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🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Statistics

Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1 both inclusive. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. By contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0 or 1.

The term fuzzy logic was introduced with the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic had, however, been studied since the 1920s, as infinite-valued logic—notably by Łukasiewicz and Tarski.

Fuzzy logic is based on the observation that people make decisions based on imprecise and non-numerical information. Fuzzy models or sets are mathematical means of representing vagueness and imprecise information (hence the term fuzzy). These models have the capability of recognising, representing, manipulating, interpreting, and utilising data and information that are vague and lack certainty.

Fuzzy logic has been applied to many fields, from control theory to artificial intelligence.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

The utility monster is a thought experiment in the study of ethics created by philosopher Robert Nozick in 1974 as a criticism of utilitarianism.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

In reasoning to argue a claim, a fallacy is reasoning that is evaluated as logically incorrect and that undermines the logical validity of the argument and permits its recognition as unsound. Regardless of their soundness, all registers and manners of speech can demonstrate fallacies.

Because of their variety of structure and application, fallacies are challenging to classify so as to satisfy all practitioners. Fallacies can be classified strictly by either their structure or content, such as classifying them as formal fallacies or informal fallacies, respectively. The classification of informal fallacies may be subdivided into categories such as linguistic, relevance through omission, relevance through intrusion, and relevance through presumption. On the other hand, fallacies may be classified by the process by which they occur, such as material fallacies (content), verbal fallacies (linguistic), and again formal fallacies (error in inference). In turn, material fallacies may be placed into the more general category of informal fallacies, while formal fallacies may be clearly placed into the more precise category of logical (deductive) fallacies. Yet, verbal fallacies may be placed into either informal or deductive classifications; compare equivocation which is a word or phrase based ambiguity (e.g., "he is mad", which may refer to either him being angry or clinically insane) to the fallacy of composition which is premise and inference based ambiguity (e.g., "this must be a good basketball team because each of its members is an outstanding player").

The conscious or habitual use of fallacies as rhetorical devices is prevalent in the desire to persuade when the focus is more on communication and eliciting common agreement rather than on the correctness of the reasoning. The effective use of a fallacy by an orator may be considered clever, but by the same token, the reasoning of that orator should be recognized as unsound, and thus the orator's claim, supported by an unsound argument, will be regarded as unfounded and dismissed.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Christianity

Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Arabic: مَنْدَائِيَّة‎, Mandāʾīyah), also known as Sabaeanism (Arabic: صَابِئِيَّة‎, Ṣābiʾīyah), is a monotheistic and gnostic religion with a strongly dualistic cosmology. Its adherents, the Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enos, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist. The Mandaeans have been counted among the Semites and speak a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic. The name 'Mandaean' is said to come from the Aramaic manda meaning "knowledge", as does Greek gnosis. Within the Middle East, but outside of their community, the Mandaeans are more commonly known as the Ṣubba (singular: Ṣubbī) or Sabians. The term Ṣubba is derived from the Aramaic root related to baptism, the neo-Mandaic is Ṣabi. In Islam, the "Sabians" (Arabic: الصَّابِئُون‎, aṣ-Ṣābiʾūn) are described several times in the Quran as People of the Book, alongside Jews and Christians. Occasionally, Mandaeans are called "Christians of Saint John".

According to most scholars, Mandaeaism originated sometime in the first three centuries AD, in either southwestern Mesopotamia or the Syro-Palestinian area. However, some scholars take the view that Mandaeanism is older and dates from pre-Christian times.

The religion has been practised primarily around the lower Karun, Euphrates and Tigris and the rivers that surround the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, part of southern Iraq and Khuzestan Province in Iran. There are thought to be between 60,000 and 70,000 Mandaeans worldwide. Until the Iraq War, almost all of them lived in Iraq. Many Mandaean Iraqis have since fled their country because of the turmoil created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation by U.S. armed forces, and the related rise in sectarian violence by Muslim extremists. By 2007, the population of Mandaeans in Iraq had fallen to approximately 5,000.

The Mandaeans have remained separate and intensely private. Reports of them and of their religion have come primarily from outsiders: particularly from Julius Heinrich Petermann, an Orientalist as well as from Nicolas Siouffi, a Syrian Christian who was the French vice-consul in Mosul in 1887, and British cultural anthropologist Lady E. S. Drower. There is an early if highly prejudiced account by the French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier from the 1650s.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Business 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of language 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language 🔗 Etymology

Bullshit (also bullcrap) is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive. It is mostly a slang term and a profanity which means "nonsense", especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as deceptive, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection, or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings. A person who communicates nonsense on a given subject may be referred to as a "bullshit artist".

In philosophy and psychology of cognition the term "bullshit" is sometimes used to specifically refer to statements produced without particular concern of truth, to distinguish from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth.

While the word is generally used in a deprecatory sense, it may imply a measure of respect for language skills or frivolity, among various other benign usages. In philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, among others, analyzed the concept of bullshit as related to, but distinct from, lying.

As an exclamation, "Bullshit!" conveys a measure of dissatisfaction with something or someone, but this usage need not be a comment on the truth of the matter.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Game theory

In philosophy and mathematics, Newcomb's paradox, also referred to as Newcomb's problem, is a thought experiment involving a game between two players, one of whom is able to be able to predict the future.

Newcomb's paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. However, it was first analyzed in a philosophy paper by Robert Nozick in 1969, and appeared in the March 1973 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games." Today it is a much debated problem in the philosophical branch of decision theory.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

Erotetics or erotetic logic is a part of logic, devoted to logical analysis of questions. It is sometimes called the logic of questions and answers.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Computing 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Numismatics/Cryptocurrency 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Philosophy/Anarchism 🔗 Anarchism

Crypto-anarchism (or crypto-anarchy) is a political ideology focusing on protection of privacy, political freedom and economic freedom, the adherents of which use cryptographic software for confidentiality and security while sending and receiving information over computer networks.

By using cryptographic software, the association between the identity of a certain user or organization and the pseudonym they use is made difficult to find, unless the user reveals the association. It is difficult to say which country's laws will be ignored, as even the location of a certain participant is unknown. However, participants may in theory voluntarily create new laws using smart contracts or, if the user is pseudonymous, depend on online reputation.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Education 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Debating

A lie-to-children is a simplified, and often technically incorrect, explanation of technical or complex subjects employed as a teaching method. Educators who employ lies-to-children do not intend to deceive, but instead seek to 'meet the child/pupil/student where they are', in order to facilitate initial comprehension, which they build upon over time as the learner's intellectual capacity expands. The technique has been incorporated by academics within the fields of biology, evolution, bioinformatics and the social sciences.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy

In theoretical physics, the problem of time is a conceptual conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics in that quantum mechanics regards the flow of time as universal and absolute, whereas general relativity regards the flow of time as malleable and relative. This problem raises the question of what time really is in a physical sense and whether it is truly a real, distinct phenomenon. It also involves the related question of why time seems to flow in a single direction, despite the fact that no known physical laws seem to require a single direction.