Recent Responses
When I see a pink ice cube, then I see a coloured three-dimensional material object; and it seems to me that its colour is equally spatially extended. But isn't it a category mistake to speak of three-dimensional colours rather than only of three-dimensional coloured objects? Aren't all properties simple and adimensional entities? The ice cube's pinkness isn't like a gas that can fill up a volume of space, is it? Is its seeming three-dimensionality a phenomenal illusion?
Jonathan Westphal
December 9, 2011
(changed December 9, 2011)
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You are absolutely right. Neither colour nor a colour is spatially extended, and a colour like pink is exactly not like a gas that fills up a volume or spreads itself, perhaps very very thinly, over a surface. That is a category mistake. Nor do colours have thicknesses. I am delighted t... Read more
When are conditional statements actually true? I am getting contradicting answers. Please help. One resource, a geometry book, says that to prove a conditional statement true, you must show the conclusion is true every time the hypothesis is true. On the contrary, however, a discrete mathematics book says a conditional statement is true unless the hypothesis is true and the conclusion is false. These methods for checking the truth of a conditional statement do not produce the same results, however. For example, consider the conditional statement (1) If today is Saturday, then 5 + 5 = 6. Under the first method, this (1) is false, because when there is a time when the hypothesis is true (It is Saturday), but the conclusion is false (5 + 5 never equals 6). A counterexample exists, as they would say. But under the second method, the statement's truth value changes with time. It is true when it is not Saturday since the condition for falsehood, that it is Saturday and 5 + 5 does not equal 6, is not met. But it is false on Saturday, since the condition for falsehood is met. Which one of these contradicting methods correctly determines the truth of a conditional statement?
Miriam Solomon
December 8, 2011
(changed December 8, 2011)
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You are confusing truth and logical validity. Your geometry book is writing about the logical validity of conditional arguments. Your math book is talking about the truth of conditional statements. Logical validity is much more than truth: it is truth that is independent of the truth or... Read more
I would like to ask if you feel it is contradictionary for chivalry to exist in a world where women push for equality. From a logical point of view a woman is perfectly capable of opening a door for herself and yet it is ingrained into society that men should open doors for women, the explanation for this being that it is polite, shows manners and shows you are a "gentleman". However I feel it is quite the opposite, if anything it promotes the idea that a woman is feeble and incapable of performing something as simple as opening a door. If a person had difficulty or was incapable of opening a door since I am performing for that person, what that person is incapable of. This makes sense. An even more extreme example is the romanticized idea of the man dying for the woman. If both men and women are equal shouldn't it really be every person for themselves in such a situation? Yet a man would be considered "weak" for allowing a woman to die when he could have saved her by sacrificing his own life in place of hers. I agree with the idea of a world where men and women are equal. Equal so far as no person can stop a person from either sex from doing something or thinking a certain way if they please. Men cannot physically have children however this is a genetic limitation, not a social one or one brought on by a member of the opposite sex. I feel as though society has a very warped sense of what equality truly is. If a woman asks to be equal to her male counterpart yet expects the man perform chivalrous deeds for no other reason other than "it is gentlemanly", then that is not equality it's female supremicist ideology.
Miriam Solomon
December 8, 2011
(changed December 8, 2011)
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I think that you are right--in age of gender equality, opening doors for women, paying for them on dates, and definitely dying for them, seem to make little sense. Why, then, do these behaviors persist? In part, they persist because many people do not fully believe in gender equality. I... Read more
Let's say I have a machine with a button and a light bulb where the bulb lights up if and only if I press the button. I don't know anything about it's inner workings (gears, computers, God), I only know the "if and only if" connection between button and light. Can I say that by pressing the button I cause the bulb to light up? (I would say yes). It seems to me that for the causal connection it doesn't matter that I don't know the exact inner workings, or that I don't desire the effect (maybe I press the button just because I enjoy pressing it, or because there is strong social pressure to press it, ...), and that I consider it very unfortunate that the bulb lights up wasting electric energy. Let's now change the terms: instead of "pressing the button" we insert "having a kid" and instead of "the bulb lights up" we have "the kid dies" (maybe when adult). I think the "if and only if" relationship still holds, and so does the causal connection. It would seem to me that parents are causally connected to the death of their kids (e.g. creating a person also causes the death of such a person), and that it doesn't matter that they don't want their kids to die, or that they don't understand exactly how a human being is created or dies, etc... it also doesn't matter if the kid will live till his 90s, or commit suicide as a teenager, or be poisoned. Those are the irrelevant "inner workings", the only certain thing is that he will surely die, one way or another. Any particular holes in this line of reasoning?
Andrew Pessin
December 2, 2011
(changed December 2, 2011)
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Great set of thoughts, here. But maybe one quick mode of response is to remark that much depends on just what you take the word "cause" to mean. You could take it to mean something like this: "x causes y" = "y if and only if x", as you've suggested. Then, granting that both cases above... Read more
Is religion the true enemy of freedom in a democratic society since it teaches us that we have to think a certain way or is science since it teaches us that nobody is truly free but a product of deterministic forces?
Andrew Pessin
December 2, 2011
(changed December 2, 2011)
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Or another mode of reply: First suppose that science DOES suggest determinism. How would anything be different in our lives? Wouldn't democratic processes work precisely the same way as they have been? (After all, our behavior has been deterministic all along, so why would discovering/p... Read more
What form of accountability should non-action take? How guilty are bystanders?
Charles Taliaferro
November 30, 2011
(changed November 30, 2011)
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Great question, but to really give a proper response we might have to consider specific cases or types of cases. In general, however, it may be said that utilitarians tend to give the same ranking to an act and an omission or failure to act. A utilitarian thinks right action is the... Read more
Hello thank you for your good website I have 1 question about research method in philosophy I like to research in this field, but I am sociologist can I use method of sociology in philosophy? would you introduce me some useful books for research in philosophy? thank you very much sara m.
Charles Taliaferro
November 30, 2011
(changed November 30, 2011)
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Hello Sara M: you might find Roger Trigg's Philosophy of the Social Sciences a good place to begin. Some philosophers do engage in what might be called sociology or, more generally speaking, history. Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor have produced sweeping treatments of the mod... Read more
Typical statements (first order) of the Peano Axioms puzzle me. Neither a mathematician nor logician, I find myself thinking the following: One would hope that arithmetic is consistent with the world as it is. So the axioms of arithmetic should be true in a domain containing the items that populate reality, e.g., a domain containing this keyboard upon which I now type. But this keyboard is neither identical to zero nor is it the successor (or predecessor) of any whole non-negative number. So what's with, e.g., (Ax)((x = 0 v (Ey)(x = Sy))? On what would think its intended interpretation, the axiom (theorem in some versions) seems false "of reality." And some other typical items of (first order) expositions seem either false or at least meaningless, e.g., (Ax)(Ay)(x + Sy = S(x + y)). What could be meant by "the sum of this keyboard and the successor of 6 is equal to the successor of the sum of this keyboard and the positive integer 6? Unless one has already limited the domain to exclude typical non-arithmetic items, then stating the (first order) Peano Axioms with leading universal quantifiers seems to produce false and false or meaningless statements. So how would one try to change/complicate the (first order) axioms to avoid this? I recall reading somewhere that in some of his work Tarski would use a predicate for non-negative integers to limit the scope, something like "for all x, if x is a member of the non-negative numbers, then...." But how else might I think about this? Thanks for helping un-confuse me. Or don't we care if the Peano Axioms are not true of the world we live in? Wayne W.
Richard Heck
November 27, 2011
(changed November 27, 2011)
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You've pretty much answered your own question.
There are two ways of thinking about this. On the first, the "domain" of the theory being axiomatized is taken to consist only of the natural numbers (i.e., the non-negative integers). So it is, in a way, like when the coach says to the drive... Read more
Hello Philosophers. My question regards to the philosophy of art. Were there any other philosophers that outlined essential criteria relating to beauty or other ways of critiquing an artwork like Kant had the 4 criteria for beauty. Thanks Callum, 16.
Mitch Green
November 25, 2011
(changed November 25, 2011)
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Hello, Callum; thanks for your question. Before Kant, there was a tradition in Enlightenment thinking about the nature of beauty and how we are able to perceive it. This tradition often referred to what was called the "faculty of taste" to distinguish this form of perception from other so... Read more
What is it about neurological pain, as opposed to other forms of suffering, that makes the pain experienced by humans and many animals morally relevant? Imagine an intelligent, autonomous robot that reacts to damage the way a human reacts to pain - fear, cries, complaints, etc. Why wouldn't the "pain" of the robot be morally relevant? Similarly, why isn't the suffering of plants considered to be morally relevant?
Gordon Marino
November 25, 2011
(changed November 25, 2011)
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I suspect that if people could be convinced that a robot felt pain they would consider it morally relevant. Convincing people or other robots would require more than mimicking the actions of humans in pain. As for plants, most people do not believe they have the sensory apparatus to suffe... Read more