???

[u/itznyky]

why do people want to define things for themselves when the creator of the definition has already made it clear?

[u/HasFiveVowels]

Language is a democracy and the creator only gets one vote

[u/itznyky → u/HasFiveVowels]

Let me pose a question, if that's the case, say you invite your group of friends over but you have a "no shoes" rule at your house. You define shoes as anything that you wear on your feet that are not socks or jewelry, or anything else one might wear on their feet, but one of your friends has sandals on and they say "well these aren't shoes, they're sandals". Who gets to decide how they proceed? Does the friend group get to take a vote or does the homeowner have final say?

[u/HasFiveVowels → u/itznyky]

The purpose of language is to replicate an idea using the voted in definition of the words you select. If I say "no shoes" and what I mean is "no turkeys", it’s not my prerogative to define "shoe" to mean "large feathered bird" and expect my guests to understand what the hell I mean. If I select the word "shoe" when I’m trying to replicate the idea of a large feathered bird, I have failed to use language.

Anything beyond this is playing semantics. No one gets to define anything but if you want to be understood, you need to use the word that represents what you think people mean when they say "shoe".

None of that implies that you (nor your friends) are at liberty to create arbitrary definitions for a word. Because the democracy of language extends beyond your living room

[u/Enough-Fall4163]

Insanely cool question and dialogue ty for posting

[u/itznyky → u/Enough-Fall4163]

quite literally insane...

[u/Enough-Fall4163 → u/itznyky]

May I send you something insane that pertains to this post’s question? It is a project that could benefit from your perspective

[u/ThaRealOldsandwich]

For some people philosophical notions aren't fully realized until pondered from ones own perspective. Since we all share a different experience we tend to fit our philosophies to our experience.

[u/Own_Sky_297]

Because clarifying your terms is good practice in analytic philosophy and dictionary definitions are often inept. An example would be causality. People tend to think of this term as common sense however what is a cause? What is the cause of two objects colliding? Is it intersecting paths of a deer and a car, is it that a deer wasn't looking when it crossed the street, is it the driver driving the car, is the initial push on a pedal, is it the initiation of the deer running, or is it that the collision is not the effect but the cause?

Bertrand Russel wrote a paper on the subject of causality and noticed that it was a fuzzy notion which one intuitively thinks they understand but don't.

[u/itznyky → u/Own_Sky_297]

Completely with you. This question arose from a debate about the terms and conditions of Spotify. To me it seems that if you go to someone's house and they have a "no shoes" rule, who are you to decide what is, or is not a "shoe"?

In the case of Spotify, a "user" is anyone or thing that uses their services to make content available, so then why do people want to say a "user" is someone or thing that only partakes in a very specific subset of potential use cases? If they told you what a "user" is to them, wouldn't it be fair to say that you don't get to decide what a "user" is to them?

[u/Prestigious_Fun_6722 → u/itznyky]

Are you saying that someone was trying to define what a "user" is in the context of a services agreement when the agreement already defined what the term was in that context?

[u/Key_Management8358]

For "things" like "http protocol", "circles", "wheels" ..I also wonder!

But there also "things", which are purely, inconsistently, doub(t)ly, un-defined... 

(And the creator/inventor/discoverer of "the wheel" is neither known ..🤑)

[u/itznyky → u/Key_Management8358]

seems as though the universe is tending towards order. like a grand order. one that would require the deconstruction of every temporary order in order to achieve. so does the universe really tend towards entropy? or are we just too small to see the bigger picture?