2025/11/25
What is a table?
From Merriam-Webster:
n. a piece of furniture consisting of a smooth flat slab fixed on legs
A desk is a table. Furniture, slab, legs. Easy. It's within the conventional definition of desk, anyway; most people would probably have the word 'table' in their definition for desk.
A counter? No legs, or maybe just one big, wide leg? Feels like a table, though; they certainly do almost everything a table does, all but for being generally movable around a room. Is mobility an essential component of tables, then? If you glue a table to the floor, is it no longer a table? Well, maybe the glue is something else, it’s an external appendage. Let’s try something else.
How about this: you carve an entire room out of stone, a hand-made cave, that pretty much perfectly resembles (after a lot of paint) a conventional American condo living room. There’s a nice little coffee table there, looks like it’s made of wood; four legs, a flat top. But its legs are actually still part of the stone. It was never separated, and is thus impossible to move without breaking it. Immobile, and yet I think any reasonable person would call it a table. But maybe its continuity with the walls and the floor make it not ‘furniture’ anymore.
How about a piano bench? A simple one, no cushion. Four legs, smooth and flat top, furniture. Unquestionably fits the definition. Obviously not a table, though. So now we have to change the definition to better fit the common understanding. How about adding a clause of ‘thing people don’t sit on’? But people sit on tables, sometimes.
‘Thing people aren’t supposed to sit on?’ Who supplies the proscription, then? Is it the original creator, in which case it’s impossible to know, if they’re old enough. Are you willing to accept that it’s impossible to know if millions of tables are in fact tables because their creator hasn’t, or won’t, or can’t, ever state firmly whether their creation was intended to be sat on or not? Is it assigned by society at large, through abstract consensus? I suspect were that to be interrogated extensively enough that it would prove circular—people’s idea of which flat-topped, legged furniture ought to be sat on and which ought not to be is necessarily informed by the existing delineation of tables and not-tables.
So, ‘thing people tend not to sit on.’
This gets complicated, though. Tendency is a blurry concept, it’s not as distinguishable as flatness, or leggedness. How can a definition be said to be true, then, if needs to be blurry like that? If all we’ve got is tendencies and approximations and so forth, doesn’t that defeat the project of definition?
Perhaps the problem is the project of definition itself.