People use words in similar ways because their lives have similar factors.
No, people use words in similar ways, because they want to communicate with each other. And because word meanings are usually inherited rather than constructed. It’s not false that the factors are usually similar, but not all true statements follow from one another. Some people with very different factors may use words similarly and others with similar factors will eventually use them differently.
The second statement, of course, is utterly false, because there is no meaning of “chairs” that makes it true.
Again, nobody thinks that the two things are similar or share properties, but that’s exactly what you asked for. If you want a milder example, I can offer “computer”, which can refer to an electronic device or to a human who does arithmetic (old usage). The two meanings are still very different, but they do share a property (they both compute), and it’s easy to see that a sentence “I had computers calculate this solution” is natural and could refer to either (or both). At the same time, using two different words for them (e.g., let’s call humans who compute “analysts”) would also be natural. The reasons we don’t use two words have very little to do with the properties of humans or electronic devices.
No, people use words in similar ways, because they want to communicate with each other. And because word meanings are usually inherited rather than constructed. It’s not false that the factors are usually similar, but not all true statements follow from one another. Some people with very different factors may use words similarly and others with similar factors will eventually use them differently.
Again, nobody thinks that the two things are similar or share properties, but that’s exactly what you asked for. If you want a milder example, I can offer “computer”, which can refer to an electronic device or to a human who does arithmetic (old usage). The two meanings are still very different, but they do share a property (they both compute), and it’s easy to see that a sentence “I had computers calculate this solution” is natural and could refer to either (or both). At the same time, using two different words for them (e.g., let’s call humans who compute “analysts”) would also be natural. The reasons we don’t use two words have very little to do with the properties of humans or electronic devices.