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Truth Vagueness And Paradox
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Book Synopsis Truth, Vagueness, and Paradox by : Vann McGee
Download or read book Truth, Vagueness, and Paradox written by Vann McGee and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 1988 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Book Synopsis Saving Truth From Paradox by : Hartry Field
Download or read book Saving Truth From Paradox written by Hartry Field and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saving Truth from Paradox is an ambitious investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the Gödel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches. Part One examines Tarski's, Kripke’s, and Lukasiewicz’s theories of truth, and discusses validity and soundness, and vagueness. Part Two considers a wide range of attempts to resolve the paradoxes within classical logic. In Part Three Field turns to non-classical theories of truth that that restrict excluded middle. He shows that there are theories of this sort in which the conditionals obey many of the classical laws, and that all the semantic paradoxes (not just the simplest ones) can be handled consistently with the naive theory of truth. In Part Four, these theories are extended to the property-theoretic paradoxes and to various other paradoxes, and some issues about the understanding of the notion of validity are addressed. Extended paradoxes, involving the notion of determinate truth, are treated very thoroughly, and a number of different arguments that the theories lead to "revenge problems" are addressed. Finally, Part Five deals with dialetheic approaches to the paradoxes: approaches which, instead of restricting excluded middle, accept certain contradictions but alter classical logic so as to keep them confined to a relatively remote part of the language. Advocates of dialetheic theories have argued them to be better than theories that restrict excluded middle, for instance over issues related to the incompleteness theorems and in avoiding revenge problems. Field argues that dialetheists’ claims on behalf of their theories are quite unfounded, and indeed that on some of these issues all current versions of dialetheism do substantially worse than the best theories that restrict excluded middle.
Book Synopsis Vagueness and Degrees of Truth by : Nicholas J. J. Smith
Download or read book Vagueness and Degrees of Truth written by Nicholas J. J. Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.
Download or read book Truth and Paradox written by Tim Maudlin and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2004-05-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truth and Paradox offers a comprehensive account of truth values and the norms governing claims about truth, based on a new approach to logic and semantics. Since the seminal work of Tarski in the mid-twentieth century, the Liar paradox and other related paradoxes have stood in the way of a precise philosophical account of truth. Tim Maudlin draws on analogies from mathematical physics to explicate the origin of classical truth-value gaps, and to provide an account of truth that avoids any hierarchy of languages or of truth predicates. He also closely investigates our reasoning about truth, including apparently unobjectionable reasoning about the paradoxical sentences. The fallacies in that reasoning are located not in any inferences concerning truth, but in the foundations of standard logic. Blocking the paradoxical arguments requires emendation of classical logic, and the requisite emendations call into question the existence of any a priori logical truths. Maudlin also includes a discussion of facts and factuality, most particularly the question of whether there are any facts about truth. All philosophers interested in logic and language will find this a stimulating read.
Download or read book Vagueness written by L. Burns and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is in two parts. It began as a general investigation of vagueness in natural languages. The Sorites Paradox came to dominate the work however, and the second part of the book consists in an discussion ofthat puzzle and related problems. The first part contains a general discussion ofthe nature ofvagueness and its sources. I discuss various conceptions of vagueness in chapter 1 and outline some of the problems to do with the conception of vagueness as a linguistic phenomenon. The most interesting of these is the Sorites paradox, which occurs where natural languages exhibit a particular variety of borderline case vagueness. I discuss some sources of vagueness of the borderline case variety, and views of the relation between linguistic behaviour and languages which are vague in this sense. I argue in chapter 2 that these problems are not to be easily avoided by statistical averaging techniques or attempts to provide a mathematical model of consensus in linguistic usage. I also consider in chapter 3 various approaches to the problem of providing an adequate logic and semantics for vague natural languages, and argue against two currently popular approaches to vagueness. These are supervaluation accounts which attempt to provide precise semantic models for vague languages based on the notion of specification spaces, and attempts to replace the laws ofclassical logic with systems offuzzy logic.
Download or read book Spandrels of Truth written by Jc Beall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-09 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jc Beall presents a new theory of 'transparent' truth. A prominent philosophical view of truth is as an entirely see-through device introduced for only practical (expressive) reasons. Beall's modest dialetheic theory shows how the notorious paradoxes associated with transparency can be dealt with.
Download or read book Truth and Paradox written by Tim Maudlin and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004-05-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consider the sentence 'This sentence is not true'. Certain notorious paradoxes like this have bedevilled philosophical theories of truth. Tim Maudlin presents an original account of logic and semantics which deals with these paradoxes, and allows him to set out a new theory of truth-values and the norms governing claims about truth.
Book Synopsis Saving Truth from Paradox by : Hartry H. Field
Download or read book Saving Truth from Paradox written by Hartry H. Field and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness the nature of validity, and the Gödel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches.
Download or read book Paradoxes written by R. M. Sainsbury and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradox can be defined as an unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises. Many paradoxes raise serious philosophical problems, and they are associated with crises of thought and revolutionary advances. The expanded and revised third edition of this intriguing book considers a range of knotty paradoxes including Zeno's paradoxical claim that the runner can never overtake the tortoise, a new chapter on paradoxes about morals, paradoxes about belief, and hardest of all, paradoxes about truth. The discussion uses a minimum of technicality but also grapples with complicated and difficult considerations, and is accompanied by helpful questions designed to engage the reader with the arguments. The result is not only an explanation of paradoxes but also an excellent introduction to philosophical thinking.
