Puzzles 1

Puzzles in Phil. & Log.
# 1
Michael Burton
January 18, 2023
1 Puzzles
What is a puzzle?
Example 1. Which choice completes the analogy?
ARCADIAN : ARCANE :: IDYLLIC : (a. pastoral, b. worshipful, c. mysterious,
d. popular)
Example 2. Which word is a synonym of ARCANE?
a. pastoral, b. worshipful, c. mysterious, d. popular
Claim: Example 1 is a puzzle, and Example 2 is not. (At least, Example 1 is

much more a puzzle than Example 2 is.)
Observation 1: Difference in amount of explicit instruction given.
Observation 2: “Distraction” is evident: “pastoral” is loosely synonymous with
“idyllic”, and more synonymous with “idyll” which is of course part of “idyllic”.
Remark: The analogy form admits of even more puzzling instances.
Example 3. Which choice (best) completes the analogy?
WRITE : PEN :: OVERSEE : (a. chair, b. seat, c. desk, d. table)
Example 4. Which choice completes the analogy?

FEET : TURKEY :: (a. sleep, b. down, c. shoulder, d. wake): DREAM
Example 5. What completes the analogy? (Hoeflin 1985)
60 : NEO- :: 59 : ???
Sometimes puzzles are too puzzling for their creator(s)...

Suppose one face of a tetrahedron with unit side length is glued (in
the obvious way, vertex on vertex) to a triangular face of a square-
base pyramid (also with unit side lengths). How many faces does
the resulting shape have? (1980 PSAT)
1
Sometimes the solution to a puzzle becomes “lost media”, at least for a time...
what completes the following number sequence? (Pickover 1992)
21, 36, 55, 60, 67, 68, 92, —, 125
P.S. If what you like are mathematical number sequences, don’t bother with
“my little sequence” here.
OK, finally one that requires little to no “cultural” or “linguistic” knowledge
(Allen 1995):
And a very famous puzzle from Raymond Smullyan. It’s a chess puzzle, but
probably unlike those you’d be familiar with. It is a retrograde puzzle, as op-
posed to an anterograde puzzle. It requires you to think backwards in some
purely hypothetical—but totally legal, if not “realistic”—game of chess. All
men on the board are shown except the White King. The question is: where is
the White King?
Unlike “normal” chess puzzles, the point of solving this puzzle is not to get
better at chess. The point in solving it is to get better at deductive reasoning.
If you don’t know the rules of chess, you will learn them in this seminar. (For
this seminar?) If you think the above admits of more than one solution (perhaps
even trivially), remember that this position (whatever it really is, White King
included) was reached legally from the usual initial chess position. If you “prove”
the puzzle is impossible to solve because the White King cannot be anywhere,
maybe you don’t really know the rules of chess (wink-wink).
2
2 Philosophy
Ship of Theseus (from Huemer reading). Not really a paradox (see below), but
a philosophical problem, certainly.
Philosophical paradox: Gold in, golden process, garbage out? Apparently un-
questionable premises, apparently unquestionable reasoning, apparently unac-
ceptable conclusion.
Contradiction: A and not A. Most say no contradiction is true... philosophical
paradoxes challenge this. (At least those of the logical variety, and then at least
usually.)
Liar paradox: “This sentence is false”. “This sentence is not true”. (What is
the difference? Does saying some declarative, meaningful sentences are neither
true nor false help with both, or just one?)
Yablo’s paradox: Consider an infinite, enumerated list of sentences, wherein the
nth sentence is, for every natural number n:
For m > n, the mth sentence is not true.
Is this a paradox? (Hint: assume some sentence is true, and try to determine
whether the next sentence is true (and false?)...) What distinguishes it most
obviously from the Liar?
3 Logic
What follows from what. Let’s formally model the way we reason (or, rather,
should reason).
The following is correct, or valid, reasoning:
1. Every man is mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Thus, Socrates is mortal.
The following is valid, also (from Smullyan):
1. Everybody loves a lover.
2. Romeo loves Juliet.
3. Thus, Iago loves Othello.
The following is also also valid (also from Smullyan):
1. Everybody loves my partner.
2. My partner only loves me.
3. Thus, I am my own partner.

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Puzzles in Phil. & Log.

January 18, 2023

Claim: Example 1 is a puzzle, and Example 2 is not. (At least, Example 1 is

Example 4. Which choice completes the analogy?

Sometimes puzzles are too puzzling for their creator(s)...

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