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Comment by cwillu | Hacker News Reader

4'33" isn't a song either. If you call a tail a leg, a dog still has 4 legs.

Since we're going into this meta-philosophical thing, your statement is false. If I call a tail a leg, dogs definitely have five legs. Unless they were of course born without a leg, or have otherwise lost one. There is no "reality" from a human perspective, it's all sensory input that goes through a lot of very subjective processing.

You can't _really_ categorize things. You can mostly sort of do it, but it never actually works out, because categories are human stuff, and human stuff is subjective and thus different depending on who you ask. Sometimes unclear even to the same person.

I can say dogs have five legs and the only reason most people will think I'm wrong is that society has come to categorize limbs based on function instead of length.

Getting a little pedantic 2. a large branch of a tree. "the bare limbs of a high tree" Similar: branch

limb (n.2) late 14c., "edge of a quadrant or other instrument," from Latin limbus "ornamental border, hem, fringe, edge," a word of uncertain origin.

Just thought of the limbic system and how that might be related, doesn't seem to be about function but about positioning against a core system

My point was that categorizing limbs (differentiating them from one another) is done by function. Now that I think about it limb isn't what I had in mind anyway, what I meant to say was that we categorize parts of the body in terms of function.

But you're right, limbs are not defined by function.

So in OP’s example of tracking every song, if I want/need 4’33” in my database of all songs, but I need to keep track of whether cwillu think’s it’s a song for some reason (they seem pretty authoritative, better make note of it), I could create a foreign key for that and set it to values like “cwillu said it’s a song”, “cwillu said it’s NOT a song”, and “cwillu has not specified if it’s a song yet”. That’s why natural keys don’t exist.

For a whole bunch of useful definitions and use cases, it's a song. Arguing about the precise delineations of song/not song is missing my point.

> If you call a tail a leg, a dog still has 4 legs.

I can't think of a useful definition of legs that includes the tail. I can for calling a recording of a musical piece a song.

In real life dogs can exist with more or less than 4 legs.

Yes! The existence of a five-legged dog makes “all dogs have four legs” false but it doesn’t make “dogs have four legs” false. Similarly, the existence of a two-legged dog makes “some dogs have only two legs” true while “dogs have two legs” is still not (unless you just mean the former).

Dog is a categorical abstraction over individuals. The properties of a category tend to have a complex relationship to the members of the category. This is true even if it is indisputable who the members are and what properties the members have.

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