Recent Responses
I have a question concerning the gender of words that exist in many languages, except in English. What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers? A different question is whether the features of a language reflect the characteristics of the societies where it's spoken in a largely unconscious and involuntary way. (Modern) Persian, spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, doesn't have the feature of grammatical gender (anymore), just as English. Many say that the languages that do have grammatical genders are sexist, and that they help to perpetuate the conviction that sex is a tremendously important matter in all areas. For Marilyn Frye, this is a key factor in perpetuating male dominance: male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance. Societies whose languages do not have grammatical genders are no less sexist than the others that do have grammatical genders. Have many languages marginalized women more than the English language? Why can't we gender-neutralize words? Does sexist language matter? Thanks.
Louise Antony
September 24, 2009
(changed September 24, 2009)
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As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things... Read more
I have heard that Gödel Proved that Arithmetic cannot be reduced to logic or formal logic. Although I have read explanations which basically state that arithmetic is not complete and thus not definitional like in formal logic, I cannot get my head around how 1+1=2 is NOT reducible to formal logic. This seems like an obvious analytic statement in which "one and one" is the same as saying "two". Can anyone shed light on this?
Peter Smith
September 24, 2009
(changed September 24, 2009)
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Well, there is a logical truth in the vicinity of 1 + 1 = 2. Or perhaps better, a whole family of logical truths. Fix on a pair of properties F and G. Then it is a theorem of first-order logic that if exactly one thing is F and one thing is G and nothing is both F and G, then are exactly... Read more
I believe it was Hume who made the point that reason cannot motivate us, only our feelings can. Supposing that's true, I have a far-flung conclusion that seems to follow from that: when the panelists on this site choose which questions to answer, they're motivated by some emotion, not by reason. But doesn't this corrupt the purity of the logic of the answer? Perhaps not necessarily so, but isn't it likely that of the 2,600+ questions a good number have been tainted? How is it not the case?
Jonathan Westphal
October 2, 2009
(changed October 2, 2009)
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A mathematician might find his feelings engaged by certain questions. Sir Andrew Wiles was passionate about Fermat's Last Theorem from the age of about ten, I believe. (Say, by contrast, that he took little interest in statistics. Perhaps statistics even disgusts him.) Does any of this "c... Read more
I believe it was Hume who made the point that reason cannot motivate us, only our feelings can. Supposing that's true, I have a far-flung conclusion that seems to follow from that: when the panelists on this site choose which questions to answer, they're motivated by some emotion, not by reason. But doesn't this corrupt the purity of the logic of the answer? Perhaps not necessarily so, but isn't it likely that of the 2,600+ questions a good number have been tainted? How is it not the case?
Jonathan Westphal
October 2, 2009
(changed October 2, 2009)
Permalink
A mathematician might find his feelings engaged by certain questions. Sir Andrew Wiles was passionate about Fermat's Last Theorem from the age of about ten, I believe. (Say, by contrast, that he took little interest in statistics. Perhaps statistics even disgusts him.) Does any of this "c... Read more
Your life isn't of much significance; there have been billions of other humans in existence, throughout multiple epochs and countless places. Very few of them have changed the world in any palpable way, and even for the ones that have changed the world in a significant way, the fact remains that humans occupy an infinitesimally small part of a gargantuan and indifferent universe, living lifes of grotesquely short duration. However, your life is actually of incalculable significance. If you die the whole universe may as well cease to exist; your perception is reality itself. Which one of these extremes contains the most truth?
Jennifer Church
September 23, 2009
(changed September 23, 2009)
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You describe two different standards for judging the significance of one's life. The first measures its significance by the size of its contribution to a long history that includes billions of other human lives. The second measures its significance by the degree to which it matters t... Read more
I am reading some philosophy and psychology about happiness, and much of the work proclaims that we must act in order to be "happy" (Aristotle, William James, as well as more popular writers such as Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi). As you will notice, they are all men. Are there difference in how female philosophers describe and prescribe "happiness" (or subjective well-being or flourishing)? Thank you.
Eric Silverman
September 23, 2009
(changed September 23, 2009)
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The four major views of happiness (aka subjective well-being) are that happiness is constituted by:
1) Pleasure (and the absence of pain)
2) Fulfilled Desires
3) Virtue
4) A number of different sources that form an objective list of some sort: usually including things like pleasure, fu... Read more
I'm a college student, hoping to enter a PhD program and specialize in philosophy of mind and language. I'm deciding if I should spend my electives on mathematics. My experience with math tells me that it furnishes the mind with superior logic, clarity of thought, and a solid scaffolding that helps me reach higher ideas. Often I find myself framing my philosophical ideas, lessons, and questions in ways that mathematics has taught me, not philosophy (although I think this owes to my longer experience with math). So I've been wondering, how much mathematics should an aspiring philosopher study, especially if he or she would like to delve into one of the more analytic sub-fields? I'm good at math, and I do not mind taking a number of advanced math courses, but frankly, I'd rather spend the extra course slots on subjects I prefer, like more philosophy or a foreign language.
Peter Smith
September 23, 2009
(changed September 23, 2009)
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I'd say: if you've done a maths course or two already, then you should have learnt some lessons about arguing rigorously and giving absolutely clear gap-free proofs. Doing further courses won't teach you any more about that. So if you are not going to specialize in the philosophy of mathe... Read more
Is modal logic first-order logic or second-order logic or higher-order logic? What makes a logical system fall into any of those categories? Is it based on expressive power?
Peter Smith
September 22, 2009
(changed September 22, 2009)
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The usual story is roughly this. The quantifiers of a first-order logic (ordinary universal and existential quantifiers; or perhaps fancier dyadic quantifiers) range over objects in some given domain. A second-order logic, as well as having those first-order quantifiers, has quantifiers r... Read more
I have always been more talented at exposing flaws in reasoning or hypocrisy in actions than in constructing anything to replace what I criticize. Naturally many people are bothered when they're criticized and aggravated beyond that when not presented with an alternative. What is the status of this ability? Should someone hold his silence if he has nothing better to offer, or is just being critical worthy by itself?
Eric Silverman
September 19, 2009
(changed September 19, 2009)
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It strikes me as very 'Socratic' to expose flaws in reasoning even if you don't have claims of your own to make. However, we should also remember that things didn't end well for Socrates (at least not by conventional measures.... I sometimes joke that Socrates was the first person in h... Read more
How do good and evil exist if one does not believe in a higher power? Any logic or emotion that renders something "wrong" really has no basis. We all inherently know that murder is wrong, but without a higher power, how is that legitimate? What if one person disagrees? Why is he not right to kill as he pleases? Thank you.
Lisa Cassidy
September 18, 2009
(changed September 18, 2009)
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Your question reminds me very much of a quote from the Russian author Dostoyevsky: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." Crime and Punishment is his wonderful novel. The main character proposes to do exactly as you say, commit a murder just to test the limits of ethics. Spoil... Read more