On the one hand, you're right: Humans are a part of nature.
On the other hand, the definition of "natural" is "untouched by humans".
On the other hand, the definition of "natural" is "untouched by humans".
Maybe once Nature has been corrupted by humans it ceases to be such.
Woe is human -- with our ontological flagellation. (We grant the existence of Nature only to turn it back on ourselves.)
> Vogon poetry is described as "the third worst poetry in the Universe"
That's quite a good insult, really. Well, if what I had done was poetry. So a good insult in a different situation.
At least he didn't say it was bad as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings's poetry about decaying swans.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/poetry.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxPeIiU2kx4
Or the Electronic Bard's horrible poems:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/HorriblePoems.html
Despair not, never give up, and just keep practicing: there's always room for improvement:
There's nought to improve. It wasn't poetry. & if you-all are suggesting my prose is poetic, then that's a compliment, not a zing.
If I pick up a baby bear in the woods and play with it for a moment before its mom finds out, does it cease to be natural?
If I don a wig, am I covering my unnatural hair with artificial hair?
There's no such thing as a "good" definition. We begin with the definition, not with some pre-existing concept (which would require an earlier definition of the same thing).
The definition is what it is: just a name we use to collect certain phenomena together.
We use words to describe, and to categorize stuff. But naturally this vague. Everybody undestands if you describe a shirt as blue.or green, but most people would find it hard to describe when one turns to another, where the boundary between them is. So we use other names for that, or describe it as blueish green, or something similar.
To get rid of confusion, handle edge cases, and for other reasons, we define formal defenitions, which are different from the ambiguous idea we have of something.
What the comment you replied to means, is that the formal definition doesn't fit his idea of what is natural. You on the other hand are saying that the formal definition is the only (valid) meaning of the word, and so it can't be good or bad.
Not to mention that "anything untouched by humans" is not the formal definition of "natural."
This is completely useless.
> We begin with the definition
No. We begin with a name, used to describe a particular entity, phenomenon, or class thereof. As the name comes into greater use, its meaning becomes known through some measure of positive (this is X) and near miss (this is like X, but not X), and eventually a definition is clarified that attempts to capture those linkages between the word and the represented things.