Download or read book The Sorites Paradox written by Sergi Oms and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a systematic introduction and discussion of all the main solutions to the sorites paradox and its areas of influence.
Download or read book Cuts and Clouds written by Richard Dietz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is a deeply puzzling aspect of the relation between language and the world. Is it a feature of the way we represent reality in language, or a feature of reality itself? How can we reason with vague concepts? Cuts and Clouds presents the latest work towards an understanding of these puzzles about the nature and logic of vagueness.
Book Synopsis Understanding Truth by : Scott Soames
Download or read book Understanding Truth written by Scott Soames and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this text explores the notion of truth and its role in our ordinary thought, as well as in logical, philosophical and scientific theories.
Book Synopsis Vagueness and Contradiction by : Roy Sorensen
Download or read book Vagueness and Contradiction written by Roy Sorensen and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2001-09-27 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? Epistemicists answer 'Yes!' They believe that any predicate that divides things divides them sharply. They solve the ancient sorites paradox by picturing vagueness as a kind of ignorance. The alternative solutions are radical. They either reject classical theorems or inference rules or reject our common sense view of what can exist. Epistemicists spare this central portion of our web of belief by challenging peripheral intuitions about the nature of language. So why is this continuation of the status quo so incredible? Why do epistemicists themselves have trouble believing their theory? In Vagueness and Contradiction Roy Sorensen traces our incredulity to linguistic norms that build upon our psychological tendencies to round off insignificant differences. These simplifying principles lead to massive inconsistency, rather like the rounding off errors of calculators with limited memory. English entitles speakers to believe each 'tolerance conditional' such as those of the form 'If n is small, then n + 1 is small.' The conjunction of these a priori beliefs entails absurd conditionals such as 'If 1 is small, then a billion is small.' Since the negation of this absurdity is an a priori truth, our a priori beliefs about small numbers are jointly inconsistent. One of the tolerance conditionals, at the threshold of smallness, must be an analytic falsehood that we are compelled to regard as a tautology. Since there are infinitely many analytic sorites arguments, Sorensen concludes that we are obliged to believe infinitely many contradictions. These contradictions are not specifically detectable. They are ineliminable, like the heat from a light bulb. Although the light bulb is not designed to produce heat, the heat is inevitably produced as a side-effect of illumination. Vagueness can be avoided by representational systems that make no concession to limits of perception, or memory, or testimony. But quick and rugged representational systems, such as natural languages, will trade 'rationality' for speed and flexibility. Roy Sorensen defends epistemicism in his own distinctive style, inventive and amusing. But he has some serious things to say about language and logic, about the way the world is and about our understanding of it.
Book Synopsis Vagueness: A Guide by : Giuseppina Ronzitti
Download or read book Vagueness: A Guide written by Giuseppina Ronzitti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how vagueness matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else. After an introductory chapter on the Sorites paradox, which exposes the various forms the paradox can take and some of the responses that have been pursued, the book proceeds with a chapter on vagueness and metaphysics, which covers important questions concerning vagueness that arise in connection with the deployment of certain key metaphysical notions. Subsequent chapters address the following: vagueness and logic, which discusses the sort of model theory that is suggested by the main, rival accounts of vagueness; vagueness and meaning, which focuses on contextualist, epistemicist, and indeterminist theories; vagueness and observationality; vagueness within linguistics, which focuses on approaches that take comparison classes into account; and the idea that vagueness in law is typically extravagant and that extravagant vagueness is a necessary feature of legal systems.
Download or read book Vagueness written by Kit Fine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vagueness is a subject of long-standing interest in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. Numerous accounts of vagueness have been proposed in the literature but there has been no general consensus on which, if any, should be be accepted. Kit Fine here presents a new theory of vagueness based on the radical hypothesis that vagueness is a "global" rather than a "local" phenomenon. In other words, according to Fine, the vagueness of an object or expression cannot properly be considered except in its relation to other objects or other expressions. He then applies the theory to a variety of topics in logic, metaphysics and epistemology, including the sorites paradox, the problem of personal identity, and the transparency of mental phenomenon. This is the inaugural volume in the Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy series, presenting lectures from the most important contemporary thinkers in the discipline.
Book Synopsis Vagueness and Degrees of Truth by : Nicholas J. J. Smith
Download or read book Vagueness and Degrees of Truth written by Nicholas J. J. Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.
Book Synopsis Universality and the Liar by : Keith Simmons
Download or read book Universality and the Liar written by Keith Simmons and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about one of the most baffling of all paradoxes--the famous Liar paradox. Suppose we say: "We are lying now." Then if we are lying, we are telling the truth; and if we are telling the truth we are lying. This paradox is more than an intriguing puzzle, since it involves the concept of truth. Thus any coherent theory of truth must deal with the Liar. Keith Simmons discusses the solutions proposed by medieval philosophers and offers his own solutions and in the process assesses other contemporary attempts to solve the paradox. Unlike such attempts, Simmons' "singularity" solution does not abandon classical semantics and does not appeal to the kind of hierarchical view found in Barwise's and Etchemendy's The Liar. Moreover, Simmons' solution resolves the vexing problem of semantic universality--the problem of whether there are semantic concepts beyond the expressive reach of a natural language such as English.
