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Logical crisis in Parliament
One of my favourite logical paradoxes (What, doesn’t everyone have a favourite logical paradox?) is the Unexpected Hanging. I first read about it from Martin Gardner, but you can read a summary here. A...
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Association by guilt
Guilt by association — you’re friends with a terrible person so you must also be one — is generally recognised as a pernicious logical fallacy. But what should we call this comment by Israeli Foreign...
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The tortoise and Achilles enforce property rights
I’ve commented before about how Lewis Carroll’s “What the Tortoise said to Achilles” identifies a paradigmatic gap between principles and action, which may be summarised as “Yeah, what are you going to...
View ArticleThe unexpected autocracy
One of my favourite logic paradoxes (does everyone have favourite logic paradoxes?) goes by the name of The Unexpected Hanging. There are numerous versions, but a standard story is: A man has been...
View ArticleKettle logic on Fox News
Most Republican leaders, in their concern to defend the president from accusations of racist over his terming African nations and Haiti “shithole countries” and saying “get them out”, have resorted to...
View ArticleQuoth the raven, Never Trump
Carl Hempel famously crystallised an obstruction to the formalisation of inductive reasoning as the “Raven paradox”: Suppose I am an ornithologist, concerned to prove my world-shaking hypothesis, “All...
View ArticleThe Tories can’t get no satisfaction
Proving that despite having acquired UK citizenship I understand nothing about the country’s politics, chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng has been forced out after less than a month in office....
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