Download or read book The Sorites Paradox Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing written by Cometan and published by Astral Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sorites Paradox & Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? is the sixty-second instalment in the Little Blue Book Series and is comprised of the one-hundred and seventh to the one-hundred and eleventh discourses of the Duodoxy, which is itself the second disquisition of the founding book of Astronism, called the Omnidoxy. The Little Blue Book Series was created and first published by Cometan himself as a way to simplify and commercialise the immensity of the two million word length of the Omnidoxy into smaller, more bite-size publications. A successful series from its very first published entry, the Little Blue Book Series has gone on to become a symbol of Astronist commercial literature and a way for Cometan’s words to reach readers of all ages and abilities who remain daunted by the beauty and yet the sheer extensiveness of the Omnidoxy as the longest religious text in history.
Download or read book The Sorites Paradox written by Sergi Oms and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a systematic introduction and discussion of all the main solutions to the sorites paradox and its areas of influence.
Download or read book Unruly Words written by Diana Raffman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unruly Words, Diana Raffman advances a new theory of vagueness which, unlike previous accounts, is genuinely semantic while preserving bivalence. According to this new approach, called the multiple range theory, vagueness consists essentially in a term's being applicable in multiple arbitrarily different, but equally competent, ways, even when contextual factors are fixed.
Download or read book Vagueness and Contradiction written by Roy A. Sorensen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? Epistemicists answer 'Yes!' They believe that any predicate that divides things divides them sharply. They solve the ancient sorites paradox by picturing vagueness as a kind of ignorance. The alternative solutions are radical. They either reject classical theorems or inference rules or reject our common sense view of what can exist. Epistemicists spare this central portion of our web of belief by challenging peripheral intuitions about the nature of language. So why is this continuation of the status quo so incredible? Why do epistemicists themselves have trouble believing their theory? In Vagueness and Contradiction Roy Sorensen traces our incredulity to linguistic norms that build upon our psychological tendencies to round off insignificant differences. These simplifying principles lead to massive inconsistency, rather like the rounding off errors of calculators with limited memory. English entitles speakers to believe each 'tolerance conditional' such as those of the form 'If n is small, then n + 1 is small.' The conjunction of these a priori beliefs entails absurd conditionals such as 'If 1 is small, then a billion is small.' Since the negation of this absurdity is an a priori truth, our a priori beliefs about small numbers are jointly inconsistent. One of the tolerance conditionals, at the threshold of smallness, must be an analytic falsehood that we are compelled to regard as a tautology. Since there are infinitely many analytic sorites arguments, Sorensen concludes that we are obliged to believe infinitely many contradictions. These contradictions are not specifically detectable. They are ineliminable, like the heat from a light bulb. Although the light bulb is not designed to produce heat, the heat is inevitably produced as a side-effect of illumination. Vagueness can be avoided by representational systems that make no concession to limits of perception, or memory,or testimony. But quick and rugged representational systems, such as natural languages, will trade 'rationality' for speed and flexibility. Roy Sorensen defends epistemicism in his own distinctive style, inventive and amusing. But he has some serious things to say about language and logic, about the way the world is and about our understanding of it.
Download or read book Essays on Paradoxes written by Terry Horgan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together many of Terence Horgan's essays on paradoxes: Newcomb's problem, the Monty Hall problem, the two-envelope paradox, the sorites paradox, and the Sleeping Beauty problem. Newcomb's problem arises because the ordinary concept of practical rationality constitutively includes normative standards that can sometimes come into direct conflict with one another. The Monty Hall problem reveals that sometimes the higher-order fact of one's having reliably received pertinent new first-order information constitutes stronger pertinent new information than does the new first-order information itself. The two-envelope paradox reveals that epistemic-probability contexts are weakly hyper-intensional; that therefore, non-zero epistemic probabilities sometimes accrue to epistemic possibilities that are not metaphysical possibilities; that therefore, the available acts in a given decision problem sometimes can simultaneously possess several different kinds of non-standard expected utility that rank the acts incompatibly. The sorites paradox reveals that a certain kind of logical incoherence is inherent to vagueness, and that therefore, ontological vagueness is impossible. The Sleeping Beauty problem reveals that some questions of probability are properly answered using a generalized variant of standard conditionalization that is applicable to essentially indexical self-locational possibilities, and deploys "preliminary" probabilities of such possibilities that are not prior probabilities. The volume also includes three new essays: one on Newcomb's problem, one on the Sleeping Beauty problem, and an essay on epistemic probability that articulates and motivates a number of novel claims about epistemic probability that Horgan has come to espouse in the course of his writings on paradoxes. A common theme unifying these essays is that philosophically interesting paradoxes typically resist either easy solutions or solutions that are formally/mathematically highly technical. Another unifying theme is that such paradoxes often have deep-sometimes disturbing-philosophical morals.
