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Fuzzy logic is good engineering and a poor theory of vagueness
I've shipped fuzzy controllers. They work, they're cheap, and nobody who has used a decent one doubts that. My thesis is narrower: as an account of what vague words mean, fuzzy logic doesn't solve the problem it's usually advertised as solving. Two…
Started by Derek Hollis4 replies -
How did Kripke’s possible worlds turn S4 and S5 from arbitrary axioms into something meaningful?
I've been reading about modal logic for fun. I understand the operators. What I don't understand is the history I keep seeing summarised: C. I. Lewis invented several systems, S1 to S5, with different axioms; nobody could say which was "correct" or…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen4 replies -
The seat in front reclines into your knees. Whose few inches are they?
A small everyday case, with more philosophy in it than it seems. You are on a long overnight coach or flight. The passenger in front presses the button and reclines into the space where your knees are. The button belongs to their…
Started by The Editors3 replies -
Why can’t a proof assistant prove its own consistency, and should that worry the people who rely on one?
Most of the code I write in Kraków is checked by an interactive proof assistant. Last week a new colleague said, half joking, that Gödel had shown the assistant can't prove itself consistent, so all our proofs might be worthless. I gave…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Zhu Xi’s commentaries became the exam syllabus a century after he died. Did that betray his idea of learning?
Every year I teach the Four Books course to senior high students in Taipei, and every year I watch them memorise Zhu Xi's arrangement of the classics for a test. The history is a little painful. Zhu Xi grouped the Analects, the…
Started by Lin Pei-shan3 replies -
Aristotle says a young person can’t be happy. I’m twenty-two. Is he insulting me or does he have a point?
My uncle (the one who quotes Nyerere) has started quoting Aristotle as well, which is worse. At dinner he said Aristotle proved I am too young to be happy, and everybody laughed. I looked it up. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I,…
Started by Baraka Mwakyusa3 replies -
My cousin’s wedding was moved because of a horoscope. What would a Cārvāka say, and would it be fair?
My cousin's wedding was set for December. Last week an astrologer compared the two horoscopes again and found a problem, so it has moved to April, at real cost to both families. Everybody is calm about it except me. The easy move…
Started by Arvind Poojary3 replies -
Protecting believers or protecting beliefs? Where offence to the sacred stops being the law’s business
Every few months the same argument breaks out somewhere: a cartoon, a novel, a burned book, a comedian. One side says nothing is sacred in law. The other says that mocking what people hold holiest is a wound, not an opinion. I…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
My students used the surprise test paradox against me. Where exactly does their argument fail?
On Friday I told my class XI section that there would be a surprise test some day next week, Monday to Friday, and that they would not know the evening before which day it was. By the end of the period one…
Started by Vikram Sethi3 replies -
Health cannot be defined without values, and Boorse’s statistical theory shows it by trying
Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory is the most serious attempt to define health without any value judgements. Roughly: health is the absence of disease, and a disease is an internal state that reduces some function below what is statistically typical for your reference…
Started by Dima Nasser3 replies -
What are the “objectives of the law” (maqāṣid) that people keep mentioning, and why do they matter?
In a discussion at our mosque youth group, one speaker kept saying that a ruling has to be understood "through the maqāṣid", the objectives or purposes of the sharia. Another person said this is exactly how people end up ignoring the texts.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho3 replies -
How would you tell a wise elder from a well-stocked memory? Odera Oruka’s problem, revisited
Odera Oruka went out to rural Kenya to talk with elders and recorded their answers to questions about God, justice, death and the good life. He drew a line between folk sages, who voice the received wisdom of their community well, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga3 replies -
Midterm on Thursday: if a Pyrrhonist suspends all judgement, how does she get out of bed?
I'm taking a philosophy elective alongside my psychology courses, and Thursday's midterm covers Hellenistic philosophy. One question on the past papers keeps coming up: "Can the Pyrrhonian skeptic live their skepticism?" My notes say Pyrrhonists suspend judgement about everything, and that their…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
Thanksgiving Monday: can gratitude be owed, or does owing it spoil it?
