This was sent to me:
Q: What has more legs–a dog or no dog?
A: “No” dog. Reason: No dog has no less than 4 legs but a dog may have 4 or less legs.
WTF!!!
Rather, I was in the position of a spore which, having finally accepted its destiny as a fungus, still wonders if it might produce penicillin.
–Ayi Kwei Armah
It’s semantics, really.
It’s like saying that nothing doesn’t exist. Whenever you have nothing, you actually have something. The something you have is nothing.
Replace atoms with words, and you have Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Makes perfect sense to me. What’s your problem?
Now in my second month of exile in the 21 pit
Nonsense. This brand of sophomoric reasoning is called a ‘bundle theory’, wherein an ordinary object (in this case a dog) is treated as a set of properties that are somehow put together, there then being no independent object within this set that has these properties.
This ‘riddle’ is often used in Intro Philosphy Forms to test one’s ability to separate an object from its properties. (i.e., a ‘chair’ cannot be defined except in terms of those properties that lend ‘chairness’ to the object, therefore the ‘chair’ cannot exist in any pure form.)
The object of the exercise is to seduce the student into a ‘no-ownership’ kind of reductionism aimed at defining the self as a set of experiences rather than as an entity that has these experiences. Once this is done, the Second Form Philosophy tutors step in with vitalism, entelechies, and Bergson’s elan vital, thereby turning the normal student’s brain into freeze-dried oatmeal.
Little wonder that Philosophy sections are underattended.
Dr. Watson
“Zipf’s law recommends against this sentence occurring with any frequency.”
“No dog has no less than 4 legs.”
Change this to “Think of all the types of dogs there are. Now, are any of these types of dogs three-legged? Two-legged? One-legged? Legless? Of course not, no breed of dog has no less than 4 (and only 4) legs.”
It should be easy to discern the rest.
Peace.
I thought this thread was going to be an opportunity to do amateur psychoanalysis on Swimming-
Bollocks.
‘No dog’ can have as many legs as you want to assign it. Fifteen, two, six hundred and twelve, negative five thousand.
If this is philosophy, then I’ll stick to being a hermit.
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Shadow of the Pigeon -
Weirdo of the Night
That should be “fewer”.
Gruel is better than nothing.
Nothing is better than chocolate.
Therefore, gruel is better than chocolate.
DrMatrix, the great Elvis Presley refuted your bad logic when he sang
“Don’t eat gruel,
To chocolate be true.”