- Buridan
- # Buridan
Jean Buridan was a medieval French philosopher (1300-1358) best known for the paradox "Buridan's Ass," which illustrates the problem of making choices when faced with equally attractive options. The paradox imagines a donkey standing between two identical piles of hay—unable to decide which to eat, it starves to death. This thought experiment explores how we make decisions when logic alone can't break a tie, and it remains relevant to modern discussions about free will and decision-making.
- Conflating
- Conflating means mixing together or treating two different things as if they were the same thing, when they're actually distinct. It's a logical error where someone blurs important differences between concepts, ideas, or situations to make an argument seem stronger than it is. For example, conflating "being critical of a policy" with "being disloyal to your country" wrongly equates two separate things.
- Ockham
- # Ockham
Ockham refers to William of Ockham, a medieval English philosopher (1287-1347) famous for the principle "Ockham's Razor," which states that simpler explanations are usually better than complicated ones—you shouldn't add unnecessary ideas or assumptions when a straightforward answer works. He's influential in philosophy and science because his thinking encouraged people to cut away needless complexity and focus on what's actually necessary to explain something. Today, scientists and thinkers still use his principle when choosing between competing theories.
- ST(as a logical criterion)
- A criterion (standard or rule) for determining what counts as a valid logical consequence; the letters likely stand for a specific technical term in formal logic.
- criterion of logical consequence(in logic)
- A rule or test for deciding whether one statement logically follows from another—in other words, whether a conclusion must be true if the starting statements are true.
- inferences valid by form(in logic and reasoning)
- Arguments that are logically correct because they follow a proper structure or pattern, regardless of whether the facts in them are true or false.
- inferences valid by the impossibility of their premises(in logic and reasoning)
- Arguments that reach a correct conclusion because their starting assumptions are actually impossible—so the conclusion must be true even if the reasoning structure isn't normally reliable.