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army1987 comments on Excluding the Supernatural - Less Wrong
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Once, in a LARP, I played Isaac Asimov on a panel which was arguing whether vampires were real. It went something like this (modulo my memory): I asked the audience to define "vampire", and they said that vampires were creatures that lived by drinking blood.
I said that mosquitoes were vampires. So they said that vampires were humanoids who lived by drinking blood.
I said that Masai who drank the blood of their cattle were vampires. So they said that vampires were humanoids who lived by drinking blood, and were burned by sunlight.
I (may have) said that a Masai with xeroderma pigmentosum was a vampire. And so on.
My point was that vampires were by definition not real - or at least, not understandable - because any time we found something real and understandable that met the definition of a vampire, we would change the definition to exclude it.
(Strangely, some mythical creatures, such as vampires and unicorns, seem to be defined in a spiritual way; whereas others, such as mermaids and centaurs, do not. A horse genetically engineered to grow a horn would probably not be thought of as a "real" unicorn; a genenged mermaid probably would be admitted to be a "real" mermaid.)
Dunno if it's because I'm not a native English speaker, but my intuition about the words unicorn and mermaid doesn't agree (whereas it does agree e.g. with Gettier about the precise meaning of knowledge, and most other similar problems about precise meanings of words).
I am a native English speaker, and I don't agree with the quoted passage either.
I think this depends a lot on your exposure to centaur and unicorn myths. Both creatures were imagined in Greece; the centaur was just a mashup of man and horse, and the unicorn was just a kind of horned donkey found in faraway places. Thus, if you slapped a horn on some donkeys (or just found an oryx) you'd have a Greek unicorn.
But in medieval Europe, the unicorn became a symbol of purity, able to cure diseases and drawn to virgins. Oryxes can't cure diseases and aren't drawn to (human) virgins, which to a large extent is the point of a unicorn (to someone who adopts the medieval European imagination of unicorns).
Yeah, that must be the reason. I'm not familiar with mediaeval myths about unicorns, so it means pretty much “a horse with a horn” (but I wouldn't count an oryx as one -- the uni- part means it has to only have one horn, doesn't it :-)), but on the other hand I know about the myth of the mermaids' singing (and Ulysses's strategy to cope with it) so I wouldn't count the top half of a woman glued onto the bottom half of a fish as one.
Interestingly, mermaid myths may have been deliberate hoaxes, which makes the question of a "real" mermaid even muddier.
I'm not sure how Ctesias or Aristotle would react to seeing an oryx- they might decide it's a new duoceros different from monoceri or they might say "oops, I guess we only saw depictions of monoceri in profile, they actually have two horns."
A nitpick: The Odyssey had sirens singing, not mermaids -- and those were half-bird women, not half-fish women. See how they were depicted in ancient times
In Spanish (and presumably also in whichever language is army's native tongue, if it is not Spanish) the word 'sirena' is used for both siren and mermaid, hence the confusion.
Yes, it's Italian.