One reason it doesn't sound right to me is that I don't know what could be meant by a "deductive statement." I know what a deductive argument is, but it always contains more than one token statement. Did the site say, instead, "every declarative statement" (i.e., every declarative sentence)? In any case, consider the statement "There are no colorless red cars." It's a declarative statement. Does it regard the real world? Arguably, yes: it's at least partly about cars. But knowing its truth doesn't require induction -- it's analytically true. On the other hand, maybe despite appearances it's not a statement even partly about cars but only about the logic of the concepts red and color . We'd need an agreed-on criterion of "aboutness" in order to decide.

If by "laws of thoughts" you mean laws of logic, then no. No coherent (that is, self-consistent) situation can violate any law of logic. Even philosophers, such as Graham Priest, who claim to be able to imagine situations that violate the law of non-contradiction concede that those situations are not self-consistent.

I see the sorites paradox as a very serious problem, not a logical fallacy that's easy to diagnose and fix. The paradox arises whenever we have clear cases at the extremes but no known line separating the cases where a concept applies from the cases where the concept doesn't apply. Clearly, 1 grape isn't enough to compose a bunch of grapes. Just as clearly, 100 grapes is enough to compose a bunch of grapes. So which number between 2 and 100 is the smallest number of grapes sufficient to compose a bunch of grapes? If there's no correct answer, then the sorites paradox shows that the concept enough grapes to compose bunch of grapes is an inconsistent concept. But inconsistent concepts, such as the concept colorless red object , necessarily never apply to anything, in which case it would be impossible for anything to be a bunch of grapes. One might reply, "Okay, fine. Necessarily there are no bunches of grapes. Life goes on." The problem, however, is that the sorites paradox applies to every vague...

In my opinion, the reasoning that generates the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise isn't nearly as compelling as the reasoning that generates the sorites paradox. The Achilles reasoning overlooks the simple fact that Achilles and the tortoise are travelling at different speeds : if you graph the motion of each of them, with one axis for distance and the other axis for elapsed time, the two curves will eventually cross and then diverge as Achilles pulls farther and farther ahead of the tortoise. All of this is compatible with the fact that, for any point along the path that's within the tortoise's head start, the tortoise will have moved on by the time Achilles reaches that point: that's just what it means for the tortoise to have a head start. It's not that the Achilles reasoning is good at the micro level but bad at the macro level. It's just bad. By contrast, the only thing overlooked by the sorites reasoning is the principle that a small quantitative change (e.g., the loss of one grain of...

It's not clear to me what you're asking, but I'll do my best. Given a particular conclusion, we can, normally, trace it back to the very basic premises that constitute it. I doubt we can do that without seeing the conclusion in the context of the actual premises used to derive it. The conclusion Socrates is mortal follows from the premises All men are mortal and Socrates is a man , but it also follows from the premises All primates are mortal and Socrates is a primate . So which pair of premises are "the very basic premises" for that conclusion? Outside of the actual argument context, the question has no answer. I don't know what you mean by "the root of a conclusion," but you seem to be suggesting that any knowledge is impure if it depends on -- or if it was acquired using -- any reasoning at all. Perhaps the term inferential would be a better label for such knowledge. On this view, even if I have direct knowledge that I am in pain (when I am), I have only...

You've asked a very good question, and your final sentence makes a good point. Those who defend one or another non-classical system of logic (paraconsistent, dialetheistic, intuitionistic, fuzzy, quantum, etc.) insist that they're not simply choosing a system of logic on a whim or merely out of convenience. Instead, they say, we're forced to accept non-classical logic because (a) it's an objective fact that arbitrary contradictions don't imply every proposition; because (b) some propositions are objectively both true and false; because (c) some propositions are objectively neither true nor false; because (d) some tautologies aren't completely true and some contradictions aren't completely false; because (e) the data gleaned from reliable experiments don't obey the classical laws of distribution, etc. Having looked into them, I find none of their arguments for (a)-(e) persuasive. But what's most interesting, as various philosophers have observed, is that the defenders of non-classical logic sooner or...

Validity in an argument comes down to one question: Is it possible for all the argument's premises to be true and its conclusion false? If no, then the argument is valid. So, assuming it is impossible for Oscar to be both a whale and a zebra, the argument is valid. Even so, the argument is not formally valid, because the following is not a valid form: Octopus(Oscar) or Whale(Oscar) Zebra(Oscar) Therefore: Octopus(Oscar) Not all valid arguments are formally valid. Furthermore, assuming that Oscar is not both an octopus and a zebra, the argument is unsound despite being valid, because in that case the second premise and the conclusion are not both true. The same holds for this argument (on similar assumptions): Oscar is an octopus, or Oscar is a whale. Oscar is a zebra. Therefore: Oscar is a whale. Valid but unsound. So neither argument establishes its conclusion.

In my experience, philosophy courses take the explicit, self-conscious formulation and evaluation of arguments (i.e., reasoning) more seriously than any other courses of study, with the possible exception of those math courses that emphasize proofs. Moreover, the breadth and depth of philosophical problems exceed those encountered in math. Therein lie the advantages of philosophy courses as compared to, say, math or economics courses. If you pursue philosophy, I think you'll discover that the standards of argumentative rigor expected in philosophy courses surpass -- sometimes by far -- the standards of rigor expected in any courses outside of math, and again they're applied to a much more varied, and often deeper, set of questions.

None that I can think of, including none of the candidates that I've seen offered by "dialetheists" (i.e., philosophers who say that some contradictions are true). If you have any promising candidates, please let us know!

As far as I can see, the definitive property of the empty set is not nothingness but instead emptiness : It's the one and only set having (containing, possessing) no members at all. The empty set can be empty, in that sense, without itself being nothing. So I see no threat of contradiction here. Indeed, the empty set can belong to a non-empty set, such as the set { { } } , which couldn't happen if the empty set were nothing.