Sea lions are seals

What does it mean for something to be a seal? What does it mean to be a sea lion?I take the words of sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel to mind for the framework of this round - to win, the affirmative must show that there is an inherent meaning in both sea lions and seals, and that this meaning is equivalent. But how could there not be arbitrariness? Nature presents [things] … without firmly established divisions. Everything shades off into everything else by imperceptible nuances. And if, on this ocean of objects surrounding us, there should appear a few that seem to break through the surface and to dominate the rest like the crest of a reef, they merely owe this advantage to … conventions … that have nothing to do with the physical arrangement of beings. I have thus far drawn a deliberately one-sided picture of reality as an array of insular entities neatly separated from one another by great divides. Such discontinuity, however, is not as inevitable as we normally take it to be. It is a pronouncedly mental scalpel that helps us carve discrete mental slices out of reality: “You get the illusion that [entities] are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be … organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves … It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that [entities] are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. The scalpel, of course, is a social scalpel. It is society that underlies the way we generate meaningful mental entities. Reality is not made up of insular chunks unambiguously separated from one another by sharp divides, but, rather, of vague, blurred-edge essences that often “spill over” into one another. It normally presents itself not in black and white, but, rather, in subtle shades of gray, with mental twilighty zones as well as intermediate essences connecting entities. Segmenting it into discrete islands of meaning usually rests on some social convention, and most boundaries are, therefore, mere social artifacts. As such, they often vary from one society to another as well as across historical periods within each society. Moreover, the precise location-not to mention the very existence-of such mental partitions is often disputed within any given society. There is more than one way to carve discrete chunks out of a given continuum, and different cultures indeed mold out of the same reality quite different archipelagos of meaning. While all cultures, for example, distinguish the edible from the inedible or the young from the old, they usually differ from one another in where they draw the lines between them. Therefore, I have my stance: sea lions and seals are not the same thing, because they have no inherent or actual meaning. Asking if the words 'poyejf' and 'ujdnfna' mean the same thing when there is no meaning behind them is nonsensical, as is the affirmative's view that there is an inherent meaning behind both sea lions and seals, and that they might be of the same!Let me expound further. Let's say I take two unknown things that you didn't know to exist, so you have no meaning within them (these represent the seals and the sea lions). How can I say that they are the same thing, when they have no inherent or realised meaning behind them? How can we say that they are the same things when we carve them (through our mental scalpel) to be different things, as they are presented to us as two discrete entities. They aren't the same thing if they don't share the same meaning, and they have no meaning, so they cannot be the same! --------------------As for rebuttals now. (I am allowed rebuttals, no rules say I cannot rebut this round and the next!)The affirmative uses the guise of dictionaries to substantiate their claim. What they fail to realise, however, is that the use of the dictionary blurs the lines between the true and the false through means of simulation - they simulate meaning in the meaningless, as Baudrillard and Zerubavel point out. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces "true" symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness's henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "real" illnesses according to their objective causes. Therefore, we can't see that any of their defintions are true, because all that they do is try to give meaning to the meaningless- this is the very meaning of what a simulacrum is, according to Baudrillard. We cannot accept any of their definitions, as they quit having meaning when looked at under any and all scrutiny.So, their first and second premises both fail to account for the fact that they can't just define themselves out of the trap that they have placed upon themselves. Dictionaries don't present an absolute truth, they simulate it, and we can't look to the simulated when we ask 'what is True?'.Therefore, since their first and second premises are necessarily false, you can see that their conclusion is false --> they have failed to meet their self-imposed burden. Vote neg, thank you.