Chris asked:

What is the name or source, assume it will be titled in one of a Greek’s dialogues, on a logical paradox, catch 22.

Like Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem, in layperson aphorism, ‘this cannot be proven’.

Answer by Shaun Williamson

There were certain paradoxes which were known to the ancient Greeks which I think of as paradoxes of self-reference. I don’t know of any other name for this type of paradox nor do I know of any source documents for them.

A typical example is as follows.

An Athenian who is thinking of travelling to Crete meets a Cretan in Athens and ask him ‘What are the people of Crete like?’ The Cretan answers ‘All Cretans are liars’.

The question is ‘Is this Cretan telling the truth?’. If he is telling the truth then he is lying, if he is lying then he is telling the truth (and so on). This paradox is attributed to the Cretan philosopher Epimenides who lived around 600BC.

Godel applied this idea in his proof because he realised that our system of mathematics allows self referential sentences such as ‘This sentence contains five words’. If we disallow self reference then Godel’s proof would no longer hold but our system of mathematics would be very different.

Alexander asked:

What is a holotes and its parts?

Answer by Tony Fahey

An answer to this question can be adequately found by anyone familiar with research engine Google. However, given that this question has been put to the panel of Ask a Philosopher, and that it is a relevant philosophical question, please find below, a brief synopsis of the term that I have put together from the information available from sources too numerous to acknowledge individually.

The term ‘holotes’, first found in the Theology of Orpheus, but used extensively by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, derives from the Greek word ‘holos’ meaning whole. Holotes is a word used to describe any entity, living or dead, animate or inanimate, that is made up of dissimilar parts which when put together is altogether different in form and function from all or any of the parts from which it is constructed. The human brain, for instance, is a holotes the component parts of which may be said to consist of matter, energy and mind (thought), and whose function is to incessantly attempt to explain phenomena accordingly (similarly), that is, according to its own existence, to itself and to its complete satisfaction.

Thus, any form of existence is a holotes (plural: holoteses). For example, a stone, an animal (human or non-human), a celestial body are all holoteses. In turn, these ‘whole’ entities can be, at the same time, component parts of a larger or hyper holotes.

In short, holotes is a term used to denote the whole, completeness, integrality, the entity and its state of being complete, either by nature or by action of man, by including/putting together all necessary parts to this end.

Claude asked:

I am retired and always have had an interest in philosophy, especially the period from Bacon to Kant. How I do I prepare a self-study program and what type of ‘support’ books do I need to read and understand these philosophers?

I have loads of history books (Kenny, Flew, Russell), but I don’t feel I’m getting anywhere (deep enough). I have no problem with difficult fiction, but it seems ‘philosophizing’ is harder, especially alone.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

You’ll need to frame some kind of agenda for yourself before you begin. Random reading is the worst kind; and starting with Flew, Kenny and Russell is tantamount to imposing a handicap on yourself because there is an implicit agenda already in those works that may not work for you.

You have to decide what you seek. Philosophy deals with many issues, and you need to find one that suits your temperament. For example, are you after ‘wisdom literature’? Or after philosophies which deal with the physical world (ontology), with the world of fundamental laws and principles (metaphysics), with human concerns (ethics, politics), with the principles of knowledge (epistemology), art and beauty (aesthetics)?

Another issue is: do you wish to read original texts or secondary works? Authors who write well, as literature? This is not a negligible issue. Apart from a few who are really difficult and obscure (Spinoza, Hegel), most of the important philosophers write well, but some are very dry and others quite lively.

As you can see, in order to profit from reading philosophy, you should make a list of your own desiderata first. Bacon to Kant is not really a guideline: there are at least four altogether different schools of thought in that era. It is better to say, e.g. I’m really interested in what thinkers believed makes the world tick’, and then you could read Aristotle and Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant in sequence, finding connecting links between them all. So let me encourage you to state your interests in your own words. When you’ve done it, write again and someone will be able to help you better.

Don’t forget in the meantime that Pathways is explicitly geared to people like yourself, and you could do worse than write to Dr Klempner, who might have a course just tailor made for you.

Aakash asked:

We all are taught since our childhood that we should always obey our parents. But sometimes I get into an utter confusion.

Expecting reply.

Answer by Tony Fahey

Hi Aakash, isn’t it such a shame that one’s parents can be such a disappointment sometimes? I wonder what your father’s side of the story might be?

