6 ideas
| 6007 | If you know your father, but don't recognise your father veiled, you know and don't know the same person [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
| Full Idea: The 'undetected' or 'veiled' paradox of Eubulides says: if you know your father, and don't know the veiled person before you, but that person is your father, you both know and don't know the same person. | |
| From: report of Eubulides (fragments/reports [c.390 BCE]) by R.M. Dancy - Megarian School | |
| A reaction: Essentially an uninteresting equivocation on two senses of "know", but this paradox comes into its own when we try to give an account of how linguistic reference works. Frege's distinction of sense and reference tried to sort it out (Idea 4976). |
| 6006 | If you say truly that you are lying, you are lying [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
| Full Idea: The liar paradox of Eubulides says 'if you state that you are lying, and state the truth, then you are lying'. | |
| From: report of Eubulides (fragments/reports [c.390 BCE]) by R.M. Dancy - Megarian School | |
| A reaction: (also Cic. Acad. 2.95) Don't say it, then. These kind of paradoxes of self-reference eventually lead to Russell's 'barber' paradox and his Theory of Types. |
| 6008 | Removing one grain doesn't destroy a heap, so a heap can't be destroyed [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
| Full Idea: The 'sorites' paradox of Eubulides says: if you take one grain of sand from a heap (soros), what is left is still a heap; so no matter how many grains of sand you take one by one, the result is always a heap. | |
| From: report of Eubulides (fragments/reports [c.390 BCE]) by R.M. Dancy - Megarian School | |
| A reaction: (also Cic. Acad. 2.49) This is a very nice paradox, which goes to the heart of our bewilderment when we try to fully understand reality. It homes in on problems of identity, as best exemplified in the Ship of Theseus (Ideas 1212 + 1213). |
| 22137 | Observation can force rejection of some part of the initial set of claims [Duhem, by Boulter] |
| Full Idea: Logic and observation alone do not force a scientist to reject a scientific claim if experimental observations so not turn out as expected. The scientist must reject something of the initial set of claims, but that is a matter of choice. | |
| From: report of Pierre Duhem (The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory [1906]) by Stephen Boulter - Why Medieval Philosophy Matters 2 | |
| A reaction: This is a key point against any simplified Popperian notion of falsification. Tiny observations can't kill huge well supported theories. |
| 18197 | Experiments only test groups of hypotheses, and can't show which one is wrong [Duhem] |
| Full Idea: The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses; when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions ...it does not designate which one should be changed. | |
| From: Pierre Duhem (The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory [1906], p.187), quoted by Penelope Maddy - Naturalism in Mathematics II.2 | |
| A reaction: This is the idea frequently invoked by Quine, in support of his holistic view of scientific knowledge (along with Neurath's Boat). |
| 5210 | We could know what a lion thinks by mapping both its brain patterns and its experiences [Douglas,A] |
| Full Idea: In principle, it seems possible to monitor both the brain activity and the external experiences of a lion cub from birth, and by extensive mapping of one against the other to work out fairly accurately what a lion is thinking. | |
| From: Andy Douglas (talk [2003]) | |
| A reaction: This has limitations (e.g. we could monitor the external events, but not the way the lion experiences them), but it seems to me to offer a real theoretical possibility of breaching the mental privacy of an inarticulate creature. |