Our panel of 91 professional philosophers has responded to

2
 questions about 
Culture
574
 questions about 
Philosophy
392
 questions about 
Religion
110
 questions about 
Biology
32
 questions about 
Sport
70
 questions about 
Truth
218
 questions about 
Education
154
 questions about 
Sex
244
 questions about 
Justice
36
 questions about 
Literature
80
 questions about 
Death
221
 questions about 
Value
69
 questions about 
Business
170
 questions about 
Freedom
58
 questions about 
Abortion
24
 questions about 
Suicide
54
 questions about 
Medicine
1280
 questions about 
Ethics
34
 questions about 
Music
96
 questions about 
Time
89
 questions about 
Law
134
 questions about 
Love
75
 questions about 
Perception
81
 questions about 
Identity
105
 questions about 
Art
284
 questions about 
Mind
58
 questions about 
Punishment
282
 questions about 
Knowledge
39
 questions about 
Race
374
 questions about 
Logic
5
 questions about 
Euthanasia
208
 questions about 
Science
23
 questions about 
History
75
 questions about 
Beauty
31
 questions about 
Space
51
 questions about 
War
27
 questions about 
Gender
77
 questions about 
Emotion
67
 questions about 
Feminism
88
 questions about 
Physics
110
 questions about 
Animals
117
 questions about 
Children
151
 questions about 
Existence
4
 questions about 
Economics
43
 questions about 
Color
2
 questions about 
Action
68
 questions about 
Happiness
287
 questions about 
Language
124
 questions about 
Profession

Question of the Day

Suppose S is the set of all things that are blue or green. Then my mug is in S because it's green and therefore satisfies "x is blue or x is green," and my pen is in the set S because it's blue and therefore satisfies "x is blue or x is green." Now it's true: satisfying "x is blue or x is green" picks out only one set: the set of all things that satisfy "x is blue or x is green." But the condition "x is green" is a different condition, and so is "x is blue."

However: when you say "being blue or green cannot be the reason why any other object is in any other set," there's an ambiguity. That could be read as "being blue cannot be the reason why an object is in any other set and being green cannot be the reason why an object is in any other set." In that case, however, it's false. Being green, and hence satisfying "x is green" puts my mug in the set G of all green things, and in the set S of all things that are either green or blue—that satisfy "x is green or x is blue." These two sets are not the same. One is a proper subset of the other. Being in the set S doesn't entail being in the set G, and also doesn't entail being in the set B, though it does entail being in either G or B.

The key is to formulate the membership condition so that there's no room for ambiguity. We have

o is in S if and only if o satisfies "x is green or x is blue."
o is in G if and only if o satisfies "x is green"
o is in B if and only if o satisfies "x is blue"

These are three different conditions that pick out three different sets. G and B are disjoint from one another and are proper subsets of S. The union of G and B is S. But the formulation "x is green or blue," while not wrong, masks the fact that "x is green or blue" amounts to "x is green or x is blue," and so is the disjunction (the "or") of two conditions. An object is in S if it satisfies either of those conditions. It's in G only if it satisfies the first, and in B only if it satisfies the second. But clearly by virtue of satisfying one condition ("x is green") my mug can be in S and also in G.