ellauri042.html on line 943: Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne´s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
ellauri096.html on line 106: Our suicide bomber may protest that the flies have been undercounted. Epistemic eliminativism dissolves all epistemic paradoxes. According to the eliminativist, epistemic paradoxes are symptoms of a problem with the very concept of knowledge.
ellauri096.html on line 140: Kyburg might answer that there is a scale effect. Although the dull pressure of joint inconsistency is tolerable when diffusely distributed over a large set of propositions, the pain of contradiction becomes unbearable as the set gets smaller (Knight 2002). And indeed, paradoxes are always represented as a small set of propositions.
ellauri096.html on line 151: If paradoxes were always sets of propositions or arguments or conclusions, then they would always be meaningful. But some paradoxes are semantically flawed (Sorensen 2003b, 352) and some have answers that are backed by a pseudo-argument employing a defective “lemma” that lacks a truth-value. Kurt Grelling’s paradox, for instance, opens with a distinction between autological and heterological words. An autological word describes itself, e.g., ‘polysyllabic’ is polysllabic, ‘English’ is English, ‘noun’ is a noun, etc. A heterological word does not describe itself, e.g., ‘monosyllabic’ is not monosyllabic, ‘Chinese’ is not Chinese, ‘verb’ is not a verb, etc. Now for the riddle: Is ‘heterological’ heterological or autological? If ‘heterological’ is heterological, then since it describes itself, it is autological. But if ‘heterological’ is autological, then since it is a word that does not describe itself, it is heterological. The common solution to this puzzle is that ‘heterological’, as defined by Grelling, is not a genuine predicate (Thomson 1962). In other words, “Is ‘heterological’ heterological?” is without meaning. There can be no predicate that applies to all and only those predicates it does not apply to for the same reason that there can be no barber who shaves all and only those people who do not shave themselves.
ellauri096.html on line 153: The eliminativist, who thinks that ‘know’ or ‘justified’ is meaningless, will diagnose the epistemic paradoxes as questions that only appear to be well-formed. For instance, the eliminativist about justification would not accept proposition (4) in the regress paradox: ‘Some beliefs are justified’. His point is not that no beliefs meet the high standards for justification, as an anarchist might deny that any ostensible authorities meet the high standards for legitimacy. Instead, the eliminativist unromantically diagnoses ‘justified’ as a pathological term. Just as the astronomer ignores ‘Are there a zillion stars?’ on the grounds that ‘zillion’ is not a genuine numeral, the eliminativist ignores ‘Are some beliefs justified?’ on the grounds that ‘justified’ is not a genuine adjective.
ellauri096.html on line 163: Epistemic paradoxes affect decision theory because rational choices are based on beliefs and desires. If the agent cannot form a rational belief, it is difficult to interpret his behavior as a choice. The purpose of attributing beliefs and desires is to set up practical syllogisms that make sense of actions as means to ends. Subtracting rationality from the agent makes framework useless. Given this commitment to charitable interpretation, there is no possibility of your rationally choosing an option that you believe to be inferior. So if you choose, you cannot really believe you were operating as an anti-expert, that is, someone whose opinions on a topic are reliably wrong (Egan and Elga 2005).
ellauri096.html on line 201: One can mock up a complicated liar paradox that resembles the surprise test paradox. But this complex variant of the liar is not an epistemic paradox. For the paradoxes turn on the semantic concept of truth rather than an epistemic concept.
ellauri096.html on line 233: Those who believe that the Church-Fitch result is a genuine paradox can respond to Williamson with paradoxes that accord with common sense (and science –and religious orthodoxy). For instance, common sense heartily agrees with the conclusion that something exists. But it is surprising that this can be proved without empirical premises. Since the quantifiers of standard logic (first order predicate logic with identity) have existential import, the logician can deduce that something exists from the principle that everything is identical to itself. Most philosophers balk at this simple proof because they feel that the existence of something cannot be proved by sheer logic. Likewise, many philosophers balk at the proof of unknowables because they feel that such a profound result cannot be obtained from such limited means.
ellauri096.html on line 299: Saul Kripke’s ruminations on the surprise test paradox led him to a paradox about dogmatism. He lectured on both paradoxes at Cambridge University to the Moral Sciences Club in 1972. (A descendent of this lecture now appears as Kripke 2011). Gilbert Harman transmitted Kripke’s new paradox as follows:
ellauri151.html on line 373: religious symbols as paradoxes. She then argues that Wittgenstein
ellauri151.html on line 658: Wittgenstein first interprets Hamann’s ideas as a Russell-type paradox of signs and their objects in light of the logical problems he was discussing in his lectures: how God∈God? Wittgenstein then uses Kierkegaard to interpret religious symbols as paradoxes that express a higher truth. I argue that Wittgenstein
ellauri434.html on line 292: Kant's antinomies were rather wimpy too, the math and the dynamic equally. They were serving suggestions rather than paradoxes anyway.
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