Topic: Philosophy/Logic (Page 2)
You are looking at all articles with the topic "Philosophy/Logic". We found 51 matches.
Hint:
To view all topics, click here. Too see the most popular topics, click here instead.
π Wronger Than Wrong
Wronger than wrong is a statement that equates two errors when one of the errors is clearly more wrong than the other. It was described by Michael Shermer as Asimov's axiom. The mistake was discussed in Isaac Asimov's book of essays The Relativity of Wrong as well as in a 1989 article of the same name in the Fall 1989 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer:
When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Asimov explained that science is both progressive and cumulative. Even though scientific theories are later proven wrong, the degree of their wrongness attenuates with time as they are modified in response to the mistakes of the past. For example, data collected from satellite measurements show, to a high level of precision, how the Earth's shape differs from a perfect sphere or even an oblate spheroid or a geoid.
Shermer stated that being wronger than wrong is actually worse than being not even wrong (that is, being unfalsifiable).
According to John Jenkins, who reviewed The Relativity of Wrong, the title essay of Asimov's book is the one "which I think is important both for understanding Asimov's thinking about science and for arming oneself against the inevitable anti-science attack that one often hears β [that] theories are always preliminary and science really doesn't 'know' anything."
Discussed on
- "Wronger Than Wrong" | 2023-04-03 | 137 Upvotes 86 Comments
π Prince Rupert's Drop
Discussed on
- "Prince Rupert's Drop" | 2023-05-30 | 117 Upvotes 35 Comments
- "Prince Rupert's Drop" | 2013-04-15 | 42 Upvotes 13 Comments
π Ludic Fallacy
The ludic fallacy, identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan (2007), is "the misuse of games to model real-life situations". Taleb explains the fallacy as "basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice". The adjective ludic originates from the Latin noun ludus, meaning "play, game, sport, pastime".
Discussed on
- "Ludic Fallacy" | 2020-07-23 | 119 Upvotes 79 Comments
π Unexpected hanging paradox
The unexpected hanging paradox or hangman paradox is a paradox about a person's expectations about the timing of a future event which they are told will occur at an unexpected time. The paradox is variously applied to a prisoner's hanging, or a surprise school test. It could be reduced to be Moore's paradox.
Despite significant academic interest, there is no consensus on its precise nature and consequently a final correct resolution has not yet been established. Logical analysis suggests that the problem arises in a self-contradictory self-referencing statement at the heart of the judge's sentence. Epistemological studies of the paradox have suggested that it turns on our concept of knowledge. Even though it is apparently simple, the paradox's underlying complexities have even led to its being called a "significant problem" for philosophy.
Discussed on
- "Unexpected Hanging Paradox" | 2020-06-26 | 11 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Unexpected hanging paradox" | 2018-06-30 | 77 Upvotes 80 Comments
- "Unexpected Hanging Paradox" | 2015-04-29 | 13 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Many-valued logic
In logic, a many-valued logic (also multi- or multiple-valued logic) is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values (i.e., "true" and "false") for any proposition. Classical two-valued logic may be extended to n-valued logic for n greater than 2. Those most popular in the literature are three-valued (e.g., Εukasiewicz's and Kleene's, which accept the values "true", "false", and "unknown"), the finite-valued (finitely-many valued) with more than three values, and the infinite-valued (infinitely-many-valued), such as fuzzy logic and probability logic.
Discussed on
- "Many-valued logic" | 2019-06-14 | 106 Upvotes 81 Comments
π Ship of Theseus
In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by ca. 500-400 BC.
Discussed on
- "Ship of Theseus" | 2022-12-10 | 28 Upvotes 13 Comments
- "Ship of Theseus" | 2015-08-19 | 46 Upvotes 50 Comments
π Bulverism is to βassume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his errorβ
Bulverism is a term for a rhetorical fallacy that combines circular reasoning with presumption or condescenscion. The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error." The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, even if the opponents's claim is actually right, attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive. The term Bulverism was coined by C. S. Lewis to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleges, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.
Similar to Antony Flew's "subject/motive shift", Bulverism is a fallacy of irrelevance. One accuses an argument of being wrong on the basis of the arguer's identity or motive, but these are strictly speaking irrelevant to the argument's validity or truth.
Discussed on
- "Bulverism is to βassume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his errorβ" | 2020-12-25 | 56 Upvotes 86 Comments
π Bonini's Paradox
Bonini's paradox, named after Stanford business professor Charles Bonini, explains the difficulty in constructing models or simulations that fully capture the workings of complex systems (such as the human brain).
Discussed on
- "Bonini's Paradox" | 2019-05-26 | 88 Upvotes 52 Comments
π Raven paradox
The raven paradox, also known as Hempel's paradox, Hempel's ravens, or rarely the paradox of indoor ornithology, is a paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement. Observing objects that are neither black nor ravens may formally increase the likelihood that all ravens are black even though, intuitively, these observations are unrelated.
This problem was proposed by the logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition.
Discussed on
- "Raven paradox" | 2015-04-04 | 69 Upvotes 43 Comments
- "The Raven Paradox (logic)" | 2008-01-13 | 9 Upvotes 16 Comments
π Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise). In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
The Tractatus is written in an austere and succinct literary style, containing almost no arguments as such, but consists of altogether 525 declarative statements, which are hierarchically numbered.
The Tractatus is recognized by philosophers as one of the most significant philosophical works of the twentieth century and was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann and Bertrand Russell's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism".
Wittgenstein's later works, notably the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, criticised many of his ideas in the Tractatus. There are, however, elements to see a common thread in Wittgenstein's thinking, in spite of those criticisms of the Tractatus in later writings. Indeed, the legendary contrast between βearlyβ and βlateβ Wittgenstein has been countered by such scholars as Pears (1987) and Hilmy (1987). For example, a relevant, yet neglected aspect of continuity in Wittgensteinβs central issues concerns βmeaningβ as βuseβ. Connecting his early and later writings on βmeaning as useβ is his appeal to direct consequences of a term or phrase, reflected e.g. in his speaking of language as a βcalculusβ. These passages are rather crucial to Wittgensteinβs view of βmeaning as useβ, though they have been widely neglected in scholarly literature. The centrality and importance of these passages are corroborated and augmented by renewed examination of Wittgensteinβs NachlaΓ, as is done in "From Tractatus to Later Writings and Back - New Implications from the Nachlass" (de Queiroz 2023).
Discussed on
- "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" | 2023-08-12 | 65 Upvotes 68 Comments