I was pleasantly astonished to see Peter Norvig comment on my recent post about the Stanford online courses - with 160,000 students competing for his attention, that's dedication! I completely take his point that I'm only a small part of the intended audience, and what works best for me is probably not what works best for the students they really ( Read more... )

All the way back in 2006, I wrote about the problem of the philosopher's axe: if you replace the shaft, and then later you replace the head, is it still the same axe? So as you can imagine, I was delighted to discover the existence of the Helko modular axe system.


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Most people know the story of the three blind men and the elephant. There were three wise blind men (the story goes) who had never before encountered an elephant. One day, an elephant was brought before them, and they were asked to describe it. The first wise man felt the trunk, and said "Elephants are like snakes", the second felt a leg, and said ( Read more... )

• Mathematics is the study of statements which can be proved.
• Science is the study of statements which can't be proved, but can be falsified.
• The humanities are the study of statements which can neither be proved nor falsified, but whose credibility can be supported or undermined by advancing evidence.
• Philosophy is the study of statements which can ( Read more... )

OK, it looks like the gender theory quotation thread has reached the end of its life-cycle, so it's time to reveal the answer. Yes, that's right: I knew where the quotation came from all along, and was using it... not really to test you, but to test the author's assumptions. I'm sorry if any of you feel betrayed by this - if it helps, I think you ( Read more... )

Gender-theory kru, your attention please:

I came across the following recently, and wondered if any of you might have some idea of its source: Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely ( Read more... )

Here's something that's been bugging me for a while: why are computers useful?

A bit of an odd question, you might think, and I'm going to need to explain some background. First, you need to know that there are problems that computers can't solve, even in principle. A classic example is the halting problem: given a program and its input, can you ( Read more... )

I'd like to talk about a couple of simple thought experiments invented by the mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege, which for me really nail the relationship between mathematics and the physical world, and at the same time raise some fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics ( Read more... )

Closely related to the No True Scotsman fallacy is Sliding Definition Ploy1. It goes like this: "for the sake of argument", give a slightly-odd definition to some common term, like Mind, or Freedom, or Justice, or Beauty. Deduce some consequences from that definition (ideally, this stage should take a while, to overflow your audience's input ( Read more... )

Happy Easter, everybody! Today, I'm going to talk about two of my favourite logical fallacies. This post got a bit long, so I've split it into two: the second part, about Sliding Definition Ploy, is here.

My favourite, for the name if nothing else, is the No True Scotsman Fallacy1, which canonically goes like this:Hamish: No true Scotsman puts ( Read more... )