Caledonian2 comments on The Parable of Hemlock - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 February 2008 02:01AM

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Comment author: Caledonian2 03 February 2008 04:31:13AM 4 points [-]

If we accept that hemlock would kill any mortal, and someone consumes hemlock, and they don't die, either they aren't mortal, it wasn't actually hemlock, they didn't actually consume it, or we were wrong about hemlock being lethal.

But complaining about defined 'truths' is silly. It's not as though the word 'man' has some objective meaning written down in the high heavens by the meaning-granting deity himself. We can use it to mean whatever we please. But when we do so, we must always remember that our application of the word to reality isn't necessarily correct. So we define 'man' to, among other things, be a mortal entity. But asserting that a person is a man is just that - an assertion, and one that can be incorrect.

Definitions cannot be incorrect. They can only be inconsistent, either with other definitions or themselves.