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What Is Anything?

Entry 2407, on 2025-08-07 at 20:27:52 (Rating 2, Philosophy)

There's a common question, used in a rhetorical style, I often see in modern "culture war" debates. It is used in the context of trans rights and it is, "what is a woman?". Anyone on the woke side might answer with something like "a woman in a person who identifies as a woman", which has obvious issues in that it uses the word "woman" to define that same word.

People on the other side usually give an answer like "a woman is an adult human female", which is better, in that it uses other words and makes some specific claims, but there is the problem that we can then ask "what is a female" which brings us back to a very similar problem.

So the question is often used as a "gotcha" to show that members of the woke mob don't have great understanding of the issue, but I need to be fair here and say that it's actually quite hard, or maybe impossible, to define what almost anything is.

A similar problem happens sometimes when I debate creationists. They like to use the word "kind" to describe different types of living things, in a similar way to how scientists use "species". But I have never really been told what a kind is, because they can't define it, or maybe they just don't want to, because vagueness and ambiguity is a common trick they use to promote their narrative.

But, to be fair, when I am asked to define what a species is, I have similar problems (although not to the same extent) because every definition of a species involves some exceptions. For example, a species is often defined as a group of living things which can successfully interbreed, but how does this work for asexual species?

Then we get to the philosophy of this. The classic question here is "what is a chair"? This sounds ridiculous, but there is no real way to have an exact definition of a chair which doesn't include "edge cases" where it is unclear whether an object really is a chair, or might be something else.

For example, if I have a chair with no backrest, is it really a stool? If I have one which is unusually wide, is it really a couch? If it is made from wood, and has no padding, maybe it's really a table which looks a bit like a chair.

Of course, it gets even more uncertain when we try to define more abstract things. In recent times a good example might be "hate speech". When politicians want to limit hate speech but are challenged to define what it is, one answer often given is "I can't define it, but you will know it when you see it".

Actually, no, you won't. Some people will see hate speech in one way and others might see it in another, while others might reject its existence, so there is no real definiton there at all. And having censorship laws based on subjective opinions instead of real objective definitions is fairly dangerous.

My contention here, is that words, as they are used in natural languages, are problematic. I know many examples where English can be interpreted many different ways, and when I compare that with programming languages there is a clear difference: the natural language can give multiple results, even when people agree on the meaning of words and syntactic and semantic rules, but programming languages are always 100% correct. So if there is a bug in a program it's always the programmer's fault!

So a classic "joke" about this involves the programmer who is asked by his wife to go to the store and buy a bottle of milk, and if they have any bread, get 6. He comes home with 6 bottles of milk and no bread. A programmer might think that way, but most people would bring one bottle of milk and 6 loaves of bread (if they had bread at all).

A programming language might specify the activity like this: buy("milk",1); if numberOf("bread")>=6 then buy("bread",6);

Notice that this is unambiguous regarding what to buy and also clarifies what to do if there are less than 6 breads (don't but any). If the intention was to buy up to 6 breads, and less if the store had less bread, then a slightly different program could be used, like: if numberOf("milk")>=1 then buy("milk",1) else error("they have no milk); b:=numberOf("bread"); if b>6 then b:=6; if b<6 then error("not enough bread, so bought "+b) else buy("bread",b);

So this will buy 1 milk as long as the store has any, otherwise it will show an error, then it will buy up to 6 breads, and show a message if there are less than 6 available. By the way, this is isn't written in any particular language, although it is similar to several real languages.

Even here, we encounter the problem of defining the words, especially the nouns. For example, if there was no cow's milk, but there was coconut milk, would that be OK?

All things considered, it's amazing we can communicate with each other at all. In programming we can exactly define a thing by assigning it properties. For example, a product might have the attribute product.name="milk"; in which case it would classify as being able to be purchased by the program above. But I could attach the label "milk" to a product which would normally be classified as something else (beer, for example), so the naming has no validity in the real world.

There's no easy answer here. We just have to question each other about what we really mean, and even more importantly, use language in an honest way to communicate instead of obfuscating, like some groups seem to do!

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