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If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is.
History taking and examination skills are vitally important in
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When did Rembrandt get old? If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap when is it no longer a heap? These questions and the many others like them will eventually lead us to the problem of vagueness. Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches, such as fuzzy logic. He shows the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague languages and defends the controversial realist view that vagueness is a kind of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we cannot know which one it is. eBook available with sample pages: 020301426X
What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does
philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or
doing something completely different, or neither? Timothy
Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy
in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in
common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to
dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability
to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends
on the development of philosophical theories, and how those
theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and
compared against each other by standards similar to those used in
the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour
can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of
philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to
provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and
failures, Williams overturns widely held dogmas about the
distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences,
demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the
discipline. From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories,
this Very Short Introduction will cause you to totally rethink what
philosophy is. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions
series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in
almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect
way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors
combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to
make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. Previously
published in hardback as Doing Philosophy
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Vagueness (Hardcover, New Ed)
Delia Graff, Timothy Williamson
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R5,928
R2,127
Discovery Miles 21 270
Save R3,801 (64%)
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Vagueness, volume XX, contains twenty-seven essays, with issues
covered including: nihilism, phenomenal sorites, degrees of truth,
epistemicism, higher-order vagueness, contextualism, and
intuitionism. Written by leading contemporary philosophers, these
essays will be of interest to researchers in philosophy of
language, philosophical logic, metaphysics and epistemology; as
well as those in natural language semantics, artificial
intelligence and cognitive science more generally. A substantial
introduction written by the editors provides a guide to the topic
and to the essays in the volume.
What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does
philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or
doing something completely different, or neither? Timothy
Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy
in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in
common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to
dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability
to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends
on the development of philosophical theories, and how those
theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and
compared against each other by standards similar to those used in
the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour
can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of
philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to
provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and
failures, Williamson overturns widely held dogmas about the
distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences,
demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the
discipline. From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories,
this little book will cause you to totally rethink what philosophy
is.
Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental state. Williamson casts light on many philosophical problems: scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The result is a new way of doing epistemology, and a notable contribution also to the philosophy of mind.
Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on
a train and start talking about what they believe. Their
conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal
confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right,
but then doubts creep in. In a tradition going back to Plato,
Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore
questions about truth and falsity, and knowledge and belief. Is
truth always relative to a point of view? Is every opinion
fallible? Such ideas have been used to combat dogmatism and
intolerance, but are they compatible with taking each opposing
point of view seriously? This book presupposes no prior
acquaintance with philosophy, and introduces its concerns in an
accessible and light-hearted way. Is one point of view really right
and the other really wrong? That is for the reader to decide.
Are there such things as merely possible people, who would have
lived if our ancestors had acted differently? Are there future
people, who have not yet been conceived? Questions like those raise
deep issues about both the nature of being and its logical
relations with contingency and change. In Modal Logic as
Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson argues for positive answers to
those questions on the basis of an integrated approach to the
issues, applying the technical resources of modal logic to provide
structural cores for metaphysical theories. He rejects the search
for a metaphysically neutral logic as futile. The book contains
detailed historical discussion of how the metaphysical issues
emerged in the twentieth century development of quantified modal
logic, through the work of such figures as Rudolf Carnap, Ruth
Barcan Marcus, Arthur Prior, and Saul Kripke. It proposes
higher-order modal logic as a new setting in which to resolve such
metaphysical questions scientifically, by the construction of
systematic logical theories embodying rival answers and their
comparison by normal scientific standards. Williamson provides both
a rigorous introduction to the technical background needed to
understand metaphysical questions in quantified modal logic and an
extended argument for controversial, provocative answers to them.
He gives original, precise treatments of topics including the
relation between logic and metaphysics, the methodology of theory
choice in philosophy, the nature of possible worlds and their role
in semantics, plural quantification compared to quantification into
predicate position, communication across metaphysical disagreement,
and problems for truthmaker theory.
La philosophie de la connaissance - l'enquete classique qui
consiste a chercher a definir la notion de connaissance et a
etablir ses sources et ses limites - connait, depuis une trentaine
d'annees, un essor important, principalement dans la tradition
anglophone de philosophie analytique. En reprenant l'entreprise du
Theetete, et en reponse au defi du sceptique cartesien, les
philosophes contemporains ont formule des theories rivales de la
connaissance, tantot internalistes, tantot externalistes, alors que
les tentatives de reponse au trilemme d'Agrippa ont donne naissance
au debat entre les theories fondationnalistes et coherentistes de
la justification des croyances. Des formes renouvelees de
scepticisme ont vu le jour, en meme temps que des reponses fondees
sur le sens commun, dans la tradition de Reid et de Moore. A
travers la subtilite des arguments, l'inventivite des exemples et
la complexite des definitions qui les distinguent, ces theories
renouvellent radicalement les interrogations classiques et en
eclairent les presupposes. Ce recueil a ete concu pour permettre
l'acces du lecteur francais a un ensemble de textes contemporains
representatifs de ce domaine.
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