The socially defined behavior of electronic components.
What it means to be a 100 Ω resistor is inherently nebulous, and negotiated and renegotiated between manufacturers and customers. By @robamacl http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ram/art/essay/components/ …
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl
Am I just being dense, or is this confusing the thing and how we talk about the thing?
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Not sure I understand the question? There is an idealization of a perfect resistor; those don’t exist. Actual resistors are nebulous physical objects with imperfectly characterizable behaviors. Whether something counts as a resistor is a matter of social negotiations.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl
Sure, but a specific resistor that you may have in a circuit behaves the way it behaves & remains what it is, regardless of the consensus definition changing around it, right? So this is a point about language, not about the thing.
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Ah, I see, maybe! There is a way of misunderstanding “social construction” as “we can make things be however we like by agreeing they are that way.” Nobody actually believes that.
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Behind that misunderstanding, there’s a broader misunderstanding of the nature of representation, according to which “map” and “territory” are clearly distinct and in a well-defined relationship with each other.
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This can lead you mis-take nebulosity as being just a matter of ambiguity of language or other representations; whereas it’s at least as much a feature of clouds and resistors and jam.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl
I'm not mistaking social construction to mean "whatever the consensus believes it is what it is". I'm trying to understand what you were saying - a specific resistor changes its behavior or things that fall into the category of resistors have different behaviors over time?
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It’s that category membership is always inherently a matter of “counts as” not objective physical fact.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl
Oh, yes, sure. I get your point now. Thanks!
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Replying to @mrgunn @Meaningness
Also, the value does change, from part to part, and with time and temperature and stress. This is specified to varying degrees.
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End of conversation
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