I took a sculpture class as an undergrad (somehow I fit it in between the 18 philosophy courses, not counting the 3 I sat in on and never missed a day). My professor said that one of his contemporaries had bragged that he had found five ways to represent drapery. This is no mean task, and my professor said he hadn’t a clue about how to go about representing drapery, let alone know five ways. […]
Category: philosophy
What are Quantifiers?
What are quantifiers? Quantifiers have been thought of things that ‘range over’ a set of objects. For example, if I say There are people with blue eyes this statement can be represented as (with the domain restricted to people): ∃x(Bx). This statement says that there is at least one person with property B, blue eyes. So the ‘Ex’ is doing the work of looking at the people in the domain (all people) and picking out […]
Consciousness Dilemma, take 2
Back in January I wrote up a post on what I believe to be a major problem in the study of consciousness. Now, with the introduction of Consciousness Online (started by the estimable R. Brown), I feel my dilemma should get some renewed attention. Here’s the argument: Assume someone knows what consciousness/mind is. If someone knows something, then it is part of his or her consciousness. If someone knows what consciousness is, then his or […]
Where Does Probability Come From? (and randomness to boot)
I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability. What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns: a measure of how likely it […]
Relativity as Informational Interdependence
Ever have the experience of sitting in traffic and believe that you are moving in reverse, only to realize a second later that you were fooled by the vehicle next to you moving forward? You were sitting still, but because you saw something moving away, you mistakenly thought you started to move in the opposite direction. Two different senses may be at work here: your sight and your balance. Lets assume that your balance did […]
Getting Around Gettier
The Gettier argument (and its descendants) run thusly… Someone thinks they know x. However, due to factor y, they do not know x. These sorts of thought experiments are used regularly to undermine different accounts of knowledge. Generally I think they are effective but there is one gray area that is under-appreciated. When the thought experiment is introduced, it is generally assumed to be unproblematic: whoever is setting up the thought experiment is defining the […]
It was just a matter of time…
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A Counterexample to Skepticism
The statement, “Either something happened or something didn’t happen,” is immune to skepticism. If a skeptic tries to doubt it, then something has happened, making the statement true. If no one doubts it and nothing happened, then the statement is again true. Therefore you may have absolute certainty that something has or has not happened. Moreover, this statement has it’s uses: I can imagine mothers all over the country trying to impress upon their teenagers […]
A note on epistemology
Justified true belief does not yield knowledge, and everyone should know this by now. Beyond Gettier’s argument, is this tack I heard given by Jaakko Hintikka: You may believe something, fine, and have whatever justifications you wish. But how do you know the thing is true? The point he was making was that far beyond the issue of problems in having the right sort of justifications is the problem of having truth as well. Whenever […]
Monty Hall Update
I wrote out an example playing of the Monty Hall Problem in Independence Friendly Logic as a game of incomplete information and appended it to my post here. I also left an extended comment on Dependence Logic vs. Independence Friendly Logic about some of the tribulations encountered as a non-academic trying to get my grubby little hands on obscure logic papers.