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Relativism

 Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism (also factual relativism) is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism). Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.

Anthropological versus philosophical relativism
Anthropological relativism refers to a methodological stance, in which the researcher suspends (or brackets) their own cultural prejudice while trying to understand beliefs or behaviors in their contexts. This has become known as methodological relativism, and concerns itself specifically with avoiding ethnocentrism or the application of one's own cultural standards to the assessment of other cultures. This is also the basis of the so-called "emic" and "etic" distinction, in which:
 * An emic or insider account of behavior is a description of a society in terms that are meaningful to the participant or actor's own culture; an emic account is therefore culture-specific, and typically refers to what is considered "common sense" within the culture under observation.
 * An etic or outsider account is a description of a society by an observer, in terms that can be applied to other cultures; that is, an etic account is culturally neutral, and typically refers to the conceptual framework of the social scientist. (This is complicated when it is scientific research itself that is under study, or when there is theoretical or terminological disagreement within the social sciences.)

Philosophical relativism, in contrast, asserts that the truth of a proposition depends on the metaphysical, or theoretical frame, or the instrumental method, or the context in which the proposition is expressed, or on the person, groups, or culture who interpret the proposition.

Methodological relativism and philosophical relativism can exist independently from one another, but most anthropologists base their methodological relativism on that of the philosophical variety.

Descriptive versus normative relativism
The concept of relativism also has importance both for philosophers and for anthropologists in another way. In general, anthropologists engage in descriptive relativism ("how things are" or "how things seem"), whereas philosophers engage in normative relativism ("how things ought to be"), although there is some overlap (for example, descriptive relativism can pertain to concepts, normative relativism to truth).

Descriptive relativism assumes that certain cultural groups have different modes of thought, standards of reasoning, and so forth, and it is the anthropologist's task to describe, but not to evaluate the validity of these principles and practices of a cultural group. It is possible for an anthropologist in his or her fieldwork to be a descriptive relativist about some things that typically concern the philosopher (e.g., ethical principles) but not about others (e.g., logical principles). However, the descriptive relativist's empirical claims about epistemic principles, moral ideals and the like are often countered by anthropological arguments that such things are universal, and much of the recent literature on these matters is explicitly concerned with the extent of, and evidence for, cultural or moral or linguistic or human universals.

The fact that the various species of descriptive relativism are empirical claims may tempt the philosopher to conclude that they are of little philosophical interest, but there are several reasons why this is not so. First, some philosophers, notably Kant, argue that certain sorts of cognitive differences between human beings (or even all rational beings) are impossible, so such differences could never be found to obtain in fact, an argument that places a priori limits on what empirical inquiry could discover and on what versions of descriptive relativism could be true. Second, claims about actual differences between groups play a central role in some arguments for normative relativism (for example, arguments for normative ethical relativism often begin with claims that different groups in fact have different moral codes or ideals). Finally, the anthropologist's descriptive account of relativism helps to separate the fixed aspects of human nature from those that can vary, and so a descriptive claim that some important aspect of experience or thought does (or does not) vary across groups of human beings tells us something important about human nature and the human condition.

Normative relativism concerns normative or evaluative claims that modes of thought, standards of reasoning, or the like are only right or wrong relative to a framework. 'Normative' is meant in a general sense, applying to a wide range of views; in the case of beliefs, for example, normative correctness equals truth. This does not mean, of course, that framework-relative correctness or truth is always clear, the first challenge being to explain what it amounts to in any given case (e.g., with respect to concepts, truth, epistemic norms). Normative relativism (say, in regard to normative ethical relativism) therefore implies that things (say, ethical claims) are not simply true in themselves, but only have truth values relative to broader frameworks (say, moral codes). (Many normative ethical relativist arguments run from premises about ethics to conclusions that assert the relativity of truth values, bypassing general claims about the nature of truth, but it is often more illuminating to consider the type of relativism under question directly.)

Legal relativism
In English common law, two (perhaps three) separate standards of proof are recognized:
 * proof based on the balance of probabilities is the lesser standard used in civil litigation, which cases mostly concern money or some other penalty, that, if further and better evidence should emerge, is reasonably reversible.
 * proof beyond reasonable doubt is used in criminal law cases where an accused's right to personal freedom or survival is in question,  because such  punishment is not reasonably reversible.
 * Absolute truth is so complex as to be only capable of being fully understood by the omniscient established during the Tudor period as the one true God

Related and contrasting positions
Relationism is the theory that there are only relations between individual entities, and no intrinsic properties. Despite the similarity in name, it is held by some to be a position distinct from relativism—for instance, because "statements about relational properties [...] assert an absolute truth about things in the world". On the other hand, others wish to equate relativism, relationism and even relativity, which is a precise theory of relationships between physical objects: Nevertheless, "This confluence of relativity theory with relativism became a strong contributing factor in the increasing prominence of relativism".