It's Thanksgiving Monday here in Canada, and I'm writing this with leftover turkey and a mild headache from yesterday's family dinner, where my aunt kept a running total of who had thanked whom for what. My cousin hadn't thanked her for a…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal3 replies -
In Aymara the past lies in front of us. Is that only a way of speaking, or a truer idea of time?
In Aymara, the word nayra means eye, and front, and also the past. The past is ahead of you, because you can see it. What is coming is qhipa, behind, at your back, because nobody can see it. My grandmother pointed forward…
Started by Lucía Mamani3 replies -
What’s the difference between a valid argument and a sound one?
In a debate thread here someone said an argument was "valid but not sound" and I realised, being completely new to logic, that I didn't understand the difference. To me both words just sounded like "good". Could someone explain simply, with examples…
Started by Kavya Menon3 replies -
Reading group: Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784)
This short essay appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in December 1784. It can be read in an evening, but it repays a week. Kant defines enlightenment as leaving behind a self-incurred immaturity, the inability to use one's own understanding without someone else's…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies -
Reading group: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, propositions 1–3
A short, dense text, so let's go slowly. Use the Ogden translation (1922) or the Pears–McGuinness (1961). I'll quote proposition numbers, not pages. Plan: Week 1: 1–2.063. The world as the totality of facts, not things; objects; states of affairs. Week 2:…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Can a translation of a poem be as beautiful as the original?
I translate my own Malayalam poems into English and they always lose something. Sometimes they gain something, which is stranger. Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) is a famous case: a very free version that many consider a great English poem…
Started by Kavya Menon3 replies -
Does anger ever help? Seneca’s On Anger versus Aristotle
Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics IV.5, praises the person who gets angry at the right things, with the right people, to the right degree, at the right time. Not to be angry when you should be is a kind of slavishness. Seneca's On…
Started by Elif Yıldız3 replies -
The translation movement: what was gained and lost between Greek, Syriac and Arabic?
Between the eighth and tenth centuries, a huge body of Greek philosophy, medicine and science was translated into Arabic, mostly in Baghdad. Many of the translators were Syriac-speaking Christians, and texts often passed through Syriac on the way. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808/809–873)…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
What does Merleau-Ponty mean by the “lived body”?
I am reading Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French and I keep circling the expression le corps propre, usually translated "one's own body" or "the lived body". I understand that he discusses the phantom limb and a patient called Schneider at…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies -
Reading group: Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
A short essay, easily read in two sittings. Seneca addresses it to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. His thesis is that life is not short; we make it short by wasting it. He describes the occupati, the busy…
Started by Elin Hedqvist3 replies -
The Gita’s karma yoga: acting without attachment to results
The Bhagavad Gītā's teaching on karma yoga, especially in chapters 2 and 3, says roughly: you have a right to your action, but never to its fruits; don't let the fruits be your motive, and don't be attached to inaction either. Gandhi…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Split-brain cases and the unity of consciousness
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to treat severe epilepsy. In experiments where information was shown to only one hemisphere, the patients sometimes acted as if there were two separate streams of…
Started by Priya Raghavan3 replies -
Does a constitution need a shared conception of the good?
Rawls, in Political Liberalism (1993), argued that a just constitution should not be based on any single comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Citizens can support it from within their own views through an "overlapping consensus". Pakistan's constitutional history begins from a different…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Is evolution compatible with objective morality?
Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871) that our moral sense evolved from social instincts. Sharon Street, in "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value" (2006), turned this into a challenge for moral realism: evolution shaped our moral judgments to…
Started by Emeka Anyaoha3 replies -
Rumi and Spinoza: are they describing the same God?
People sometimes say Rumi and Spinoza are describing the same reality. Everything in God, God in everything, the self dissolving into a larger whole. But Rumi's God is a beloved who longs for us and whom we long for, the reed flute…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies -
Łukasiewicz, the sea battle, and why three-valued logic was born in Lwów
In De Interpretatione 9 Aristotle considers the sentence "there will be a sea battle tomorrow". If it is already true today, isn't the battle already necessary? And if so, isn't deliberation pointless? Around 1920 Jan Łukasiewicz, working in the Lwów–Warsaw school founded…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak3 replies -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on testimony and records, and it is always vulnerable to being…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies