Consider the two following views on so-called “online infidelity”:  A: Although the people involved never actually meet in person, they still de...

Consider the two following views on so-called “online infidelity”: 

A: Although the people involved never actually meet in person, they still develop a sexually intimate relationship with someone who is not their partner. If you are betraying your partner’s trust, you are cheating. An online affair is very much like a physical fling, one that can do lasting harm to a relationship or even an entire family. Ultimately, cheating is cheating. 

B: It is true that online cheating may have negative effects very alike to those of physical cheating; still, a concession must be made in the sense that many of the usual ingredients of cheating are just not there: no lunch dates, no secret meetings, no late-night talks in restaurants and, of course, no physical contact. It is undeniably not the first “modality” of cheating that comes to mind when someone thinks of infidelity. 

On top of representing opposing views on the significance of online cheating, A and B also reflect different stances on category membership itself. During our encounters, we discussed two types of category membership. Which type is represented by which view? 

View A represents structuralist membership, since the statement “ultimately, cheating is cheating” indicates an egalitarian conception of all instances of cheating, regardless of how they occur; conversely, View B represents Aristotelian membership, because many significant differences are acknowledged to exist between physical and online cheating. 

b.

View A represents entailments, as it treats lasting harm as a property which is semantically encoded in cheating; on the other hand, View B represents implicatures, as it treats negative effects as something which is only culturally associated to the category, but not one of its obligatory components. 

c.

View A represents Scandinavian membership, as it encompasses all types of cheating without internal distinction; meanwhile, due to its many layers of internal distinction, view B represents Gibraltarian membership.

d.

View A represents hyponymical membership, inasmuch as it ties cheating to the breaking of official agreements, whereas view B represents contradictory membership, seeing that it treats online cheating as a milder form of cheating and still, somehow, claims that it can cause negative effects akin to those of physical cheating.  

e.

View A represents equal membership, establishing a clear condition which any instance must fulfill in order to belong to the category of cheating, and View B represents graded membership, since it acknowledges that online cheating is indeed a type of cheating all the while conceding that it is not the most representative member of this category.