I have previously spoken of the ancient, pulp-era magazine covers that showed a bug-eyed monster carrying off a girl in a torn dress; and about how people think as if sexiness is an inherent property of a sexy entity, without dependence on the admirer.

"Of course the bug-eyed monster will prefer human females to its own kind," says the artist (who we'll call Fred); "it can see that human females have soft, pleasant skin instead of slimy scales. It may be an alien, but it's not stupid—why are you expecting it to make such a basic mistake about sexiness?"

What is Fred's error? It is treating a function of 2 arguments ("2-place function"):

Sexiness: Admirer, Entity—> [0, ∞)

As though it were a function of 1 argument ("1-place function"):

Sexiness: Entity—> [0, ∞)

If Sexiness is treated as a function that accepts only one Entity as its argument, then of course Sexiness will appear to depend only on the Entity, with nothing else being relevant.

When you think about a two-place function as though it were a one-place function, you end up with a Variable Question Fallacy / Mind Projection Fallacy. Like trying to determine whether a building is intrinsically on the left or on the right side of the road, independent of anyone's travel direction.

An alternative and equally valid standpoint is that "sexiness" does refer to a one-place function—but each speaker uses a different one-place function to decide who to kidnap and ravish. Who says that just because Fred, the artist, and Bloogah, the bug-eyed monster, both use the word "sexy", they must mean the same thing by it?

If you take this viewpoint, there is no paradox in speaking of some woman intrinsically having 5 units of Fred::Sexiness. All onlookers can agree on this fact, once Fred::Sexiness has been specified in terms of curves, skin texture, clothing, status cues etc. This specification need make no mention of Fred, only the woman to be evaluated.

It so happens that Fred, himself, uses this algorithm to select flirtation targets. But that doesn't mean the algorithm itself has to mention Fred. So Fred's Sexiness function really is a function of one object—the woman—on this view. I called it Fred::Sexiness, but remember that this name refers to a function that is being described independently of Fred. Ma...