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Crocodile Dilemma
The crocodile paradox, also known as crocodile sophism, is a paradox in logic in the same family of paradoxes as the liar paradox. The premise states that a crocodile, who has stolen a child, promises the parent that their child will be returned if and only if they correctly predict what the crocodile will do next. The transaction is logically smooth but unpredictable if the parent guesses that the child will be returned, but a dilemma arises for the crocodile if the parent guesses that the child will not be returned. In the case that the crocodile decides to keep the child, he violates his terms: the parent's prediction has been validated, and the child should be returned. However, in the case that the crocodile decides to give back the child, he still violates his terms, even if this decision is based on the previous result: the parent's prediction has been falsified, and the child should not be returned. The question of what the crocodile should do is therefore paradoxical, and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fargo (TV Series)
''Fargo'' is an American black comedy crime drama television series created and primarily written by Noah Hawley. The show is inspired by the 1996 film of the same name, which was written and directed by the Coen brothers, and takes place within the same fictional universe. The Coens were impressed by Hawley's script and agreed to be named as executive producers. The series premiered on April 15, 2014, on FX, and follows an anthology format, with each season set in a different era and location, with a different story and mostly new characters and cast, although there is minor overlap. Each season is heavily influenced by various Coen brothers films, with each containing numerous references to them. The first season, set primarily in Minnesota and North Dakota from January 2006 to February 2007 and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, and Martin Freeman, received wide acclaim from critics. It won the Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Miniseries, Outs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paradox
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites". In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises in a topic-neutral way. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Formal logic contrasts with informal logic, which is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. While there is no general agreement on how formal and informal logic are to be distinguished, one prominent approach associates their difference with whether the studied arguments are expressed in formal or informal languages. Logic plays a central role in multiple fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises together with a conclusion. Premises and conclusions are usually un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liar Paradox
In philosophy and logic, the classical liar paradox or liar's paradox or antinomy of the liar is the statement of a liar that they are lying: for instance, declaring that "I am lying". If the liar is indeed lying, then the liar is telling the truth, which means the liar just lied. In "this sentence is a lie" the paradox is strengthened in order to make it amenable to more rigorous logical analysis. It is still generally called the "liar paradox" although abstraction is made precisely from the liar making the statement. Trying to assign to this statement, the strengthened liar, a classical binary truth value leads to a contradiction. If "this sentence is false" is true, then it is false, but the sentence states that it is false, and if it is false, then it must be true, and so on. History The Epimenides paradox (circa 600 BC) has been suggested as an example of the liar paradox, but they are not logically equivalent. The semi-mythical seer Epimenides, a Cretan, reportedly stated t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
If And Only If
In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is biconditional (a statement of material equivalence), and can be likened to the standard material conditional ("only if", equal to "if ... then") combined with its reverse ("if"); hence the name. The result is that the truth of either one of the connected statements requires the truth of the other (i.e. either both statements are true, or both are false), though it is controversial whether the connective thus defined is properly rendered by the English "if and only if"—with its pre-existing meaning. For example, ''P if and only if Q'' means that ''P'' is true whenever ''Q'' is true, and the only case in which ''P'' is true is if ''Q'' is also true, whereas in the case of ''P if Q'', there could be other scenarios where ''P'' is true and ''Q'' is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metaknowledge
Meta-knowledge or metaknowledge is knowledge about knowledge. Some authors divide meta-knowledge into orders: * ''zero order meta-knowledge'' is knowledge whose domain is not knowledge (and hence zero order meta-knowledge is not meta-knowledge ''per se'') * ''first order meta-knowledge'' is knowledge whose domain is zero order meta-knowledge * ''second order meta-knowledge'' is knowledge whose domain is first order meta-knowledge * most generally, n + 1 order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is n order meta-knowledge. Note that other authors call zero order meta-knowledge ''first order knowledge'', and call first order meta-knowledge ''second order knowledge''; meta-knowledge is also known as higher order knowledge.Pedersen, Nikolaj Jl Linding, and Christoph Kelp. "Second-Order Knowledge." ''The Routledge Companion to Epistemology''. Routledge, 2010. 586-596. Meta-knowledge is a fundamental conceptual instrument in such research and scientific domains as, knowledge engineer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unexpected Hanging Paradox
