Originally Posted by
pizzapete8
the reason is the people hate cats and want them to suffer! they dont care if cats suffer from no mice, duh!
He's apperantly answering the first question... shoo invader!
What Brubert is saying is, if someone asks "what is that?" and you go "it's a sandwhich" there is still the unanswered question of what is in the sandwhich, even though it is covered by the term "sandwhich." You can learn more about it by not having the answer a term which covers all of it.
My knowledge on the philosophy of langauge is quite limited - actually, but I think there's little diffrence between stating a noun and commonly attributed adjectives (and 'sub nouns') to the main noun. Both are abstract terms used to name (and NOT describe) things that appear before a human via empirical (via the senses, experience, or experiment) witness. However the question of what it REALLY is, is not covered by langauge. (A branch of philosophy which attempts to do that is metaphysics.)
Example; What's that? A sandwich.
What's a sandwich? It's made of bread. (for simplicity's sake I'll only name one value of a sandwich)
What's bread? It's a food made from wheat.
What's food? Stuff that people eat.
etc. etc. etc. etc.
What's there to learn by simply using such terms? You're only going to name things which have a relationship with the before metioned object. Yes you can see the relationships easier by using such abstract language - but to learn what bread really is, you'll have to touch it, feel, smell it, experiment with it, and only then you'll understand what a sandwich REALLY is. Yes, you can try to describe it by abstracting it into language, but that would simply be renaming the problem (of what a sandwich is), not solving it.