Vagueness

By Tye, Michael

It seems obvious that there are vague ways of speaking and vague ways of thinking – saying that the weather is hot, for example. Common sense also has ...

Vagueness

By Mahtani, Anna

In ordinary conversation, we describe all sorts of different things as vague: you can have vague plans, vague ideas and vague aches and pains. In philosophy of language, ...

Metaethics

By Finlay, Stephen

A tripartite distinction is often drawn in moral philosophy between (i) applied ethics, (ii) normative ethical theory, and (iii) metaethics. Applied ethics seeks answers to moral questions about ...

Williamson, Timothy (1955–)

By Ball, Brian

Timothy Williamson is a British analytic philosopher, who has made major contributions in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and philosophical methodology. ...

Ambiguity

By Bach, Kent

A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. ...

Fuzzy logic

By Morgan, Charles G.

The term ‘fuzzy’ refers to concepts without precise borders. Membership in a ‘fuzzy’ set – the set of things to which a ‘fuzzy’ concept (fuzzily) applies – is ...

Incommensurability in ethics

By Carlson, Erik

In ethics and neighbouring subjects, incommensurability has been attributed to at least three different kinds of entities, namely moral theories or traditions, abstract values, and particular bearers of ...

Metaphysics of composition

By Brenner, Andrew

Composition occurs when one or more objects are parts of another object. The metaphysics of composition concerns the nature of composition – i.e. what it is, and how ...

Monism

By O’Conaill, Donnchadh

The basic idea of monism is that reality is, fundamentally, one. This contrasts with any view on which reality is, fundamentally, many, or with any view on which ...

Chaos theory

By Kellert, Stephen H.

Chaos theory is the name given to the scientific investigation of mathematically simple systems that exhibit complex and unpredictable behaviour. Since the 1970s these systems have been used ...

Logic in the second half of the twentieth century

By Cook, Roy T.; Logan, Shay Allen

By the end of the first half of the twentieth century, logic had become a mature philosophical and mathematical discipline. As happens in mature disciplines, in the second ...

Church’s thesis

By Shapiro, Stewart

An algorithm or mechanical procedure A is said to ‘compute’ a function f if, for any n in the domain of f, when given n as input, A ...

Many-valued logics

By Morgan, Charles G.

Many-valued logics may be distinguished from classical logic on purely semantic grounds. One of the simplifying assumptions on which classical logic is based is the thesis of bivalence, ...

Concepts

By Rey, Georges

The topic of concepts lies at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of mind. A concept is supposed to be a constituent of a thought (or ‘proposition’) rather ...

Positivist thought in Latin America

By Martí, Oscar R.

Between 1850 and the 1920s European positivism became a major intellectual movement in Latin America. It asserted that all knowledge came from experience; that scientific thinking was the ...

Paradox, sorites

Determinism and indeterminism

Over the centuries, the doctrine of determinism has been understood, and assessed, in different ways. Since the seventeenth century, it has been commonly understood as the doctrine that ...

Henry of Ghent (early 13th century–1293)

By Marrone, Steven P.

Perhaps the most influential theologian between Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in the third quarter of the thirteenth century and John Duns Scotus at the beginning of the fourteenth ...

Logic, ancient

By Thom, Paul

Western antiquity produced two great bodies of logical theory – those of Aristotle and the Stoics. Both aim to explain what distinguishes good arguments from bad. Both see ...

Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)

By Gopnik, Alison

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the founder of the field we now call cognitive development. His own term for the discipline was ‘genetic epistemology’, reflecting his deep ...

Legal evidence and inference

By Schum, David A.

In the field of law there is a rich legacy of scholarship and experience regarding the properties, uses and discovery of evidence in inferential reasoning tasks. Over the ...

Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)

By Milton, J.R.

Along with Descartes, Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little respect for the work ...

Behaviourism, analytic

By Braddon-Mitchell, David

Analytical behaviourism is the doctrine that talk about mental phenomena is really talk about behaviour, or tendencies to behave. For an analytical behaviourist, to say that Janet desires ...

Brazil, philosophy in

By Sturm, Fred Gillette

It is possible to distinguish between European philosophy in Brazil and Brazilian philosophy. The former refers to Brazilians who participate in discussions of issues occurring in the European ...

Liberation philosophy

By Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio

Philosophy of liberation emerged in Argentina early in the 1970s with the explicit intention of proposing a liberating alternative to the diagnosis of structural dependence offered by the ...