Should England apologize to Alan Turing?

So this story has been circulating for the past few days now: Now Turing enthusiasts, led by John Graham-Cumming, are petitioning the government to make a formal apology for the treatment of Alan Turing. They say this would give a national recognition to the Turing’s remarkable contributions and would acknowledge the tragic consequences of a [...]

Sliding from possible worlds semantics to truth

Relativism and strong forms of contextualism assert, from what I gather, that the content of a proposition is not true or false simpliciter, but rather true or false at a time/world/context. A motivation for accepting semantic relativism is the success of possible worlds semantics. It becomes easy to make the move from thinking about possible [...]

Entailment and Inference

I’ve been doing a little thinking about the differences between implications/entailments and inferences, or rather the rules or activity of inferring. The former is a relation between things like premises and conclusions and beliefs. Sentences can be in an entailment-relationship. Inferring seems to be an art form, even in deductive arguments. ‘Drawing an inference’ is [...]

Is male-ness a physical property?

Recall my previous discussion of Descartes’ possible version of the replacement argument. Let’s take this premise: The mind and body do not have the same essential properties. And modify it slightly to a specific property (if existence is a property at all, which we will just suppose): Possibly, I exist and my body does not. [...]

Daily Analysis: Rigid Designator

Kripke’s term for an expression that has the same referent in every possibly world. This includes proper names and natural-kinds. Example: “The 44th president of the United States” designates Barack Obama in the actual world, but it does not rigidly designate him because in some possible world John McCain is the 44th President of the [...]

Daily Analysis: Trope

Trope: An unrepeatable, simple property that stands in contrast with a ‘universal’. Tropes do not exemplify universals like particulars which are complex events, but belong to the subject alone. An example would be the basketball skills of Michael Jordan or Beethoven’s musical talent. It should not be confused with the linguistic speech act that carries [...]

Plantinga’s Replacement Argument

*Just a friendly warning* I’m going to take a few days (or so) looking at Plantinga’s replacement argument along with related issues (Kripke, van Inwangen). I’ll have something by tomorrow afternoon. Carry on.

Daily Analysis: Modus Tollens

Modus Tollens: If P, then Q. ¬Q Therefore, ¬P. Literally, ‘the denying mode’. A method of inference in propositional logic. May also be termed ‘denying the consequent’. If Socrates is a God, then he is immortal. Socrates is not immortal. .: Socrates is not a God. In the above sentence- If Socrates is a God, [...]

Daily Analysis: Falsification

Falsification: Karl Popper’s theorized property that demarcates a scientific theory from a non-scientific theory. A scientific theory is open to empirical falsification via Modus Tollens.

Daily Analysis: Supervenience

Weak Supervenience: A weakly supervenes on B if and only if necessarily (for any property F in A, if an object x has F, then there exists a property G in B such that x has G), and if any y has G it has F. Strong Supervenience: A strongly supervenes on B just in [...]