Download or read book Omnidoxy written by Cometan and published by Astronist Institution. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 3357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Omnidoxy is the founding treatise of the Astronist religion and was solely authored by the philosopher and religious founder, Cometan. Partitioned into twelve disquisitions, each of which are further divided into hundreds of discourses, which are themselves titled by those which are known as rubrals, The Omnidoxy has been codified according to a unique writing structure known as insentence. The Omnidoxy not only forms the foundations of Astronism, but it remains the primary modern contributor and the book that ignited the establishment of the Astronic tradition of religion which encompasses the philosophy of Astronism. Introducing brand new philosophical concepts such as cosmocentricity, reascensionism, transcensionism, and sentientism amongst many others, The Omnidoxy remains the principal signifier of a new era in philosophy. The Omnidoxy births hundreds of new belief orientations, schools of thought, neologisms, disciplines of study, theories, and concepts which, when combined and considered collectively, have formed the basis of Astronism. The authorship of The Omnidoxy rests with the single individual philosopher, Cometan who began writing The Omnidoxy at the age of seventeen driven by what he terms as personal inspiration. The historical origination of The Omnidoxy rests in its authorship by Brandon Taylorian during early 21st century England, specifically in the northern county of Lancashire. Like in all textual criticism, the timing and location of the codification of The Omnidoxy is integral to understanding why and how it was written, especially by considering the influential factors impacting Taylorian during his construction of the text, particularly the cultural, political, religious, and social contexts of Taylorian's personal life and of wider society at the time. This forms an important branch of study within omnidoxicology known as omnidoxical criticism, or omnidoxical exegesis in which scholars study and investigate The Omnidoxy in order to discern conclusive judgements inspired by how, where, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances The Omnidoxy was written.
Download or read book Vagueness written by Kit Fine and published by Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy. This book was released on 2020 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is a subject of long-standing interest in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. Numerous accounts of vagueness have been proposed in the literature but there has been no general consensus on which, if any, should be be accepted. Kit Fine here presents a new theory of vagueness based on the radical hypothesis that vagueness is a "global" rather than a "local" phenomenon. In other words, according to Fine, the vagueness of an object or expression cannot properly be considered except in its relation to other objects or other expressions. He then applies the theory to a variety of topics in logic, metaphysics and epistemology, including the sorites paradox, the problem of personal identity, and the transparency of mental phenomenon. This is the inaugural volume in the Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy series, presenting lectures from the most important contemporary thinkers in the discipline.
Download or read book Oppositions and Paradoxes written by John L. Bell and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since antiquity, opposed concepts such as the One and the Many, the Finite and the Infinite, and the Absolute and the Relative, have been a driving force in philosophical, scientific, and mathematical thought. Yet they have also given rise to perplexing problems and conceptual paradoxes which continue to haunt scientists and philosophers. In Oppositions and Paradoxes, John L. Bell explains and investigates the paradoxes and puzzles that arise out of conceptual oppositions in physics and mathematics. In the process, Bell not only motivates abstract conceptual thinking about the paradoxes at issue, but he also offers a compelling introduction to central ideas in such otherwise-difficult topics as non-Euclidean geometry, relativity, and quantum physics. These paradoxes are often as fun as they are flabbergasting. Consider, for example, the famous Tristram Shandy paradox: an immortal man composing an autobiography so slowly as to require a year of writing to describe each day of his life — he would, if he had infinite time, presumably never complete the work, although no individual part of it would remain unwritten. Or think of an office mailbox labelled “mail for those with no mailbox”—if this is a person’s mailbox, how can they possibly have “no mailbox”? These and many other paradoxes straddle the boundary between physics and metaphysics, and demonstrate the hidden difficulty in many of our most basic concepts.