The unexpected hanging paradox or surprise test paradox is a paradox about a person's expectations about the timing of a future event which they are told will occur at an unexpected time. The paradox is variously applied to a prisoner's hanging or a surprise school test. It was first introduced to the public in Martin Gardner's March 1963 Mathematical Games column in ''Scientific American'' magazine. There is no consensus on its precise nature and consequently a canonical resolution has not been agreed on. Logical analyses focus on "truth values", for example by identifying it as paradox of self-reference. Epistemological studies of the paradox instead focus on issues relating to ''knowledge''; for example, one interpretation reduces it to Moore's paradox. Some regard it as a "significant problem" for philosophy. Description The paradox has been described as follows: Other versions of the paradox replace the death sentence with a surprise fire drill, examination, pop quiz, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Montague
Richard Merritt Montague (September 20, 1930 – March 7, 1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory ( ZFC). For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40. Career At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned a BA in Philosophy in 1950, an MA in Mathematics in 1953, and a PhD in Philosophy in 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski. Montague spent his entire career teaching in the UCLA Department of Philosophy, where he supervised the dissertations of Nino Cocchiarella and Hans Kamp. Montague wrote on the foundations of logic and set theory, as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Paradoxes
This list includes well known paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article in this encyclopedia. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning ( falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term ''paradox'' is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result. However, some of these paradoxes qualify to fit into the mainstream perception of a paradox, which is a self-contradictory result gained even while properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. These paradoxes, often called ''antinomy,'' point out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. Logic * : The supposition that, 'if one of two simultaneous assumptions leads to a contradiction, the other assumption is also disproved' leads to paradoxical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philosophy, it also refers to the ability of a subject to speak of or refer to itself, that is, to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person nominative singular pronoun "I" in English. Self-reference is studied and has applications in mathematics, philosophy, computer programming, second-order cybernetics, and linguistics, as well as in humor. Self-referential statements are sometimes paradoxical, and can also be considered recursive. In logic, mathematics and computing In classical philosophy, paradoxes were created by self-referential concepts such as the omnipotence paradox of asking if it was possible for a being to exist so powerful that it could create a stone that it could not lift. The Epimenides paradox, 'All Cretans are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-referential Paradoxes
This list includes well known paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article in this encyclopedia. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning ( falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term ''paradox'' is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result. However, some of these paradoxes qualify to fit into the mainstream perception of a paradox, which is a self-contradictory result gained even while properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. These paradoxes, often called ''antinomy,'' point out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. Logic * : The supposition that, 'if one of two simultaneous assumptions leads to a contradiction, the other assumption is also disproved' leads to paradoxical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dilemmas
A dilemma ( grc-gre, δίλημμα "double proposition") is a problem offering two possibilities, neither of which is unambiguously acceptable or preferable. The possibilities are termed the ''horns'' of the dilemma, a clichéd usage, but distinguishing the dilemma from other kinds of predicament as a matter of usage. Terminology The term ''dilemma'' is attributed by Gabriel Nuchelmans to Lorenzo Valla in the 15th century, in later versions of his logic text traditionally called ''Dialectica''. Valla claimed that it was the appropriate Latin equivalent of the Greek ''dilemmaton''. Nuchelmans argued that his probable source was a logic text of c.1433 of George of Trebizond. He also concluded that Valla had reintroduced to the Latin West a type of argument that had fallen into disuse. Valla's neologism did not immediately take hold, preference being given to the established Latin term ''complexio'', used by Cicero, with ''conversio'' applied to the upsetting of dilemmatic reason ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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