>>110952Sigh, I know, I know it's fuzzy, but it's worth arguing against that. Natural language is geared towards contrasts and generalizations, and so it often breaks down when things become indistinguishable. Like in the sorites paradox, which tries to find a quantitative threshold for a "heap" even though, in my opinion, the word refers to a form that inherently lacks discrete boundaries. But something like Earth is a rock, not a cloud. It does have clear boundaries, like solid planets do.
Inversely, today's Russia is definitely not the same as yesterday's USSR even if it took its place in the international stage, not unlike how the Qin weren't a continuation of the Zhou in spite of traditional Chinese historians seeing it as such, and no thinker would defend the remade ships as continuations just because they transferred a few pieces of wood from one to the other. Literal biological death too is a concept I'll continue to defend as total rupture, a completely irreversible process, while a hard drive's death is metaphorical.
But yeah, I know, it's never that simple.
>>110957The problem with saying that elementary things are the basis for man-made abstractions is that
the elementary was discovered by using abstraction. Abstractions must map onto reality, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to find a well-defined anything. We can't retroactively derive logic from things we didn't know existed until decades ago, especially if our concepts are fanfic. Every language is going to tell you that a rock is hard, not because it's human nature to think of rocks that way, but because they really are hard. It reflects reality.