Man, I got half way through this sentence and my brain just flashed the clone high JFK bit of "I like your funny words magic man!"
just in case, I'll say it in very simple English without any prior domain or subject matter knowledge required
ahem
the question "what is a chair?", by itself, is a real question about how words and ideas work. Like, we see many different things in the world. Some have 4 legs, some have 1 leg, some have a back rest, some do not. Some are made of wood, some are made of metal, some are soft, some are hard. Yet, we still understand why many of these things count as chairs.
A good answer to the question is neither "a chair is whatever society says it is", nor "since not all chairs look exactly the same, the word 'chair' has no clear meaning"
The right way to look at this is to ask: what are we grouping together, and why?
A chair is a kind of thing made for sitting. That does not mean that every chair must look exactly the same, or that every chair needs 4 legs. It also does not mean that every possible edge case destroys the very concept of a "chair". It means we are grouping things by their real purpose and their real features, i.e. they are objects meant to support a person who is sitting.
Bad philosophy makes this confusing because it teaches people to look at words, or concepts, in the wrong way.
One of these bad approaches - one that is commonly taught in schools all over the world, and has been for hundreds of years - is what I mean by standard "empiricism", or sensualism-nominalism. In simple terms, that is a view that breaks down knowledge into tiny sense impressions, like colors, shapes, sounds, and feelings. Then it also treats words as labels that we stick onto piles of impressions.
So, instead of saying "I see a chair", a standard empiricist, let's call him Lilith, acts like the real starting point is like "I see brown, flat, hard, tall, smooth, rectangular" etc. Then Lilith says that the word "chair" is just a name that we in an English-speaking society attach to some of those sense-impressions.
That is a stupid way of doing things because, if concepts are just labels, then it becomes easy to play games with them. You can say "well, this chair has no legs, this stool has no back, this bench can seat several people, this rock can be sat on, so what even is a chair?"
However, that is not deep or profound, it's just losing the point of the concept at all.
The concept "chair" does not depend on every chair sharing one exact visible feature. It depends on us noticing real similarities between things and grouping them in a way that is useful and based on reality.
That is also why the same kind of bad thinking can be exploited in political or social arguments. Once people are trained to treat concepts as loose labels instead of ideas that are grounded in reality, they can start playing the same game with words like "woman", "rights", "violence", "property", or anything else.
The move is always the same: Focus on edge cases. Ignore the normal basis of the concept. Pretend that the concept is unclear. Replace the concept with whatever meaning is politically useful.
