My eyes were starting to glaze over until I came to this wonderful H. G. Wells quote:
"Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for stupidity — for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical enquiry through a series of valid syllogisms — never committing any generally recognized fallacy — you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that are difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual. — First and Last Things (1908)"
Damn, that is a great quote. And I went and read late-Wittgenstein[1] to get that idea nailed down (admittedly with a hell of a lot more but he is not an easy read). His concept of "word games" is an excellent thinking tool to have available.
This general idea is also a necessary vaccine against a lot of terrible ... LessWrong style "philosophy" (sigh, of all the place to feel compelled to make that statement)
"Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for stupidity — for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical enquiry through a series of valid syllogisms — never committing any generally recognized fallacy — you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that are difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual. — First and Last Things (1908)"