Whereas previous investigations of science only sought sociological or psychological explanations of failed scientific theories or pathological science, the 'strong programme' is more relativistic, assessing scientific truth and falsehood equally in a historic and cultural context.

Criticisms
A common argument  against relativism suggests that it inherently refutes itself: the statement "all is relative" classes either as a relative statement or as an absolute one. If it is relative, then this statement does not rule out absolutes. If the statement is absolute, on the other hand, then it provides an example of an absolute statement, proving that not all truths are relative. However, this argument against relativism only applies to relativism that positions truth as relative–i.e. epistemological/truth-value relativism. More specifically, it is only extreme forms of epistemological relativism that can come in for this criticism as there are many epistemological relativists who posit that some aspects of what is regarded as factually "true" are not universal, yet still accept that other universal truths exist (e.g. gas laws or moral laws).

Another argument against relativism posits a Natural Law. Simply put, the physical universe works under basic principles: the "Laws of Nature". Some contend that a natural Moral Law may also exist, for example as argued by, Immanuel Kant in Critique of Practical Reason, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) and addressed by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1952). Dawkins said "I think we face an equal but much more sinister challenge from the left, in the shape of cultural relativism - the view that scientific truth is only one kind of truth and it is not to be especially privileged". Philosopher Hilary Putnam, among others, states that some forms of relativism make it impossible to believe one is in error. If there is no truth beyond an individual's belief that something is true, then an individual cannot hold their own beliefs to be false or mistaken. A related criticism is that relativizing truth to individuals destroys the distinction between truth and belief.

Sophism
Sophists are considered the founding fathers of relativism in Western philosophy. Elements of relativism emerged among the Sophists in the 5th century BC. Notably, it was Protagoras who coined the phrase, "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." The thinking of the Sophists is mainly known through their opponent, Plato. In a paraphrase from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, Protagoras said: "What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me."

Bernard Crick
Bernard Crick, a British political scientist and advocate of relativism, suggested in In Defence of Politics (1962) that moral conflict between people is inevitable. He thought that only ethics can resolve such conflict, and when that occurs in public it results in politics. Accordingly, Crick saw the process of dispute resolution, harms reduction, mediation or peacemaking as central to all of moral philosophy. He became an important influence on feminists and later on the Greens.

Paul Feyerabend
Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend is often considered to be a relativist, although he denied being one.

Feyerabend argued that modern science suffers from being methodologically monistic (the belief that only a single methodology can produce scientific progress). Feyerabend summarises his case in Against Method with the phrase "anything goes".

 * In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, "potentially every culture is all cultures". This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an "ambiguity" - better, an open-endedness - which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. [...] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. [...] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival [realism] serve, in their different ways, to "devalue human existence". The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise "other cultures" to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of "scientific realism", with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of "the monster 'science'", is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality - a politics which likewise "hides" its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, "blunts choices and imposes laws".

Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, as expressed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is often interpreted as relativistic. He claimed that, as well as progressing steadily and incrementally ("normal science"), science undergoes periodic revolutions or "paradigm shifts", leaving scientists working in different paradigms with difficulty in even communicating. Thus the truth of a claim, or the existence of a posited entity, is relative to the paradigm employed. However, it is not necessary for him to embrace relativism because every paradigm presupposes the prior, building upon itself through history and so on. This leads to there being a fundamental, incremental, and referential structure of development which is not relative but again, fundamental.

 * From these remarks, one thing is however certain: Kuhn is not saying that incommensurable theories cannot be compared - what they can't be is compared in terms of a system of common measure. He very plainly says that they can be compared, and he reiterates this repeatedly in later work, in a (mostly in vain) effort to avert the crude and sometimes catastrophic misinterpretations he suffered from mainstream philosophers and post-modern relativists alike.

But Kuhn rejected the accusation of being a relativist later in his postscript:

 * scientific development is ... a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles ... That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.

Some have argued that one can also read Kuhn's work as essentially positivist in its ontology: the revolutions he posits are epistemological, lurching toward a presumably 'better' understanding of an objective reality through the lens presented by the new paradigm. However, a number of passages in Structure do indeed appear to be distinctly relativist, and to directly challenge the notion of an objective reality and the ability of science to progress towards an ever-greater grasp of it, particularly through the process of paradigm change.

