| Is a cup that's filled to the brim "wet"? One could make an argument for why it might be acceptable to describe that cup as "wet", but in day-to-day parlance with normal people, it would be confounding to refer to a full cup as "wet". "Full" would be a much more salient description of the state of the cup. Describing it as "wet" would only cause people to go "huh?" and you'd have to explain your reasoning. Save for mathematical terms like "isosceles triangle", words don't have inherent meaning. They're shortcuts for us to more conveniently refer to a swath of individual things or events that share some common characteristics. This is easier to see with really abstract words. Imagine trying to define whether a specific action is or isn't "honorable", or "moral", or "meaningful". There are no axioms from which we can derive a universal litmus for whether an action fits under any of those categories. Different cultures have their own interpretations, and the peoples comprising those cultures would have differing interpretations, and even for the same person, their interpretations of a word may change from one moment to another. With more physical terms like "wet", or "Scotsman", or "Ship of Theseus", it can be less obvious that words are abstractions for individual instances of things, and that abstractions fray at the edges. There never was such a thing as the Ship of Theseus; there were certain configurations of atoms that people thought of as "the ship" that bore a certain relationship with another configuration of atoms that people thought of as "Theseus", that was referred to as the "Ship of Theseus" for the sake of convenience, and most of the time, it sufficed. |