§ 17 Being in terms of using

§ 17 Being in terms of using

A less charged question than the question of how we should use that we might want to address is: what happens to the many entities that are named and defined only in terms of human use, such as the concepts house, office, railway station, chair, ship, widget, or spoon?1

It turns out not to be such a revolutionary question.

We do not have to do all that much, except to make them carry a semantic health warning that they are defined that way; their purpose defines them.

Most of our entities are defined in terms of what we consider them to be for; that does not make the analysis and exploration of happy affordances impossible. It just requires an extra compensatory move in the language game of giving and asking for reasons.

We might want to make the conditions upon which we say things about them analytically or critically, crystal clear.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

  1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