 * In the sciences there need not be progress of another sort. We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.

 * We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define relativism in Metaphors We Live By as the rejection of both subjectivism and metaphysical objectivism in order to focus on the relationship between them, i.e. the metaphor by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience. In particular, Lakoff and Johnson characterize "objectivism" as a "straw man", and, to a lesser degree, criticize the views of Karl Popper, Kant and Aristotle.

Robert Nozick
In his book Invariances, Robert Nozick expresses a complex set of theories about the absolute and the relative. He thinks the absolute/relative distinction should be recast in terms of an invariant/variant distinction, where there are many things a proposition can be invariant with regard to or vary with. He thinks it is coherent for truth to be relative, and speculates that it might vary with time. He thinks necessity is an unobtainable notion, but can be approximated by robust invariance across a variety of conditions—although we can never identify a proposition that is invariant with regard to everything. Finally, he is not particularly warm to one of the most famous forms of relativism, moral relativism, preferring an evolutionary account.

Joseph Margolis
Joseph Margolis advocates a view he calls "robust relativism" and defends it in his books Historied Thought, Constructed World, Chapter 4 (California, 1995) and The Truth about Relativism (Blackwell, 1991). He opens his account by stating that our logics should depend on what we take to be the nature of the sphere to which we wish to apply our logics. Holding that there can be no distinctions which are not "privileged" between the alethic, the ontic, and the epistemic, he maintains that a many-valued logic just might be the most apt for aesthetics or history since, because in these practices, we are loath to hold to simple binary logic; and he also holds that many-valued logic is relativistic. (This is perhaps an unusual definition of "relativistic". Compare with his comments on "relationism".) To say that "True" and "False" are mutually exclusive and exhaustive judgements on Hamlet, for instance, really does seem absurd. A many-valued logic—with her values "apt", "reasonable", "likely", and so on—seems intuitively more applicable to interpreting Hamlet. Where apparent contradictions arise between such interpretations, we might call the interpretations "incongruent", rather than dubbing either of them "false", because using many-valued logic implies that a measured value is a mixture of two extreme possibilities. Using the subset of many-valued logic, fuzzy logic, it can be said that various interpretations can be represented by membership in more than one possible truth set simultaneously. Fuzzy logic is therefore probably the best mathematical structure for understanding "robust relativism" and has been interpreted by Bart Kosko as philosophically being related to Zen Buddhism.

It was Aristotle who held that relativism implies that we should, sticking with appearances only, end up contradicting ourselves somewhere if we could apply all attributes to all ousiai (beings). Aristotle, however, made non-contradiction dependent upon his essentialism. If his essentialism is false, then so too is his ground for disallowing relativism. (Subsequent philosophers have found other reasons for supporting the principle of non-contradiction.)

Beginning with Protagoras and invoking Charles Sanders Peirce, Margolis shows that the historic struggle to discredit relativism is an attempt to impose an unexamined belief in the world's essentially rigid rule-like nature. Plato and Aristotle merely attacked "relationalism"—the doctrine of true for l or true for k, and the like, where l and k are different speakers or different worlds—or something similar (most philosophers would call this position "relativism"). For Margolis, "true" means true; that is, the alethic use of "true" remains untouched. However, in real world contexts, and context is ubiquitous in the real world, we must apply truth values. Here, in epistemic terms, we might tout court retire "true" as an evaluation and keep "false". The rest of our value-judgements could be graded from "extremely plausible" down to "false". Judgements which on a bivalent logic would be incompatible or contradictory are further seen as "incongruent", although one may well have more weight than the other. In short, relativistic logic is not, or need not be, the bugbear it is often presented to be. It may simply be the best type of logic to apply to certain very uncertain spheres of real experiences in the world (although some sort of logic needs to be applied in order to make that judgement). Those who swear by bivalent logic might simply be the ultimate keepers of the great fear of the flux.

Richard Rorty
Philosopher Richard Rorty has a somewhat paradoxical role in the debate over relativism: he is criticized for his relativistic views by many commentators, but has always denied that relativism applies to much anybody, being nothing more than a Platonic scarecrow. Rorty claims, rather, that he is a pragmatist, and that to construe pragmatism as relativism is to beg the question.

 * '"Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists'

 * '"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'

 * 'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.'

Rorty takes a deflationary attitude to truth, believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective. He also argues that the notion of warrant or justification can do most of the work traditionally assigned to the concept of truth, and that justification is relative; justification is justification to an audience, for Rorty.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he argues that the debate between so-called relativists and so-called objectivists is beside the point because they do not have enough premises in common for either side to prove anything to the other.

