About Tables

Yes I agree with you our definitions of objects and ideas are social contracts based on mutual consent. We don't call the floor a table, because through social interactions we have learned that they are different categories. A desk needs to be a movable object, distinct from the structure of the house for example. Juice needs to be made of some fruit or vegetable and needs to be edible. It depends on us how flexible these definitions are. Personally a card board box and a table share enough qualities that they could be seen as from the same table category, but you seem to disagree. This means your definition of a table is narrower than mine. But I still think you would understand if I called my cardboard box a table. And other people might outright agree with me. And you are right people are more complicated than inanimate objects. The "being used" definition doesnt always apply. If laws or social contracts define what a husband is, then from one day to the next he could cease to be a husband. Maybe at first the law allowed him to have multiple wives but now it is outlawed. Or he could have broken a law that dorsnt exist anymore and cease to be a criminal. A doctor could lose his licence too or the medical knowledge could change drastically so that he becomes useless. These societal roles are majorly influenced by current opinions. And I think the table is similar to that. If we had a societal consent or a law that says carboard boxes are tables we would all say so. And its true that a table can't state his opinion while a person can. If a card board box could speak I think a lot of people would consider its opinion on the table question and it would have great influence. But sadly it can't. And yes I also agree with the dehumanizing part and I apologize. I was just trying to make an argument and didnt want to dehumanize anyone by implying they are defined by their physical characteristics or lack agency like an inanimate object. I think humans can decide a lot of things about themselves freely and I didnt intend to push the table role onto anyone in particular.

No, she wouldn’t think the cardboard box is a table just because it’s being used as one. It’s still a cardboard box. If we eat on the floor instead, the floor also isn’t a table; it’s still a floor. There’s even no need to declare it “being used as a table”—we’re simply putting our plates and food on it. “We have no table, so we just eat on the floor.” “We have no bed, so we just sleep on the ground.” If someone went to a furniture store to buy a table, no one would tell them to buy a floor instead ("it's more spacious and covers everything"), or to buy a chair. Equating artefacts with sentient beings commits a category error, because it treats fundamentally different entities (insentient objects and conscious, autonomous humans) as if they operate under the same rules.Roles like husband, doctor, or Red Sox fan are socially recognised, bound by consent or law; “table” is not. Functional objects lack agency, moral rights, and social responsibilities, whereas humans possess all of these. A box can’t consent, pursue a role, or earn a label—but humans can. For humans, these labels are achieved through effort, qualifications, or social processes: licences to acquire, passions to cultivate, and norms to respect. You can’t arbitrarily assign them. So a legal husband won't be described as "like a" husband, because he just is. Plus, they are conceptual, abstract positions—not equivalent to simply perceiving someone as a table. Also, if "use" defined "identity", then the floor becomes a chair the second I sit on it, someone becomes a television if I watch them for hours, a pencil becomes a knife if used for stabbing, muriatic acid becomes juice if drunk.. I can go on, but don't you hear the absurdity of it all? If I offer you a glass of juice that's made of muriatic acid, would you drink it? Unless you want to die, then no. Because you know it's muriatic acid despite me calling it juice just because it's being served in a glass. “Husbands wear rings, doctors wear coats.." Yeah, but the absence of them doesn't take away their function in society. Those symbols work because they’re anchored to stable categories. The ring doesn’t make you a husband, the social contract does. The lab coat doesn’t make you a doctor, the training, license, and function do. If I scoop some brown poop and wrap it with Ferraro wrapper and give it to you as a chocolate because I am a sweet person, would you eat it? The smell would give it away and in an instant, you're well aware it's poop. Would you eat it still? Would you call and acknowledge it as chocolate just because it looks like one and covered in a Ferrero wrapper? And if an object or person really becomes what it is by how it's used, exactly what is the criminal used for? I can understand the husband being "used" as such by his wife, a doctor being "used" as a healer, but a criminal is used as what? By that logic, wouldn't that mean a criminal isn’t really a criminal because no one is “using” them? They earned that title because of law, societal judgment, and the crime they "did". They created an "action" that made them a criminal. A table can't create an action. A cardboard box or any inanimate object can’t take exams, marry, or apply for a role in Tableship. Philosophically playful as it may seem, applying the “table” analogy to humans is objectifying and dehumanising outside pure metaphor. If a man positions himself on all fours even with a table napkin on his back, one might think he’s inviting a backshot.

