When are conditional statements actually true? I am getting contradicting answers. Please help. One resource, a geometry book, says that to prove a conditional statement true, you must show the conclusion is true every time the hypothesis is true. On the contrary, however, a discrete mathematics book says a conditional statement is true unless the hypothesis is true and the conclusion is false. These methods for checking the truth of a conditional statement do not produce the same results, however. For example, consider the conditional statement (1) If today is Saturday, then 5 + 5 = 6. Under the first method, this (1) is false, because when there is a time when the hypothesis is true (It is Saturday), but the conclusion is false (5 + 5 never equals 6). A counterexample exists, as they would say. But under the second method, the statement's truth value changes with time. It is true when it is not Saturday since the condition for falsehood, that it is Saturday and 5 + 5 does not equal 6, is...

I would like to ask if you feel it is contradictionary for chivalry to exist in a world where women push for equality. From a logical point of view a woman is perfectly capable of opening a door for herself and yet it is ingrained into society that men should open doors for women, the explanation for this being that it is polite, shows manners and shows you are a "gentleman". However I feel it is quite the opposite, if anything it promotes the idea that a woman is feeble and incapable of performing something as simple as opening a door. If a person had difficulty or was incapable of opening a door since I am performing for that person, what that person is incapable of. This makes sense. An even more extreme example is the romanticized idea of the man dying for the woman. If both men and women are equal shouldn't it really be every person for themselves in such a situation? Yet a man would be considered "weak" for allowing a woman to die when he could have saved her by sacrificing his own life in place of...

My father replaced the lenses on his glasses. Then he replaced the frame when it later broke. Same type of lenses and same model of frame. He claims they're still the same pair of glasses. When I argue he's wrong and that they're now a different pair, he claims the same could therefore be said of him as he's replaced all his cells several times since he originally bought the glasses but, since he's still him, the glasses are still the glasses. Who's right?

Suppose someone brings John a glass of tap water, which John watcher being poured from an entirely normal tap. Yet suppose that the water from that particularly tap was somehow laced with poison. When asked what the glass contains, John, not knowing of the poison, says "That's water." Let's put aside the issue of whether witnessing tap water being poured is sufficient grounds for knowledge that the substance is in fact tap water, and assume that, were the water not poisoned, John would have a justified true belief about the contents of the glass. Presented with the poisoned water, does John have knowledge about the contents of the glass? I ask because, normally, our tap water contains a great deal of things besides water, yet we would not intuitively say that calling the stuff that comes from taps "water" is incorrect. But if some of the stuff was poison, it suddenly seems that John's belief that the glass contains water is incorrect (despite, in a sense, being obviously true), because if he were to...

Is it ethical for psychologists and psychometricians to lie to their clients about their IQ if it protects them from harm to their self-esteem? I ask because I highly suspect that such a practice is both very common and something that has been practiced on me. I am told I have an IQ of a 138 which to me seems highly improbable given my academic record and my SAT scores, but I always wanted to join Mensa and I think i told my tester that. However when I applied for Mensa I had to have my records sent three times to their headquarters but each time they somehow got "lost" and so I never became an official member. It also seems improbable that so many people I have known have IQs higher than 150, it's like it's just very common for practitioners to give their clients high feel good numbers.

Is there any validity in the following argument? By medical science we keep people with severe chronical diseases alive and these people are free to reproduce. Already there has been an increase in people with chronical diseases, maybe because of our progression in medical science. So, in the future, it is possibly that we will all struggle with many chronical diseases, unless we accelerate in stem-cell research or genetic manipultaion. With this I see only two opportunities: either deny the chronically diseased to reproduce (Which I think is quite unethical) or "play God" and rid our selves with these plagues with either genetic manipulation or stem-cell research (which is also unethical, for some). But not matter what ethical principles one leans on, these two options are the only sensible ones, of course to the exception of not doing anything (which is also unethical). So we have here, three unethical options, depending on one´s ethical affiliation: 1. Everyone will be chronically diseased. 2....

There was something that I wanted so badly for so long. Now, I got it but I am not as excited as I thought. How can we know what we want (our goal) in life?

How justified is a doctor's decision to practise cosmetics when he had sworn upon the Hippocratic Oath?

Are there any modern philosophers that still defend astrology as either a legitimate practice or as a science?

In this question, I'm going to assume there are strictly two human biological sexes, male and female. That assumption isn't exactly true (chromosomal variations), but it's a close enough approximation to ask the question. At restaurants such as "Hooters," provocatively-clad females serve food to patrons. There are no male waiters. No one seems to think too much about it. I think, however, that many people would be appalled if we had restaurants whose theme was to have provocatively-clad Jewish people serve food, or provocatively-clad African Americans serve food, or provocatively clad [insert religious or ethnic or national group] serve food. There are, of course, ethnic restaurants. So we might think of Hooters as nothing more and nothing less than another type of ethnic restaurant, this one peculiar to sex instead of ethnicity. Is this good reasoning? Maybe that reasoning is not valid. Women have a sex (female) and men have a sex (male). There can't be anything intrinsically more sexual about...