Whilst at first sight this might not seem to qualify as a philosophy question, since it involves the issue of how one ought to behave, and since the issue of how one ought to behave is concerned with Ethics, and since Ethics falls under the rubric of Philosophy, it seems to me that this question is not only worth addressing for its own sake, but also for its wider ramifications.

Let me begin by saying that whilst there appear to be a number of ways of approaching this issue, I do feel that your dilemma might have been more easily addressed had you taken the time to present it in a fuller and more objective manner. For example, you say that your father is obese, but do not say why this is the case: is his obesity genetic, because his work schedule does not allow him time to take the type of exercise he needs to keep in the kind of shape that you would like him to be in, or is it caused because he has a large appetite? Moreover, you do not say that he asks you to take his cleared plate away because he is tired after his days toil, because you are younger and fitter than your old man, because presumes you may be prepared to show your appreciation to him for furnishing you with a roof over your head, food on the table, and a solid education, that he is punishing you in some way for some unacknowledged (by you) misdemeanour, or because he is just too damn lazy.

Anyway, to what you could do: (1) you could accept that it’s not about what you want, but what is best for domestic harmony, and take the plate to the kitchen; (2) you could ask your father to take it the plate away himself, and put up with the consequences, (3) you could follow the childhood advice and be an obedient, and even grateful, son, or (4) you could even find a place of your own.

Anna asked:

I’m tutoring a practical class for first year biology (uni), and I have taken issue with something they are teaching the class regarding hypothesis testing, I would like a second opinion.

Can I get some insight from some epistemologically savvy people think before I put my reputation on the line with the course co-ordinator? Apologies if I’ve totally muffed this up.

Answer by Shaun Williamson

Anna you need to be clear in your head about what the hypothesis says and what would falsify it.

As far as I can see from your account of things the hypothesis says ‘Any organ in the body which contains red blood cells will look purple’. It does not say ‘All the purple organs in the body look purple because they contain red blood cells’.

If you find any purple organs in the body which contain red blood cells then this will support the hypothesis. If you find purple organs in the body that do not contain red blood cells then these organs will not support the hypothesis but they won’t falsify it either.

So what will falsify the hypothesis? If you find an organ in the body which clearly looks green or orange but which contains red blood cell then this would falsify the hypothesis.

You need to be clear in your head about two similar looking hypotheses which are logically very different.

1. All organs with red blood cells in them will look purple 2. All organs which look purple will contain red blood cells.

Your hypothesis is 1 not 2 So if you find a purple organ with no red blood cells in it. This will NOT falsify 1 but it will falsify 2.

If you find a green organ with red blood cells in it then this will falsify 1.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Your students might learn some interesting zoology, but they wont learn much about hypothesis testing from this exercise.

The ‘root of the mess’ isn’t that toads have more than one (externally) purple organ.That’s an interesting fact for your students to learn. Nor is it that your hypothesis isn’t falsifiable.

The problem is that you don’t have a clear hypothesis to test. Your ‘hypothesis’ can be construed either as a conditional (if….then…) or as an argument (RBCs contain Hb, which is purple; therefore RBCs are purple; therefore an organ storing RBCs will appear purple, internally and maybe externally). But it isn’t a hypothesis (conjecture).

In the light of what we believe about RBCs and Hb, and what we surmise about the RBC life-cycle including a storage phase, a hypothesis (conjecture) for testing might be:

‘The toad organ-set includes at least one which appears purple.’

(falsified if we don’t find one – maybe because 1. RBCs stored in bone marrow, bones appear white, only insides are purple, or 2. No RBC storage in toads, or 3. Stored RBCs change their colour)

In fact we find several purple organs (say spleen, liver, two kidneys). So hypothesis confirmed (for one or a few toads at any rate, we surmise most others are the same). One, or more, or none of these organs might store RBCs. So, a better, more specific hypothesis might be:

‘The toad organ-set includes at least one which appears purple due to stored RBCs.’

(falsified if either no purple organ or none contains stored RBC when examined microscopically) In fact we find spleen contains large numbers of RBCs but liver/kidneys contain other things and only a few RBCs inside their blood vessels, as with any organ. Hypothesis confirmed (for those toads examined at any rate)

I don’t think induction comes into your conjecture-and-testing exercise with toads, except that the move from ‘all toads examined have a spleen’ to ‘all toads have a spleen’ is inductive. Of course a few toads may well be asplenic, so the better inductive argument would be to ‘nearly all toads have a spleen.’

A personal note. I don’t mind carving up toad, human or any other sort of dead bodies. It’s the killing of them for this very purpose which I am unhappy about, even with toads. But that’s another debate.

Sergio asked:

My name is Sergio, I’m from Italy and I like spending time reading your page. During my studies I’ve got stuck in a real big problem:

P.S. I’m not really looking for Husserl or Kant or St. Augustine or what the other people say about time, I’d like to know what do you think about time.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

You have to get away from the notion that time is something that exists independently of you. I am aware that this is widely believed, and the argument goes, ‘we can measure time, so there must be something that exists’. This argument is feeble. We do not measure time; but an arbitrary regularization of the various periodicities found in nature.

Time is the rhythm of events that you experience. Your heartbeat, the succession of day and night; the changes of weather patterns; the growth of your body; the passage of the seasons; the wobble of the earth as it rotates around the Sun, etc. This experience we have always wished throughout history to ‘objectify’, to regularize. Since day/ night alternation is the major influence on this pattern of experience, we subdivide it into convenient segments. But since days are longer in summer than in winter, we average these segments out and disregard the changing lengths of days. You know yourself that your personal sense of time is quite often at variance with clock time, depending on the intensity with which you experience an event. Waiting for a train that’s running late makes time slow down; enjoying yourself on holiday seems to make the days rush by. And so on.

So there is no objective time. Time is not a word that picks out a fact of the universe: it denotes a concept made by humans for humans and their convenience. The reduction of time segments to minutes, seconds, milliseconds is governed by the circumstances of our observations of nature’s rhythms. If you are a physicist, you need smaller and smaller segments; if you are an astronomer, you need bigger ones.

I hope you can see from this that ‘measuring time’ is not measuring time, but something else. Namely the duration of some fact in relation to your experience of events. The simplest way of doing this is to use a device that travels a distance–e.g. the finger of a clock. When the minute hand of your clocks has travelled (e.g.) 1 cm, 1 minute has passed. Or: 255 pulses of your electronic watch define 1 minute. Other devices are equally good: An egg timer gives you 4 minutes. So time here is a quantity of sand.

In short, forget the hypersophisticated philosophical and scientific arguments about time, as though time was some thing or process. It is always a rhythm, the periodical recurrence of some phenomenon. Our best current timekeeper is the beating of a Caesium atom–in a word, a recurrent regular pulse. All you need to conclude from this is that ‘time is a pulse’, according to present-day definition, the caesium’s pulse. And that’s all there is to it.

Answer by Helier Robinson

First of all the examples you give (‘Sorry I don’t have time for you, I don’t want waste my time, etc.’) are from ordinary language, which is a bad place to look for truth because ordinary language is geared to common sense. Common sense is fine for everyday activities but misleading when seeking to understand the Universe: just consider how un-common-sensical relativity and quantum mechanics are.

The nearest I can get to understanding time is that it is relational: it consists of relations between events, so that one event is earlier than another, which latter is later than the former. Relations give philosophers trouble for several reasons. One is that they are ephemeral: they come into existence and go out again very easily: if you put your hat on your head the on just pops into existence, and if you take your hat off again the on ceases to exist. Another reason is that we have difficulty explaining how we perceive relations, since they have no colours, tangible properties, or any other concrete properties. For example, we can see that this colour is brighter than that colour, but brighter than has no colour; or we can hear that this note is higher than that note, but higher than makes no sound; or this surface is rougher than, and warmer than, and harder than, that surface, but these relations cannot be felt. So how do we perceive them? Yet another difficulty with relations is their extravagant multiplication. If relations really exist then they are entities and as such may be terms of other relations. So if we take two relations of similarity we find that they are similar to each other, so that we now have a new similarity, and this third similarity is similar to each of the first two, so that we have two more similarities, and so on to infinity. These difficulties have led many philosophers to declare that relations are unreal, mere things of the mind. But it is very difficult to maintain this when considering space and time (or, better, space-time), causation, similarity and dissimilarity, logical necessity, and the like, all of which we want to say are real. So that is part of your trouble with time.

If you are interested, I have written a book on relations, called Relation Philosophy of Mathematics, Science, and Mind. It is somewhat technical, but may be of help to you. It is obtainable from SharebooksPublishing.com.