Download or read book Paradoxes written by R. M. Sainsbury and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradox can be defined as an unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises. Many paradoxes raise serious philosophical problems, and they are associated with crises of thought and revolutionary advances. The expanded and revised third edition of this intriguing book considers a range of knotty paradoxes including Zeno's paradoxical claim that the runner can never overtake the tortoise, a new chapter on paradoxes about morals, paradoxes about belief, and hardest of all, paradoxes about truth. The discussion uses a minimum of technicality but also grapples with complicated and difficult considerations, and is accompanied by helpful questions designed to engage the reader with the arguments. The result is not only an explanation of paradoxes but also an excellent introduction to philosophical thinking.
Download or read book The Duodoxy written by Cometan and published by Astronist Institution. This book was released on 2019-03-16 with total page 1689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Duodoxy is a 370,000 word long philosophical disquisition and the second of twelve disquisitions forming The Omnidoxy solely authored by the mononymous philosopher and founder of Astronism, Cometan. The Duodoxy comprises of one hundred and forty different discourses and introduces a plethora of new words, concepts, disciplines of study, and belief orientations. The topics addressed in these discourses differ vastly from the introduction of the Millettic approach to logic, the different forms and structures of philosophies, comparisons of philosophies to religions and ideologies, as well as outlining the theoretical foundations of how Astronism is to be disseminated globally which is addressed in the discourse focusing on the nature of promulgation and its management. The Duodoxy is also colloquially referred to as The Everything Disquisition due to the fact that it encompasses such a wide range of branches of philosophy, the most prominent one of which of course remains logic, upon which all of the ideas and theories presented in The Duodoxy are predicated. Additionally, The Duodoxy is said to provide the philosophy of Astronism with its ornamentation for The Duodoxy comprises of such a wide range of topics that without its presence, Astronism would not have developed as it has to become a philosophy with its own distinct physical and conceptual features and beliefs. At its heart, The Duodoxy is the introducer and outliner of Millettarian/Millettic/Astronic logic and under this auspice, Cometan has formulated, with the use of a new philosophical language, a new logical approach to understanding The Cosmos from the perspective of humanity as a whole as well as from our own personal individual perspectives.
Download or read book Cuts and Clouds written by Richard Dietz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is a deeply puzzling aspect of the relation between language and the world. Is it a feature of the way we represent reality in language, or a feature of reality itself? How can we reason with vague concepts? Cuts and Clouds presents the latest work towards an understanding of these puzzles about the nature and logic of vagueness.
Download or read book Blindspots written by Roy A. Sorensen and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1988 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1942 G.E. Moore first wrote about the curious sort of "nonsense" exhibited by the statement "it is raining but I do not believe it". What Moore discovered was a species of blindspots: consistent propositions that cannot be rationally accepted by certain individuals even though they mightbe true. In this book, Professor Sorenson aims to provide a unified solution to a large family of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes through a study of blindspots. He devotes special attention to revealing their role in "slippery slope" reasoning.
Download or read book A Brief History of the Paradox written by Roy Sorensen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-12-04 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums--for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before He made the world, he was told: "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with such thinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken toward these puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor.
Download or read book Understanding Truth written by Scott Soames and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this text explores the notion of truth and its role in our ordinary thought, as well as in logical philosophical and scientific theories.
Download or read book Identity and Discrimination written by Timothy Williamson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identity and Discrimination This updated edition of Identity and Discrimination, first published in 1990 and the first book by well-known philosopher Timothy Williamson, is now reissued with the inclusion of significant new material. This major work – influential in philosophy of perception and the theory of vagueness – continues in an original and rigorous way to highlight the necessity of discrimination and the thresholds which determine the approximate criteria of identity. Williamson’s proposal for an original and rigorous theory links identity, a relation central to metaphysics, and indiscriminability, a relation central to epistemology. He provides a distinctive cognitive account of the nature of discrimination, with important applications to the philosophy of perception and the theory of vagueness. The book pioneers the use of epistemic logic to solve the notorious paradoxes of indiscriminability, and develops the application of techniques from mathematical logic to understand issues about identity over time and across possible worlds.
Download or read book Spandrels of Truth written by Jc Beall and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the various conceptions of truth is one according to which 'is true' is a transparent, entirely see-through device introduced for only practical (expressive) reasons. This device, when introduced into the language, brings about truth-theoretic paradoxes (particularly, the notorious Liar and Curry paradoxes). The options for dealing with the paradoxes while preserving the full transparency of 'true' are limited. In Spandrels of Truth, Beall concisely presents and defends a modest, so-called dialetheic theory of transparent truth.
Download or read book The Outer Limits of Reason written by Noson S. Yanofsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.
