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Philosophy

I am interested in and confused by an emerging branch of philosophy called 'experimental philosophy', and was wondering if any good examples could be provided that might help settle this confusion and direct these interests? Could Kinsey be regarded as an experimental philosopher as well as a psychologist, since, in many ways, he helped to revolutionize the way sexuality is defined in terms of a spectrum instead of the reduced dichotomy of gay/straight?

And here's a link to an " experimental epistemology " lab at the University at Buffalo , run by philosopher James Beeb e . While I think there are useful experiments that philosophers can do that can shed light on what "ordinary" people's "intuitions" are, I wonder if this is really philosophy or merely philosophically-oriented cognitive science.
Philosophy

Are there any topics that philosophy doesn't touch on?

I'm sure that there are some topics that philosophy hasn't touched on. But I'm equally sure that there are no topics that philosophy couldn't touch on. I believe that, for any topic X, there is the philosophy of X. As Plato said, "The one who feels no distaste in sampling every study , and who attacks the task of learning gladly and cannot get enough of it, we shall justly pronounce the lover of wisdom, the philosopher." (Italics mine. Plato , Republic V,475c (trans. Paul Shorey, in Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (eds.) (1961), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press): 575-844, quotation on p. 714.))
Mathematics

Is this for philosophers, mathematicians, or logicians? But here goes: Given that the decimal places of pi continue to infinity, does this imply that somewhere in the sequence of numbers of pi there must be, for instance, a huge (and possibly infinite) number of the same number repeated? 77777777777777777777777777... , say? If Pi goes on forever, you might think it must be. After all, if you checked pi to the first googol decimal places you obviously would't find an infinite number of anything. Try a googlplex! Still nothing. But we haven't scratched the surface, even though the universe would have fizzled out by now. If pi's decimal places go on forever, there may be, (not just 77777777777777... or 1515151515151) but all of them, in all combinations, forever. After all, you only have to say "You've only checked a googolplex. There's still an infinite number to to check. The universe is long gone, but pi goes on and on." Philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, any ideas? Mark G.

It doesn't imply that, because that's false. If pi had an infinite number of the same digits repeated, it would be a rational number. But it's an irrational number. See Wikipedia's article on pi .
Language

Is it true that all language is meaningless without context?

It depends on what you mean (!) by "meaning" and on what you mean by "context" (but surely you didn't expect a philosopher to say anything different, did you?). If by "meaning" you mean "reference" (or "denotation", or "extension"), e.g., a thing in the world, and if by "context" you mean the world, then I would say that all language is meaningless without context. But that's not a very interesting claim in that case, because it's almost a tautology. Similarly, if "meaning" means "sense" (or "intension", or maybe "connotation")--e.g., the word "unicorn" has no extensional meaning (because there are no unicorns), but it has a "sense" in the sense that it means a white, one-horned, horselike animal--and if "context" means something like a semantic network of interrelated senses, then, again, all language is meaningless without context (although in a different way from the previous paragraph). But again that's not very interesting. I think a more interesting question is how linguistic meanings ...
Language

Can a "fact" be defined simply be defined as a "proposition that is true"?

It can, and no doubt many people do define it that way. But others (including me) prefer to use the word 'fact' to refer to the states of affairs or situations in the world that correspond to true propositions or that can be said to make true propositions true. Whenever you read someone discussing things like "facts", "propositions", etc., you must always try to find out how that person is using the word, because there often is no standard, universally agreed upon definition.
Logic

This question has been given to my year 7 son and he has permission from his teacher to seek help from the web! Any assistance gratefully received. "A wicked year 7 pupil, the self-styled "Logician", was up before the year head on a serious charge of misleading the rest of the year into avoiding homework through clever argument. The head of year promised expulsion from the school, but added the following strange condition that, if on the day of expulsion the Logician signed a statement making one true declaration about his punishment, the expulsion would be reduced to confinement in the Head's study for 10 days. If on the other hand the statement is false, then the sentence will be carried out immediately. The day of expulsion arrives and the Logician, beaming, signs a declaration which is handed to the head of year who reads it in bewilderment. Tearing the document to shreds in his anger he orders that the Logician suffers no punishment whatsoever." What could the Logician have said which resulted in...

