Raven paradox. First proposed by the celebrated German philosopher and logician Carl Hempel (1905–1997) in the 1940s, to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition. Hemel started with the simple proposition that all ravens are black. Now this hypothesis could be confirmed in two ways. The first would be to find every single raven in the world and confirm, that indeed, all known examples of a raven are black. Now another way (albeit a practical absurdity), would be to find every non-black object in the world and check that this is not a raven as this methodology could also uncover the existence of a non-black raven. Given that the statement everything that is not-black is not a raven is logically equivalent the all ravens are black, it follows that the sight of - say a yellow banana - is evidence supporting the notion that all ravens are black. A conclusion that seams nonsensical as it implies that information can been gained about ravens by looking at bananas. So next time you chomp into a nice ripe banana with each chew be rest assured that all ravens are black.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 22:43:14 +0000
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