Bryan Frances

I’m a former professor of philosophy & logic, with an education in theoretical physics. I published books with Oxford, Cambridge, and other international presses, and had research professorships in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Now I coach people to become the wisest thinker in the room, almost regardless of the room. Not the person with the highest IQ, most knowledge, most serenity, or best moral behavior. I can’t get you those. But I can make you a wildly more wise thinker, in both your professional and personal lives. See here: http://bryanfrances.weebly.com/

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I have taught logic classes at several universities. I am assuming that as I am using it in the post, "TS either is or is not human" is logically true. It doesn't matter if there are viable interpretations of it that aren't logically true. I thought it was clear that I was using the sentence to express a logical truth. All I need in the argument is the premise that it can express a logical truth. Almost everyone agrees with that premise, especially since "Taylor Swift" has a referent.

Thanks for your reply. I agree that we should avoid political topics here. That's why I didn't discuss any of his political, moral, or religious views. It was all about how we treat expertise, as you mentioned.

Thanks for the comment. I don't think there is any mistake in basic logic. I could formalize all of it in elementary symbolic logic. It would be first-order predicate logic, but still pretty basic.

Thank you for your comment. 

I'm not sure that in order for an argument to be knockdown, there has to be a contrary belief. I might give a new, conclusive argument for a conclusion C that is so new that no one has ever disbelieved it (e.g., perhaps some claim about dark energy, a couple decades ago).

But in any case, if you were right, then the TS arguments wouldn't be knockdown, which is response 2 to the paradox.

'Taylor Swift is or is not human' is short for 'Either Taylor Swift is human or it's not the case that Taylor Swift is human', which is a logical truth on anyone's conception of logic.