I won't give you an answer, but I'll give you a hint: Read Don Quixote :-)
Language
Truth

I have been reading the recent discussion about whether "facts" can be "rational" or "irrational" http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/2829). Professor Rapaport suggests that philosophers use facts differently than most non-philosophers. Facts, he says, "simply 'are'". They are not like beliefs, which are more like sentences. His statements have left me very confused. The Earth is round. Is that a fact? We all die. Is that a fact? Seems to me that it is. And it's simultaneously a sentence. I don't see how a fact can be anything but a sentence. But suppose facts are not sentences. They are situations. One big fact would be the way the world is, I suppose. A smaller fact might be the way my room is right now. Fine, why can't situations be "rational" or "irrational"? I think very often we come upon a situation and say things like "This situation is totally crazy", by which we mean, it is irrational. As the questioner said, dictionary.com defines "rational" as "agreeable to reason". ...

I'm happy to try to clarify: I don't think that philosophers use facts differently from most non-philosophers. Rather, I think that philosophers use the word 'fact' differently from the way most non-philosophers use it. I think that most non -philosophers use it to mean more or less the same as the expressions 'true sentence', or 'true proposition', or 'true belief'. I think that most philosophers use it to mean more or less the same as the word 'situation' or the phrase 'state of affairs', i.e., a bunch of objects having properties or standing in relations. Used in this way, I don't think it makes sense to call a fact "rational" or "irrational", any more than it makes sense to call, say, the number 3 "beautiful" or to call, say, the color red "odd" (in the sense of not evenly divisible by 2). In this sense, the sentence 'The Earth is round' is true. And the reason that it is true is that there is a fact that corresponds to it, namely, the fact consisting of the object that is the...
Language
Philosophy

Peter Smith wrote recently (Question 2823) that "facts aren't the sort of thing that are rational or irrational". But that isn't true, is it? The first definition of the word "rational" on dictionary.com is "agreeable to reason". Certain facts offend reason - and the questioner's example (while not the best, in my view) of death seems to be a fact that is not agreeable to reason. That is to say, if reason ruled the world or, put another way, if God created everything in accordance with reason, we would not die. There is no rational explanation or reason for our death. Certainly there is a sense in which I understand Peter Smith's statement that facts aren't rational or irrational, but there seem to be plenty of definitions of "rational" for which it makes perfect sense to say that facts are rational or irrational. What's more - and I don't mean to be contentious - Peter seems to focus on this aspect of the question to the detriment of the spirit of the question. The questioner seems perturbed by...

I thought that Peter Smith's reply was fine, too, until I read this new question and Prof. Stairs's reply. So I went back and re-read the original question (2823) and Smith's answer, and I wonder if this isn't all a tempest in a teapot. My reading of Smith's original answer was that he was distinguishing between "facts" and "beliefs", where facts are what philosophers call "states of affairs" or "situations": ways the world is (or could be). Facts simply "are", or "hold", or "obtain". Beliefs, on the other hand--as I think Smith used that term--are "propositions" or maybe even "sentences": Descriptions of ways the world is (or could be). Beliefs, understood in this way, can be true or false, rational or irrational. In ordinary, everyday usage, people (other than philosophers) tend to use the word "fact" to mean "belief" or "proposition", but I think Smith was trying to make a distinction that the current questioner is missing. As for the spirit of the question, sure, some facts are--what...
Ethics
Science

I'm a scientist. The results of my research may generate technologies that could potentially be used in both and offensive and defensive military applications. These same technologies could potentially help people as well. Here are two examples: (1) My work could potentially create odor-sensing devices to target "enemies" and blow them up, but the same work could aid land-mine detection and removal. (2) My work could help build warrior robots, but it could also help build better prosthetics for amputees. For any given project, I have to decide which agency(ies) my lab will take money from. I do not want to decide based on the name of the agency alone: DARPA has funded projects that helped amputees and killed no one, while I would bet (but do not know for sure) that some work sponsored by the NSF has ultimately been used in military operations. So I'd like to base my decision on something more than the agency acronym. How can I start to get my head around this? What sorts of questions should I...

I am happy to read Miriam's and Thomas's replies to this question, because it is one that I somewhat unexpectedly faced when I switched from being a professional philosopher to being a professional computer scientist (albeit one with a highly philosophical bent!). The first time the issue came to light was when I gave a talk to computer and cognitive scientists at the University of Texas at Austin about 20 years ago. One of my hosts was Benjamin Kuipers , a leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who had done groundbreaking work, as a grad student supported by military funding, on "way finding": How to program computers to give and to follow geographic directions. He told me that after he got his Ph.D., he realized that, as a practicing Quaker, he could not in good conscience continue to take military funding, especially if that meant that he would have to fire grad students or postdocs who would be working under his direction if the military asked him to do something against his beliefs...

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