How can we tell that something is likely true? How we know stuff A proposition is a type of statement that can be true or false. Not all sentences are propositions. For example, “Some parrots have green feathers” is a proposition, while “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is not a proposition. There are essentially three…
Tag: logic
What the sunk cost fallacy isn’t
I’ve invested too much to back out now. Is this thought a mistake, or not? Costs Every action incurs a cost. The cost is whatever you lose by taking the action. In some cases a cost can be recovered, and in other cases a cost is unrecoverable or sunk. In economics it’s said that there’s…
The definition of insanity
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This well-circulated quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein. I find it somewhat strange in that that is clearly not “the definition of insanity”. Insanity has multiple definitions. “Sane” and “insane” come from the Latin word for health. In…
Possibility, necessity, and imagination
In philosophy, specifically in metaphysics, we often speak of what is “possible” or “contingent” and what is “necessary”. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot possibly to be false. An example of necessary truth might be mathematical theorems. If something is contingent, then it’s true but possibly could have been false. We often talk…
Failure to understand the null hypothesis
This is an issue I see a lot in apologetics and in arguments about theism vs. atheism. Certain theists (who I will just refer to as “theists,” even though I’m not referring to all theists) want to be able to put forward the existence of god as a hypothesis that can be argued for or…
Equality, equity, equivalence, identity, indistinguishability, isomorphism, resemblance, congruence, and similarity
While the title of this post might as well be a thesaurus entry, my purpose here is to investigate the differences between these concepts and how they operate in different contexts. Mathematical equality The reader is almost certainly very familiar with the equals sign or = used in math. Many of us first encounter it…
thoughts on mind 