Download or read book Vagueness and Contradiction written by Roy Sorensen and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2001-09-27 with total page 214 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 Vagueness and Contradiction written by Roy A. Sorensen and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in Sorensen's unique style, inventive and amusing, Vagueness and Contradiction 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 Truth Vagueness and Paradox written by Vann McGee and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 1988 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Download or read book How Mathematicians Think written by William Byers and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-02 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many outsiders, mathematicians appear to think like computers, grimly grinding away with a strict formal logic and moving methodically--even algorithmically--from one black-and-white deduction to another. Yet mathematicians often describe their most important breakthroughs as creative, intuitive responses to ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. A unique examination of this less-familiar aspect of mathematics, How Mathematicians Think reveals that mathematics is a profoundly creative activity and not just a body of formalized rules and results. Nonlogical qualities, William Byers shows, play an essential role in mathematics. Ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes can arise when ideas developed in different contexts come into contact. Uncertainties and conflicts do not impede but rather spur the development of mathematics. Creativity often means bringing apparently incompatible perspectives together as complementary aspects of a new, more subtle theory. The secret of mathematics is not to be found only in its logical structure. The creative dimensions of mathematical work have great implications for our notions of mathematical and scientific truth, and How Mathematicians Think provides a novel approach to many fundamental questions. Is mathematics objectively true? Is it discovered or invented? And is there such a thing as a "final" scientific theory? Ultimately, How Mathematicians Think shows that the nature of mathematical thinking can teach us a great deal about the human condition itself.

Download or read book Vagueness written by Kit Fine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 192 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 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 Vagueness in Psychiatry written by Geert Keil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In psychiatry there is no sharp boundary between the normal and the pathological. Although clear cases abound, it is often indeterminate whether a particular condition does or does not qualify as a mental disorder. For example, definitions of subthreshold disorders and of the prodromal stages of diseases are notoriously contentious. Philosophers and linguists call concepts that lack sharp boundaries, and thus admit of borderline cases, 'vague'. Although blurred boundaries between the normal and the pathological are a recurrent theme in many publications concerned with the classification of mental disorders, systematic approaches that take into account philosophical reflections on vagueness are rare. This book provides interdisciplinary discussions about vagueness in psychiatry by bringing together scholars from psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, history, and law. It draws together various lines of inquiry into the nature of gradations between mental health and disease and discusses the individual and societal consequences of dealing with blurred boundaries in medical practice, forensic psychiatry, and beyond. --

Download or read book Contradiction Studies Exploring the Field written by Gisela Febel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Contradiction” is a core concept in the humanities and the social sciences. Beside the classical ideas of logical or dialectical contradiction, instances of “lived” contradiction and strategies of coping with it are objects of this study. Contradiction Studies discuss the many ways in which explicit or implicit contradictions are negotiated in different political or cultural settings. This volume collects articles that tackle the concept of contradiction, practices of contradicting and lived contradictions from a number of relevant perspectives and assembles contributions from linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and media studies.

Download or read book Vagueness in Communication written by Rick Nouwen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Workshop on Vagueness in Communication, VIC 2009, held as part of ESSLLI 2009, in Bordeaux, France, July 20-24, 2009. The 11 contributions presented shed a light on new aspects in the area of vagueness in natural language communication. In contrast to the classical instruments of dealing with vagueness - like multi-valued logics, truth value gaps or gluts, or supervaluations - this volume presents new approaches like context-sensitivity of vagueness, the sharpening of vague predicates in context, and the modeling of precision levels.

Download or read book Conditionals Paradox and Probability written by Lee Walters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability brings together fifteen original essays by experts in philosophy and linguistics. These specially written chapters draw on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The contributors to this volume focus on the key topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions, including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. Their insights will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists working in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.

Download or read book Vagueness in Context written by Stewart Shapiro and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stewart Shapiro's aim in Vagueness in Context is to develop both a philosophical and a formal, model-theoretic account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary with such contextual factors as the comparison class and paradigm cases. A person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professionalbasketball players. The main feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions (and anti-extensions) of vague terms also vary in the course of a conversation, even after the external contextual features, such as the comparison class, are fixed. A central thesis is that in some cases, a competent speaker ofthe language can go either way in the borderline area of a vague predicate without sinning against the meaning of the words and the non-linguistic facts. Shapiro calls this open texture, borrowing the term from Friedrich Waismann.The formal model theory has a similar structure to the supervaluationist approach, employing the notion of a sharpening of a base interpretation. In line with the philosophical account, however, the notion of super-truth does not play a central role in the development of validity. The ultimate goal of the technical aspects of the work is to delimit a plausible notion of logical consequence, and to explore what happens with the sorites paradox.Later chapters deal with what passes for higher-order vagueness - vagueness in the notions of 'determinacy' and 'borderline' - and with vague singular terms, or objects. In each case, the philosophical picture is developed by extending and modifying the original account. This is followed with modifications to the model theory and the central meta-theorems.As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak. But vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other. Vagueness is also due to the kinds of beings we are. There is no need to blame the phenomenon on any one of those aspects.

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 The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language written by Piotr Stalmaszczyk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 831 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of language is central to the concerns of those working across semantics, pragmatics and cognition, as well as the philosophy of mind and ideas. Bringing together an international team of leading scholars, this handbook provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics. Chapters are grouped into thematic areas and cover a wide range of topics, from key philosophical notions, such as meaning, truth, reference, names and propositions, to characteristics of the most recent research in the field, including logicality of language, vagueness in natural language, value judgments, slurs, deception, proximization in discourse, argumentation theory and linguistic relativity. It also includes chapters that explore selected linguistic theories and their philosophical implications, providing a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective. Showcasing the cutting-edge in research in the field, this book is essential reading for philosophers interested in language and linguistics, and linguists interested in philosophical analyses.

Download or read book Vagueness written by Rosanna Kenney and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole" -- have borderline cases (arguably, someone may be neither tall nor not tall); and they lack well-defined extensions (there is no sharp boundary between tall people and the rest). The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity.

Download or read book The Principal Contradiction written by Torkil Lauesen and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Principal Contradiction, Torkil Lauesen introduces readers to the philosophy of dialectical materialism as a tool for changing the world. Dialectical materialism allows us to understand the dynamics of world history and to draw practical conclusions, with the concept of contradiction building a bridge between theory and practice. This is not just a valuable tool with which to analyze complex relationships: it also tells us how to intervene.Lauesen explores the historical origins of dialectical materialism, focusing at first on the European context in which Hegel was famously turned on his head, then introducing the subsequent contributions made by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. Drawing on his own decades of experience as an anti-imperialist, Lauesen shows how dialectical materialism can be employed as a method to understand the past five hundred years of capitalist history, how contradictions internal to European capitalism led to colonialism and genocide in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as all humanity was brought into a single exploitative world system. The historical record is used to show how contradictions interact with one another and how a correct understanding of the principal contradiction is critical to formulating a correct strategy.

Download or read book Compactness and Contradiction written by Terence Tao and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many bits and pieces of folklore in mathematics that are passed down from advisor to student, or from collaborator to collaborator, but which are too fuzzy and nonrigorous to be discussed in the formal literature. Traditionally, it was a matter

Download or read book In Contradiction written by Graham Priest and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-02-16 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Contradiction advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheism), a view that flies in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The book has been at the centre of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since its first publication in 1987. This second edition of the book substantially expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author's reflections on developments over the last two decades. Further aspects of dialetheism are discussed in the companion volume, Doubt Truth to be a Liar, also published by Oxford University Press.