I think what is needed in order to advance this discussion is a deeper understanding regarding the distinction between words, concepts and things.
The three, although different, must be related to each other in a specific way.
Words must point to concepts which must point to things.
This means that every word must point to some kind of thing.
There is no exception to this rule.
Here, we can focus exclusively on written words ignoring all other types of words such as spoken words.
Words can therefore be thought of as a sequence of letters that can either mean something (i.e. point to a concept that points to a thing) or mean nothing (i.e. not point to a concept that points to a thing.)
The majority of the content of Internet posts is words.
I think we can all agree what words are.
It appears to be a bit more difficult to agree that words can be either meaningful or meaningless.
Some people obviously think that it is impossible to construct a sentence out of meaningless words.
I don’t know what to do about that.
That words and concepts are different is best observed in the fact that different words can point to one and the same thing.
For example, both “car” and “automobile” mean one and the same thing.
Concepts are a lot more interesting than words.
Concepts can be thought of as classes or categories of things.
They do not refer to any particular thing.
Rather, they refer to a class or a category of things.
They refer to any of the many different things that are usually related in some way.
In other words, many different things can be represented using one and the same concept.
For example, the following two images are two different things:
Even though they are two different things they belond to one and the same class or category which is that of cars.
In other words, the two different things are both cars.
Classes can be defined as a set of all things that they point to.
But this is generally not how they are defined.
More commonly, they are defined in terms of membership rules.
Every class defines a test that a thing has to pass in order to be considered a representative of that class.
Usually, things that belong to one and the same class do so because they share certain similarities.
For example, the two images above belong to one and the same class – that of cars – because they are similar in certain regards, namely, in that they both possess certain key features that define cars.
Concepts classify things.
They are NOT separate from things.
They are not things themselves but they are not separate from them either.
Things are classified based on certain membership rules.
This is why I demand that every concept is accompanied by a test that allows us to determine which things belong to it and which don’t.
When there is no such a test what that indicates is that the concept is meaningless.
Pretty much every meaningful concept you can think of, no matter how abstract, has a test that can be used in order to determine which things belong to it and which don’t.
Numbers, for example.
A lot of people will tell you that there is no picture that can be classified as a number.
They will tell you this is because numbers have no visual form.
This is quite simply wrong.
When we say that numbers do not have a visual form what this means is that numbers can have ANY visual form.
When you say that a concept does not have some feature what it means is that that feature is not one of the defining characteristics of the concept.
In other words, you cannot define the concept using that feature which means that that feature is not part of the membership rules.
The feature does not have an impact on deciding whether any given thing is a member of the class or not.
For example, we say that cars have no backdrop to mean that whatever surrounds a thing – and it must be surrounded by something! – does not change whether that thing is a car or not.
If we take one of the above two images and change the backdrop to whatever we want the image would still be that of a car.
We can also say that cars have no color because color is not one of the defining features of cars.
If we took any of the above two images and changed the color of the car to any other color we would still have a car.
However, in general, we say that cars DO have color because that feature, although not the defining feature, is often useful to us in a different context.
In the same exact way that we say that circles have straight sides even though straights sides are NOT the defining characteristic of circles (i.e. circles can have any kind of sides, they don’t have to be straight.)