Baudrillard describes a way of thinking of the world, one that is inherent to human thinking. You can't escape the fact that your mental model of the world is t

Baudrillard describes a way of thinking of the world, one that is inherent to human thinking. You can't escape the fact that your mental model of the world is the only way you know the world; That's axiomatic, just a repetition of Plato's Cave. He extrapolates that into a theory about the way society interacts with itself; Most individual agents doesn't interact directly with most things. They have a mental model based on the ones they've touched, and assume that when someone else talks about a teapot that that teapot matches their mental model. When you talk about a teapot, my mind imagines it as my ideal teapot, until you add descriptors and detail. Still, however, it is "my ideal teapot" + "Descriptors" and in no way the teapot in your mind. On aggregate, that works - Our interactions with teapots are mostly the same, and it doesn't much matter whether I'm imagining a blue teapot and you a pink. They get filled with water and put on the stove to boil. As Software people, we're especially susceptible to reducing objects and experiences to the sum of their functions. We even have a word for it - Duck Typing. A teapot is a teapot because it boils water and pours it into cups; We can say that any old pot is a teapot if we add a funnel adapter, a kettle is a teapot, a tin can is a teapot, etc. In reality, you don't use a tin can as a teapot, because it's not convenient. You need gloves to handle it, or you'll get burned. It doesn't hold much more than one cup. It's not really washable and reusable. In Analog but not Analogy, a tin can is not a teapot. Modern philosophy is entirely based on equivocation. A tin can is a teapot, therefore all teapots are hard to handle for heating water, so why bother heating water, anyway? It's stupid and soliphistic. This article, like so many like it, is trash and the author should be laughed out of the room. Instead, there's a giant cancerous mass of this bile replacing literature and journalism.