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TheOtherDave comments on Fallacies of Compression - Less Wrong
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If you can't think of any unifying features of a category, but you still want to use it, you could go about listing members: "Art" Includes (for all known English-speaking humans): * Intentional paintings from before 1900 *Statues *Stained-glass windows &c. Includes for many: *abstract art *modern art *cubism *Photography &c. Includes for a few: Man-made objects not usually labelled as art &c. Includes for no known English-speaking human: Non man-made objects The Holocaust &c.
If the effect of knowing what "art" is (although that one's common-usage definition can be articulated in terms of features) is understanding what English-speakers mean when they say it, then a list-based definition is as effective, though not as efficient, as a feature based one. (You can make up for not knowing what criterion someone uses with a bit of Bayesian updating: The probability that Alice will call a Jackson Pollock piece "art" is greater if she called Léger's "Railway Crossing" "art" than if she did not)
It's worth being a little careful when talking about "list-based" as opposed to "feature-based" definitions, because it's easy to confuse those ideas with the more standard ideas of extensional and intentional definitions.
E.g., an extensional definition of "art" doesn't allow new works of art to be recognized as belonging to the set, and is therefore clearly not what English speakers mean when they say "art", but if I'm understanding what you mean by "list-based" here the same objection doesn't apply. What you seem to to be talking about here is an intentional definition where the defining properties are not explicitly articulable, and where knowledge of them is transmitted by analysis of prototypical examples and non-examples.
Yes?
That works a bit better, at least for the art example. A better example of where you'd best "define" a set by memorising all of it's members might be the morality of a particular culture. For instance, some African tribes consider it evil to marry someone whose sibling has the same first name as oneself. Not only is it hard to put into words, in English or Ju|'hoan, a definition of "bad" (or |kàù) which would encompass this, but one couldn't look at a bunch of other things that these tribes consider bad and infer that one shouldn't marry someone who has a sibling who share's one's first name. Better to just know that that's one of the things that is said to |kàù in that culture.
Sure. Though even in cases like that, humans have a way of generalizing these sorts of things -- that is, of inferring an intensional definition which they extend, rather than treating the set strictly extensionally. It would not surprise me if after a few generations such a community came to consider marrying someone whose parent has the same first name as oneself to be |kàù, for example.
If I recall correctly, they actually do. It falls under their incest taboo. So "bad" in any culture could probably be defined by a list of generalised principals which don't necessarily share any characteristics other than being labelled as "bad".
Yup, more or less agreed.