Sure you have to be using the word in some way, but there’s not guarantee that there’s a meaningful concept that can be extracted from it or whether the term is just used in ways that are hopelessly confused.
Agreed. For example, the concept of phlogiston eventually fell apart. It was at one time clear enough: the thing that a material loses when it burns, the ashes being the part that wasn’t phlogiston. But the growth of knowledge forced the concept to take more and more strained forms until it fell apart. (Thinking of it as negative oxygen is a retcon that does not fit the history.) And the philosopher’s stone was pretty much a non-starter. (I think Eliezer has Harry Potter remark on this somewhere in HPMOR.)
Sure you have to be using the word in some way, but there’s not guarantee that there’s a meaningful concept that can be extracted from it or whether the term is just used in ways that are hopelessly confused.
Agreed. For example, the concept of phlogiston eventually fell apart. It was at one time clear enough: the thing that a material loses when it burns, the ashes being the part that wasn’t phlogiston. But the growth of knowledge forced the concept to take more and more strained forms until it fell apart. (Thinking of it as negative oxygen is a retcon that does not fit the history.) And the philosopher’s stone was pretty much a non-starter. (I think Eliezer has Harry Potter remark on this somewhere in HPMOR.)
Wasn’t that how Joseph Priestley identified it when he Isolated oxygen and called it dephlogistonated air?
What he had was oxygen. What he thought he had was dephlogisticated air.