Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts

Thursday, February 27, 2014

"The basic cause is mental"

The neglect of relevant distinctions, when these are important for clear thinking or adequate statement, is ambiguity.

R.W. Sellars, The Essentials of Logic (The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1917)
And what causes ambiguity? "The basic cause is mental" whatever that means. 
Only he who is willing o take the trouble to distinguish things and ideas which are ordinarily grouped roughly together, can escape the pitfall of ambiguity.
 Don't say I didn't warn you!

(How sad is it that I already have a tag, "logic?")

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Knave or Knight?

A little puzzle for you before the evening begins (with help from several crappy old books and that infallible source, Wikipedia, which I draw on below).

You are stranded on an island whose residents are either Knaves or Knights. All Knaves are Liars. All Knights are Truth-tellers. You wander the island looking for Freedom, knowing full well Death is a possibility.

You come to a fork in the road. One path ahead leads to Freedom, the other to Death. Each of the two paths is guarded, one by Robert, one by Paul. You know that one of the two is a Knave, the other a Knight. But you do not know who is which. By asking one yes/no question, can you determine the road to Freedom?

The answer is, "Yes, you can." And now the question becomes, "What is that one question?" [Hint: There are two possible questions.]

Think about it and after you've scratched your head, continue reading.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Recipe: Oven Fried Chicken I

Really really good
Mr. Big Food reports that, in addition to this recipe (below), he now has recipes for Oven Fried Chicken II, III, IV, and V. As he culls crappy old cookbooks for recipes worthy of inclusion in his Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide, he often finds recipes with the same name, but which are not the same. To get a Super Bowl Roman Numeral designation, a recipe must 1) be titled exactly the same as at least one other in Big Food; 2) have at least two ingredients different from the first or others of the same name; or 3) have at least two different preparation (including cooking) methods. "Or" in this context is not a simple word.

Necessary, sufficient or both? Mr. Big Food says both. A recipe-- worthy of inclusion-- gets a new Roman numeral iff (if and only if) ... at least ...  .  The recipe has to be different in at least two fundamentally different ways. It's fun to flesh out exactly what necessary and sufficient means, especially in the context of delicious Oven Fried Chicken. Very logical.

Recipe below

Friday, January 6, 2012

Hold on to your hats!

Mr. Big Food will be thinking more logically than usual for the next few months. Prepare yourselves. 

"Opinions!?! I don't want opinions. I want justified assertions," is what he said in response to a promo for ESPN2765's half-time coverage of the AT&T Cotton Bowl that he tells me isn't being played in the Cotton Bowl. 

Logically, I have been suspecting I will learn something in the next few months. As it turns out Daughter C. suspects the same!

[Let's diagram that paragraph!]

Let us begin with a logical discussion of tonight's entry into the Fall/Winter Soup Contest.

Link is coming! DONE!