What this shows is that the human definitions of the words “standing”, “sitting” and “lying” are vague rather than strict.
Lack of taking the “the meaning of spoken language words is in fact pretty blurry around the boundaries (even for words ‘everybody agrees on’)” effect into account is the reason why technical implementations “not doing what the users want” is so incredibly common that it has become a running joke in fields like software development.
Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.
What this shows is that the human definitions of the words “standing”, “sitting” and “lying” are vague rather than strict.
Lack of taking the “the meaning of spoken language words is in fact pretty blurry around the boundaries (even for words ‘everybody agrees on’)” effect into account is the reason why technical implementations “not doing what the users want” is so incredibly common that it has become a running joke in fields like software development.