Concept tag
#reference
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Does ‘atom’ in my physics class refer to what Dalton meant by it?
I tutor physics in Lagos, mostly for school-leaving exams. Last week a student asked, half joking, whether Dalton was "wrong about atoms or right about something else". It is a better question than it sounds. Dalton's atoms were indivisible. A few generations…
Started by Emeka Nwosu3 replies229 views -
Kripke’s Gödel and Schmidt case: why would my word still pick out Gödel?
I teach mathematics in Delhi, and every year when we reach the incompleteness theorems one student asks the same thing: what if somebody else actually did it? This year I went looking and found that Kripke used exactly that scenario. The setup,…
Started by Vikram Sethi4 replies130 views -
Appiah is right: racial terms are empty, like ‘phlogiston’, and we should stop talking as if they named kinds
I lecture in Accra, and Appiah, whose father was Ghanaian, is someone my students claim with a certain pride, even when they disagree with him. I want to defend his eliminativism, at least for argument's sake. The argument, roughly: racial terms were…
Started by Kwame Asante7 replies192 views -
Reading group: Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ (1905), and the puzzle of the hare’s horn
Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905, has been called a paradigm of philosophy, and it is also short. It is the best example I know of predicate logic being turned on ordinary language, so I'd like to read it…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies183 views