| Description |
1 online resource (x, 246 pages) |
| Contents |
I. Material Falsity. 1. Thinking One Thing Is Another. 2. A Little History -- II. What Confusion Is. 3. Fred and the Ant Colony. 4. The Semantic Use of Psychological Language -- III. A Little Logic. 5. Ambiguity. 6. Humoring -- IV. Truth-Valuing. 7. Calibration. 8. Failure to Refer. 9. How You Convince People -- Including Yourself -- of the Theory of Descriptions. 10. Trying to Predicate Existence -- V.A Logic for Confusion. 11. Explicating. 12. Good Advice. 13. How Fred Should Think -- VI. Curing Confusion. 14. Semantic Self-Awareness. 15. Two Charleys. 16. Young Newton -- VII. Flexible Sameness. 17. Self-Induced Confusion. 18. The Theory of Ideas. 19. Making Category Mistakes and Loving It |
| Summary |
Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
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English |
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Print version record |
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
| Subject |
Errors.
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Knowledge, Theory of.
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epistemology.
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PHILOSOPHY -- Logic.
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PHILOSOPHY -- Epistemology.
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Errors
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Knowledge, Theory of
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Irrtum
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Verwechslung
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Erkenntnistheorie
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Fouten.
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Ambiguïteit.
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Logica.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780674029170 |
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0674029178 |
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