Yes like you say words are public concepts that we share with each other. If your friends visited you and saw that in the middle of your living room you have a cardboard box with a vase of flowers and a plate of food on it she would instantly understand that this cardboard box is your table. No words needed to be exchanged. So I don't think there is any physical essence to a table, it's just a word describing a certain use for an object. It doesnt matter if that object used to have a different definition or if it still has characteristics that could identify it as somethings else. It's use makes it clear what it is. When it comes to people this is even more evident. You say that a man can't be a table just because he is used as such. But a man can be a husband if he wears a ring and is used as such by a wife, right? He can be an doctor because other people use him to heal. He can be a criminal if others think he commited a crime. Or he can be a red sox fan of he likes that team. None of these categories change anything about his physical being, but they drastically change how he is perceived by other people. He stays human of course, like the box keeps its physical form when used as a table. But he takes on these other roles all at the same time even. And there is nothing confusing about this right? I could call him the husband, the doctor, the criminal or the red sox fan and they would all be true. I don't need to use a simile either. I don't need to say "He is like a husband", because he fulfills the social conditions to be one until he gets a divorce. And just like that I can call him a table when he goes on all fours and lets me put stuff on him. I could make a photo of it and show it to someone and they would understand that in this situation he is the table. Without words. Of course these conditions need to be fulfilled. If you call him a table outside of this situation when there is nothing tablelike about him then it would be confusing. Thats why with social roles people tend to change their appearence to signify the role. A husband wears a ring, a doctor wears his white work clothes, a criminal is forced to wear jail clothes or is put in a register, a red sox fan wears scarfs and clothes with the red sox logo on them. So we use signigiers to better understand the people around us to mitigate the confusion of putting people in so many different categories. But we manage just fine right? And people change their roles all the time. So I think its pefectly reasonably to call someone a table and not just" like a table".

If my friend at one point used a cardboard box as a table because she was too lazy to walk to the dining room, and then I came over with more friends to have dinner with her, would she pull out the box to be used as our dinner table? If she were pulling a prank on us, sure. But at the end of the day, no. Because a box is a box. A table with one leg is still a table because its essential function (a surface for placing things) is intact; a human with one leg is still a human because their essence as Homo sapiens is intact. The core essence doesn’t vanish because of variation. Words like table or teacup are categories of artefacts. These categories are human-made and fuzzy at the edges. It really doesn’t matter to the universe if your “table” is made of stone, has no legs, or floats on magnets—the function and the convention we’ve built around the word “table” can shift. “Human,” though, is a natural kind, not just a cultural artefact. It’s rooted in biology and lineage, whether someone is born without legs, eyes, or even a heartbeat, they’re still part of the species Homo sapiens. No amount of self-identification will make me an eagle, a cat, or a toaster. When you slide from “a chair can be used as a table” to “a person can be a table” to “if someone identifies as X they are X,” you’re smuggling an argument that only works for artefacts into a domain where there are biological realities. Function and naming alone don’t change ontological category. A man kneeling on all fours isn’t a table; he’s a man being used as a table. In grammar we already have a phrase for that: “as a.” “Used as a.” “Serves as a.” It’s a simile, not an identity claim. Social usage and shared understanding matter. Words aren’t private contracts; they’re public agreements. If one person insists “this box is a table,” but everyone else recognises it as a box, the shared category holds. Otherwise, language would collapse—every person’s whim would redefine words, and communication would become impossible. That’s why “identify as whatever you want” may feel liberating in theory, but in practice it smashes into the wall of shared categories. Without those, meaning dissolves, and the world would collapse into a mental asylum. Also, a table can stay still for a whole year being a table. A human identifying as a table and functioning as such wouldn't last a day. One way or another, they would wear out. And what of it then? Omg, the table died? It's insane to hold a funeral for a table.