"Take the word chair. When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think of armchairs and reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral and rock specimens, are unique things -- if you know them well enough you will find an individual difference even in a set of machine-made chairs -- and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of pigeonholes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the belief that there is a chairishness in this species common to and distinctive of all chairs." H. G. Wells, "Scepticism of the Instrument," Mind, vol. 13, No. 51, 1903.
'But what are the simple parts of which reality is composed? -- What are the simple constituent parts of a chair? -- The bits of wood of which it is made? Or the molecules, or the atoms? -- "Simple" means: not composite. And here the point is: in what sense "composite"? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the "simple parts of a chair"' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations).
80. I say "There is a chair". What if I go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight.? -- "So it wasn't a chair, but some kind of illusion". -- But in a few moments we see it again and are able to touch it and so on. -- "So the chair was there after all and its disappearance was some kind of illusion". -- But suppose that after a time it disappears again-or seems to disappear. What are we to say now? Have you rules ready for such cases ---rules saying whether one may use the word "chair" to include this kind of thing? But do we miss them when we use the word "chair"; and are we to say that we do not really attach any meaning to this word, because we are not equipped with rules for every possible application of it? (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations).