The meaning of “is”

… and betting on baldness.

Through the Australasian Association of Philosophy’s Facebook page, this To φ Or Not To φ (Daily Nous Philosophy Comic) by Tanya Kostochka:

(#1) And that’s just the beginning: cf. I’m Louise with I’m your daughter

From Tatyana (Tanya) Kostochka’s website:

I am a philosophy PhD student at the University of Southern California. I got my M.A. in philosophy at Northern Illinois University and my B.A. in East Asian studies at Brandeis University.
My primary research is in moral psychology, particularly moods and emotions. ​I also have a strong secondary interest in Buddhist philosophy.
In my spare time, I like to draw philosophy-related comics.

Another of her cartoons:

(#2)

Here you really have to know something about the philosophical tradition. From Wikipedia:

The sorites paradox (sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates. A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

… This paradox can be reconstructed for a variety of predicates, for example, with “tall”, “rich”, “old”, “blue”, “bald”, and so on. Bertrand Russell argued that all of natural language, even logical connectives, is vague

#2 alludes to the variant with the predicate bald.

Leave a Reply


%d bloggers like this: