Gloves- Why Ryle was wrong

16 years old, and I don't know what a glove is. OK, so some of us struggle with times tables and spelling words with more than 6 letters, but the definition of a glove is never one that eluded me before today.

Gilbert RyIe was the cause for my distress. He used gloves to describe how like two gloves make a pair, and when they are separated the pair no longer exists, so must our mind and bodies not be able to exist without the other. But, the challenge I find with this is not the analogy but how do you define the term glove?

When does a glove stop becoming a glove? You get fingerless gloves, but yet if you made gloves without a palm it would be a useless collection of finger caps. Is it a certain percentage? Does a glove suddenly become something else when 70% of it's mass is lost? What about fishnet gloves?

Why is an oven glove called a glove, when it is clearly mitten shaped? This led to a worrying debate about whether mittens were a species of glove, and could they therefore be defined differently (although we were stopped in our tracks by someone pointing out oven gloves could also be called oven mitts).

Similarly do over mitts even count as gloves? They certainly don't fit like a glove, and you can get ones that look totally unlike any glove I've ever seen, I'm sure people would question my sanity if I started wearing them as a fashion accessory anyway. (The square ones, joined by a strip of fabric for example). And now you come to think of it where did the expression fit like a glove come from? Many of my gloves aren't as tight as the expression leads us to believe, are they no longer gloves, if they do not fit like one?

glove [gluhv]  noun, verb,gloved, glov·ing.

1. 

a covering for the hand made with a separate sheath for each finger and for the thumb.

Love Louisa xx