Those of you who are interested in following up on this month’s episode with van Benthem should check out his recent book on the topic, Logical Dynamics of Information and Interaction (2011). It’s a thrilling read! There is also his earlier book on the topic, Exploring Logical Dynamics (1996). Matt Teichman ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: In this episode, we talk to Johan van Benthem, University Professor of pure and applied logic at the University of Amsterdam and Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of philosophy at Stanford University. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Logic is traditionally assumed to have deductive reasoning as its subject matter. A valid deductive argument is one in which it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. For instance, if it’s true that I’m a German composer, then it absolutely must be the case that I am a composer. I couldn’t not be one! The conclusion of the argument is just inevitable. Over the past century, philosophical and mathematical logicians have developed a wide array of formal techniques to study arguments of this sort. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month we’re joined by Nicholas Asher, research director at the CNRS and the IRIT in Toulouse, and former longtime Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Remember Spanish class? You had to learn all those rules about where to put the verb, where to put the subject, which nouns have which genders, which prepositions to use when, etc. What a pain. Now try to imagine what it would be like to try to explain all of the rules of English to someone from a different country. It’s actually pretty difficult. If you did try to do this, you’d find that you were following all kinds of subtle grammatical conventions without even realizing it. You’d be pronouncing everything a certain way without realizing it. Although the rules we follow when we speak English are incredibly complicated, we native speakers do it effortlessly, as if by reflex. And that’s part of the difficulty: our knowledge of how to speak English is tacit. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month we talk to Christopher Frey, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation. Aristotle thought that after you chop off a person’s hand, it ceases to be a hand in the original sense of the term. Sure, we _ call _ it a hand. But it just isn’t a hand in the same sense. It can’t pick up a glass of orange juice, twist doorknobs, or make obscene gestures. It can’t do any of the things that real hands do; and if you can’t do any of the things that real hands do, you don’t get to count as a hand. This is because being a hand–according to Aristotle–isn’t just a matter of having a certain shape, weighing a certain amount, or being located near an arm. Being a hand is really about serving a certain purpose in a person’s life: namely, that of allowing her to grasp objects, use tools, build things, and so on. ...
If you’re curious to learn more about what Catarina Dutilh Novaes called conjunctive pluralism (as opposed to disjunctive pluralism), take a look at some of her blog posts from NewAPPS: Methodological Pluralism in Philosophy Intuition-based Philosophical Methodology and Belief Empirically-informed Philosophy of Logic Feynman on Precise Definitions and Philosophical Methodology On the Origins of Analytic Philosophy Instrumentalist and Intrinsic Value Defenses of History of Philosophy History of Philosophy as Antidote to Philosophical Intuitions ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: In this episode, Matt continues his European adventure by sitting down with Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Assistant Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. Click here to listen to their conversation. Philosophers want to answer big, sexy questions like how one should live or what knowledge is. How should one go about answering questions like that? Random guessing is definitely out. That’s because philosophical insight is supposed to be the result of some kind of rigorous investigation. But what is that kind of investigation supposed to look like? This is a question about philosophical methodology, and an extremely important one. After all, if we don’t know what methods we can use to gain philosophical insight, it’s hard to know whether we’re on the right track when we try to answer those big, sexy questions. ...
If you’re interested in learning about how the ancient Stoic philosopher Chrysippus tried to deal with the sorites paradox, give episode 61 of the amazing History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast a listen. Matt Teichman ...
For an excellent introduction to the issues we discussed in Episode 36, you can read: Robert van Rooij, ‘Vagueness and Linguistics’ If you’re curious to see the details of van Rooij’s solution to the sorites paradox, including the distinction between strict truth and tolerant truth, take a look at the following: Robert van Rooij, ‘Tolerant, Classical, Strict’ Matt Teichman ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: This month we’re joined by Robert van Rooij, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, at the University of Amsterdam. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. As it happens, nearly everything we say is imprecise. For example, when I indicate where I want you to stand while posing for a photo, I don’t give exact coordinates; I just point with my finger. When I tell you my friend Janine is really tall, I don’t specify her height right down to the last millimeter. Would six feet count as tall? Probably. How about 5'11"? Or 5'10"? 5'9"? The closer we get to the middle of the boundary between people who are tall and people who aren’t, the more of a challenge it is to say, because the boundary is blurry. And when I tell you that my sixth grade music teacher was bald, it isn’t clear exactly how much hair I’m saying he had. Maybe he had absolutely no hair, or maybe he had a little bit. In any event, he didn’t have much. But how much does it take to be ‘much’? What are we to make of the fact that we can’t give an exact answer to that question? ...
For those of you who’d like to read more about the issues we discussed with Martha Nussbaum in Episode 35, we recommend you check out her recent book, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Belknap Press, 2011). The book provides a wonderful and concise presentation of the capabilities approach to human development, and contains an excellent bibliography. Matt Teichman ...