Larry Temkin on Transitivity
Philosophy Bites
Nigel Warburton
4.6 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2015
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you choose which course of action is best? It seems reasonable that if A is better than B, and B is better than C, A must be better than C. But is it? Larry Temkin challenges this idea, known as the axiom of transitivity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds. |
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| 0:30.9 | Now you know that philosophy morsels is better than philosophy crumbs and you know that philosophy crumbs |
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| 0:42.2 | is better than philosophy bites. Not necessarily |
| 0:45.4 | so according to Larry Temkin. Larry Temkin welcome to philosophy bites. |
| 0:50.1 | Great thanks very much Nigel great to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is |
| 0:54.8 | transitivity. What is transitivity? So transitivity is a property of |
| 1:00.4 | relations. A relation R is transitive technically if for any three |
| 1:05.2 | alternatives A, B, and C if A stands in that relation to B, that relation R to B, and B |
| 1:12.1 | stands in that relation R to B, and B stands in that relation R to C, then A must stand in that relation |
| 1:16.7 | R to C. Common examples is taller than. |
| 1:20.4 | If Nigel is taller than David and David is taller than Larry, then Nigel must be taller than Larry. |
| 1:26.0 | Faster than, bigger than, heavier than, smarter than, these are all thought to be transitive relations. |
| 1:32.0 | Now you're a moral philosopher and I'm interested to know why you're interested in this notion of transitivity. |
| 1:38.0 | So I'm interested in the notion of transitivity because transitivity is one of the fundamental axioms that underlie our |
| 1:45.6 | understanding about the nature of practical reasoning. So there's a theory out |
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