Category: Logic & Semantics

Logic & Rationality:

• 2 envelopes paradox - an interesting puzzle about probability


• If Squares were Circles - what would cubes be?


• Constructing the Largest Prime - can intuitionists still prove that there is no largest prime?


• Reform reform - Some quirky logic.


• Petal Puzzle - How many petals around the rose?


• Buridan's Ass - suggests that an ecological grounding can help us avoid the paradox of choice without preference.


• Rational Irrationality - Sometimes it's rational to make yourself irrational, and right to make yourself do wrong.


• This Sentence is False - and other paradoxes. See also: This Desire is Thwarted, Is Immoral Value Possible?, Contextual Impossibility, and Believing the Paradoxical.


• Logic Translations - how much detail should we aim to include?


• Logic Trees and Modal Indexicals - suggests a way to simplify the tree rules for the S5 modal system


• Relevant Implications - some thoughts on the contrast between classical logic and common-sense understandings of "if-then"


• Battle Tactics / Future Truths - Examining a plausible-looking argument for an absurd conclusion. (A problem with subjunctive conditionals.) See also Better Battle Tactics, and Do worry, stay happy.

Formal Semantics:

• Scopal Ambiguity - Using formal semantics to help shed light on why scopal ambiguity arises (and sometimes disappears)


• Longer than it is - As above, but regarding ambiguities between de dicto (of the words) versus de re (of the object) interpretations of intensional sentences.


• Naming and Necessity - examples of empirical necessities and a priori contingencies, as described in Kripke's famous work.

Truth:

• Analyticity - On Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction.


• Future Truths - Do they already exist?


• Truth and Relativism - on the absurdity of extreme relativism, but the usefulness of a more limited sort, which can help us to understand value-claims objectively.


• Semantic Contextualism - An intuitive theory of truth as relative to a contextual 'world' (understood as coarser- or finer-grained views of the ultimate reality)


• The Law of Non-Contradiction - why it cannot easily be denied.


• True Contradictions - Could they exist? What would this even mean? I argue that truth is a feature of our descriptions, not of the world itself, and as such a contradiction is symptomatic of a bad description, i.e. not one that we would ever want to settle for (accept as true).


• Truth and Value - Given the close analogy between {belief, truth} and {desire, value}, can we plausibly hold truth to be objective but value not? See also Convergence, Ethics and the a priori

Modality:

• Essential Meanings - Essence is a feature of our descriptions, not of things in themselves.


• So Many Possibilities - What's really possible?


• Logic and Possibility - Exposing a question-begging defence of the 'necessary' nature of logical laws


• More Modality - Expanding on the previous post, and (roughly) outlining a pragmatic formalist approach to modality.


• Real Possibilities - What does it mean to say some counterfactual event was "really possible"? Is this even a coherent concept?


• Formal Systems and the Absolute - Comparing formalism about mathematics, modality, and normativity.


• Modal Cognition - Outlining a psychology experiment to test whether our modal judgments are framework-relative.

Fiction:

• Fiction & Emotion - Are our emotional responses to fiction irrational?


• Complete Fiction, inside and out - Is there any fictional fact as to which shoe Harry Potter put on first, or can fictions be incomplete? Also discusses internal vs external explanations of truth in fiction.


• Fictional Worlds - Can we analyse fictions (and the problem of 'truth in fiction') in terms of possible worlds?


• Interactive Fictions - a.k.a. The Philosophy of Video Games.

Related Topics: See also Metaphysics and Mind. Also, for more on the topic of "reasons", see Ethics.