• HopFlop
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    I burnt a toast in the toaster. But ruining my bread is not the purpose of the toaster.

    Similarly, if a fire alarm goes off on a false positive, that doesn’t mean the purpose of the fire alarm was to waste the firefighters time. Not every effect of a system is also its purpose.

    • CascadeOfLight [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      9 months ago

      But if your toaster ALWAYS ruined your toast, and you kept putting bread in it for, say, seventy years, and every single time it made a burned mess you say “But the toaster is supposed to make toast, it was designed with the intention to make toast, this burned mess is just bad luck/an unintended side effect/the result of a few bad apples” - then your epistemological paradigm might be lacking.

    • SmokinStalin [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      Yeah just the effect that KEEPS HAPPENING over and over again. As another poster put it, if a toaster burns toast every single time, then yeah, that’s a toaster for burning bread. That’s all its useful for.