The example of the chair, where the author asserts that “functional definitions are wrong, only ‘structural’ definitions are correct” is a good test here. The author objects to the idea that “anything you sit on can be a chair” and then provides a definition of chair which does not include: - folding chairs - metal chairs - plastic chairs - any chair much bigger or smaller than a person (such as dollhouse furniture or some novelty item).
Does that make any sense? The moment you try to fix the problem with the author’s definition , you should come to the conclusion that functional definitions correspond more reliably to what people mean.
For example, how would this author define “food”?
Look at the extremely convoluted definition of money the author proposes:
> what is money?”, I would begin like this:
A vast network structure, at the centre of which lies three sets of issuers issuing out three chained layers of legal IOUs – in physical and digital form – which will later return to the issuers to be destroyed, but which in the interim entrench themselves as economic network access tokens that circulate around an interdependent web of people who cannot mobilise each other’s labour without them. These tokens are activated in the context of legal systems set within political systems set within social systems set within ecological systems, and this mesh structure underpins modern capitalism and is etched into the very fabric of our being.
If this is the definition of money, then it suggests people never used money at all until computers existed. Absurd.
This is someone trying to sell an idea (MMT) and claiming that it’s the result of “more rigorous thinking”.