This post is part of a series beginning with The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay about the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement. As a reminder, they don’t usually call themselves sovereign citizens, but I will use that label because it is the one generally accepted among outsiders like myself. In the previous post in this…
Tag: definitions
What does “include” mean? (2nd in a series on sovereign citizens)
They say nothing is certain but death and taxes, but some people think they can avoid at least one of these. This post is about the people who call themselves sovereignty advocates, state nationals, private men and women, etc., and whom others may call sovereign citizens, tax protestors, tax scammers, etc. In my post The…
The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay
So-called “sovereign citizens” make up a collection of people with vaguely similar beliefs about government and the law. I say so-called not to deride people for calling themselves that, but rather because they often do not call themselves that. Instead, it has become a label that people in the mainstream use to describe individuals with…
Cluster definitions as an explanation for vague concepts
Vague concepts are fuzzy. They lack strict definitions and contain edge cases. One classical example is baldness: we would call a person bald even if they have three hairs on their head, so exactly how many hairs could someone have and still be bald? Another example is a heap of sand: a single grain of…
Words don’t have meanings
There is an argument I have heard. It goes like this: “Words have meanings.” The implication is that one cannot just use words to mean whatever they want, the words have defined meanings and these definitions are the only things those words can mean. I have seen this argument used a variety of contexts, from…
Thinking about infinit(ies): The math tea argument
Are there undefinable numbers? Numbers that exist, but that we can’t identify or talk about? According to one argument, there must be such numbers, since there must be more numbers than definitions. Preliminaries First, some background about infinity. We’ll start by talking about the foundations of math using set theory. A set is an unordered…
thoughts on mind 