I'll confess that I'm not sure I have your question right. You've given a pretty good explanation of why P can't be true if it entails a contradiction. I'd rephrase the way you put it, however. Instead of saying "contradictions don't exist in real life," I'd say "contradictory statements are never true." But as you in effect note, if a statement entails a contradiction, then the statemetn could only be true if a contradiction were true. That can't happen, so the statement must be false. So far so good. Your worry has to do with that fact that we are dealing with symbols and formal logic rather than "real life. " But the point of the the symbols is just to let us talk in general. The schema is (roughly) that whenever P entails a contradiction, P is false. That's shorthand for saying that whenever a statement entails a contradiction, the statement can't be true. In other words, Pick any "real life" statement you like that entails a contradiction. Then the statement is false. Notice that...

You've several questions, though they're closely related. Let me start with the first one: "What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers?" My answer is: "Darned if I know!" But I rather suspect that most of my co-panelists are in the same position. Whether the presence of grammatical gender in a language has an effect on the outlook of people who speak it is something we could only figure out by bringing to bear the reseources of disciplines like sociology, psychology, sociolinguistics and who knows what else. It would also call for refining the question itself to the point where we knew what counts as an answer. As you yourself observe, it's not exactly obvious that societies whose languages don't mark gender are less sexist than their grammatically gendered counterparts. If there is an effect here, one suspects that it's a subtle one, and not easy to tease out. It may well be that if the people in a society believe that men and women are ...

I'd suggest reflecting on a different question: is there any good argument to support the claim that it isn't? I ask this because for my own part, I can't think of one. Further, I don't think this is just a failure of imagination on my part. When I think about the same-sex couples I know, the fact that both partners are men or both are women fades into the background pretty quickly. I've known dysfunctional same-sex couples, and dysfunctional opposite-sex couples. I've seen loving, sustaining, healthy same-sex relationships, and loving, sustaining, healthy opposite-sex relationships. Some homosexual people are abusive; so are some heterosexual people. Some heterosexual people are just the sort of people you'd be glad to see your own child in a relationship with. And so are some homosexual people. Now it's true: homosexual sex isn't procreative. Neither is sex with birth control. Nor is celibacy. It's also true: if everyone were homosexual, the survival of the species would be a lot more...

On the one hand, there is still a real fallacy of the sort we label ad hominem . The fallacy consists in claiming that a person's conclusion should be rejected because they have a bad character or have an ulterior motive. This is a fallacy because I don't have good grounds for saying that the conclusion is false. A bad person can occasionally offer a good argument, and a conclusion can be plausible even if it's argued for by someone of suspect character. Further, in the wild, so to speak, ad hominem arguments are often the last (or first) resort of intellectual scoundrels who want to divert attention from the poverty of their own case. That said, there's a familiar sort of move that all of us make legitimately. Suppose, for example, that I am not an expert on some controversial topic, but I do realize that coming to sound conclusions is hard and that I'm not in a position to sort good arguments from bad. Suppose I come across an argument by someone who has something at stake, and who has a...

Sorry to hear of your distress. And I'm also sorry that I don't have a lot of insight to offer, except but of negative advice. When you wonder what causes meaning to erode, there are two rather different sorts of things you might be asking. One is what sorts of reasons and arguments might persuade us that things don't have the cosmic significance we thought they did. Some philosophers have had things to say about that, and you might find Thomas Nagel's classic article "The Absurd" (Journal of Philosophy, 1971 pp. 716-727) interesting as an example. But Nagel cautions that even if his diagnosis of the absurdity of things is correct, it doesn't give us a reason to worry about it. Put in a different way, perhaps, a philosophical account of how things mean less than they seem needn't get in the way of a rich and enjoyable existence. And that brings me to what I suspect is the real point. Many of us have gone through periods when things seem meaningless to us not just in some abstract philosophical...

There are a couple of ways we might think about the questions you're raising. One is by trying to look for an Archimedean Point, so to speak, that provides some sort of absolute or incontrovertible answer. The other way is to look at how we actually think about these sort of things -- look from the inside. Since I have no Archimedean point available to me, I'll offer the latter sort of response. What we think does depend on what we've experienced, but even though my life is different from yours, we have lots of common ground to appeal to. Obvious sort of case: if you and I were both to look out my office window, then even though your experience is not just like mine, we'd agree that there's a building directly across from us. We'd also agree that there's a large grassy area behind it, and that there are people wandering around in the vicinity. Other cases of ho-hum agreement among people are more complicated, but we could multiply examples indefinitely. We can also agree that some people are...

Timely! I'm inclined to tinker a bit with the question. First, I think it's a scandal that in the USA, people with pre-existing conditions often can't get health insurance. Other developed countries have figured this out; it's about time the US caught up. However, given the way the system works at present, we might get a fix on your issue by asking this. Suppose I'm in a position to set up a not-so-large company that provides health insurance, but I'm not willing to take on the risk of insuring people with certain pre-existing conditions; I'm worried that if I do, the company will be bankrupted and then won't be able to insure anyone. (I'm not saying this is actually the case for most big health insurance companies, but bear with me.) So long as I'm upfront and honest about what I'm offering, it's not clear that I do wrong by offering my more limited product. It's in the nature of private insurance schemes that the companies are in the business of risk management. Companies that don't make...

An interesting question. On the one hand, we can't simply choose to believe or not believe things. I couldn't simply decide to believe that Paraguay is in Africa, for example. But there are things we can do that make it more or less likely that we'll end up with certain beliefs. Pascal famously suggested that one might be able to become a religious believer by going to mass, hanging out with believers, and so on. To some extent and for some people, this strategy probably works. We can also go out of our way to avoid hearing about evidence that counts against what we want to believe, and to hear only things that count in favor of the belief. To whatever extent strategies like this work, they amount to indirect ways of "choosing" our beliefs, though I'd be reluctant to drop the shudder quotes. On the specific question, however, many people become atheists because belief in God becomes hard to sustain. They don't decide to become atheists; they simply find that at some point, their theism gives...

You've given some good reasons for not buying the album. And since it's hard to make the case that you need this particular album, the reasons seem pretty strong - strong enough to convince me, at least. That said, there's a larger and harder issue here, and I'm guessing you may have it in the back of your mind. Many of us spend money at businesses whose practices we really wouldn't approve of if we let ourselves think about it. Perhaps they buy goods from sweat shops. Perhaps they have despicable labor practices. Without pretending that this does justice to the matter, a couple of issues strike me. One has to do with thresholds and balances. At what point are the practices of a business "bad enough" or insufficiently offset by the value of what they provide (including employment) that I should stop patronizing them? And how strong are my obligations to inform myself? I may know that business X has some very nasty practices. I might decide to patronize business Y instead, but the only...

Not to be flippant (well, yes: to be flippant) but I'm tempted to point to Peter Smith's earlier reply and say "What he said!" Let's grant that in one sense of the word "irrational," some of life's surd facts are irrational -- aren't how things would be if a rational Maker had her way. Prof. Smith acknowledges that some facts are difficult to cope with emotionally. And he might add (I'll add it for him) that being rational doesn't mean ignoring your emotions or trying to stuff them into a sack. But how, exactly, would it help to leave reason aside in dealing with tragic, intractable facts? Prof. Smith's closing comment seems to me to be a sober, thoughtful way of summing it up: "For irrationally formed beliefs are not likely to lead to actions whichget any of us what we want -- including a decent life, lived well inthe knowledge of our all-too-explicable mortality." The language of philosophy is seldom poetic; in that sense it may not mirror the gravity of some of its subject matter. That said, the...