This essay concerns the question of how we make genuine epistemic progress through conceptual analysis. Our way into this issue will be through consideration of the paradox of analysis. The paradox challenges us to explain how a given statement canmake a substantive contribution to our knowledge, evenwhile it purports merely to make explicit what one’s grasp of the concept under scrutiny consis...

Formal semantics constitutes the framework of the research presented here, and the aim is to provide a solution to the imperfective paradox; i.e. explain why \Max was running" entails \Max ran", but \Max was running home" does not entail \Max ran home". This paper is divided into two parts. In Part I we evaluate what I will call the Eventual Outcome Strategy for solving the imperfective paradox...

The Twin Paradox is one of the most well known and debated paradoxes associated with Relativity theory. Opponents challenge Relativity theory on the grounds that the Twin Paradox reveals an underlying flaw in the theory. Such opponents feel that the existence of a paradox, in and of itself, is sufficient to disqualify the theory. Supporters explain the paradox by introducing the concept of acce...

Philosophers have studied paradoxes for millennia. The term paradox is appearing increasingly outside of philosophy, and researchers seek to understand them in common situations. By understanding these phenomena, systems engineers may develop better strategies to deal with them when encountered in business or projects. However, what is meant by the term systems paradox and are there different t...

In this paper we analyse some of the classical paradoxes in Social Choice Theory (namely, the Condorcet paradox, the discursive dilemma, the Ostrogorski paradox and the multiple election paradox) using a general framework for the study of aggregation problems called binary aggregation with integrity constraints. We provide a definition of paradox that is general enough to account for the four c...