Nalin de Silva
In his book Mage Lokaya (My World), 1986, Nalin de Silva criticized the basis of the established western system of knowledge, and its propagation, which he refers as "domination throughout the world".He explained in this book that mind independent reality is impossible and knowledge is not found but constructed. Further he has introduced and developed the concept of "Constructive Relativism" as the basis on which knowledge is constructed relative to the sense organs, culture and the mind completely based on Avidya.

Colin Murray Turbayne
In his final book Metaphors for the Mind: The Creative Mind and Its Origins (1991), Colin Murray Turbayne joins the debate about relativism and realism by providing an analysis of the manner in which Platonic metaphors which were first presented in the procreation model of the Timaeus dialogue have evolved over time to influence the philosophical works of both George Berkeley and Emmanuel Kant. In addition, he illustrates the manner in which these ancient Greek metaphors have subsequently evolved to impact the development of the theories of "substance" and "attribute", which in turn have dominated the development of human thought and language in the 20th century.

In his The Myth of Metaphor (1962) Turbayne argues that it is perfectly possible to transcend the limitations which are inherent in such metaphors, including those incorporated within the framework of classical "objective" mechanistic Newtonian cosmology and scientific materialism in general. In Turbayne's view, one can strive to embrace a more satisfactory epistemology by first acknowledging the limitations imposed by such metaphorical systems. This can readily be accomplished by restoring Plato's metaphorical model to its original state in which both "male" and "female" aspects of the mind work in concert within the context of a harmonious balance during the process of creation.

Postmodernism
The term "relativism" often comes up in debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism and phenomenology. Critics of these perspectives often identify advocates with the label "relativism". For example, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often considered a relativist view because it posits that linguistic categories and structures shape the way people view the world. Stanley Fish has defended postmodernism and relativism.

These perspectives do not strictly count as relativist in the philosophical sense, because they express agnosticism on the nature of reality and make epistemological rather than ontological claims. Nevertheless, the term is useful to differentiate them from realists who believe that the purpose of philosophy, science, or literary critique is to locate externally true meanings. Important philosophers and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Max Stirner, political movements such as post-anarchism or post-Marxism can also be considered as relativist in this sense - though a better term might be social constructivist.

The spread and popularity of this kind of "soft" relativism varies between academic disciplines. It has wide support in anthropology and has a majority following in cultural studies. It also has advocates in political theory and political science, sociology, and continental philosophy (as distinct from Anglo-American analytical philosophy). It has inspired empirical studies of the social construction of meaning such as those associated with labelling theory, which defenders can point to as evidence of the validity of their theories (albeit risking accusations of performative contradiction in the process). Advocates of this kind of relativism often also claim that recent developments in the natural sciences, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity theory show that science is now becoming relativistic. However, many scientists who use these methods continue to identify as realist or post-positivist, and some sharply criticize the association.

Buddhism
Madhyamaka Buddhism, which forms the basis for many Mahayana Buddhist schools and which was founded by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna taught the idea of relativity. In the Ratnāvalī, he gives the example that shortness exists only in relation to the idea of length. The determination of a thing or object is only possible in relation to other things or objects, especially by way of contrast. He held that the relationship between the ideas of "short" and "long" is not due to intrinsic nature (svabhāva). This idea is also found in the Pali Nikāyas and Chinese Āgamas, in which the idea of relativity is expressed similarly: "That which is the element of light ... is seen to exist on account of [in relation to] darkness; that which is the element of good is seen to exist on account of bad; that which is the element of space is seen to exist on account of form."

Madhyamaka Buddhism discerns two levels of truth: relative and ultimate. The two truths doctrine states that there are Relative or conventional, common-sense truth, which describes our daily experience of a concrete world, and Ultimate truth, which describes the ultimate reality as sunyata, empty of concrete and inherent characteristics. Conventional truth may be understood, in contrast, as "obscurative truth" or "that which obscures the true nature". It is constituted by the appearances of mistaken awareness. Conventional truth would be the appearance that includes a duality of apprehender and apprehended, and objects perceived within that. Ultimate truth is the phenomenal world free from the duality of apprehender and apprehended.

Catholicism
The Catholic Church, especially under John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, has identified relativism as one of the most significant problems for faith and morals today.

According to the Church and to some theologians, relativism, as a denial of absolute truth, leads to moral license and a denial of the possibility of sin and of God. Whether moral or epistemological, relativism constitutes a denial of the capacity of the human mind and reason to arrive at truth. Truth, according to Catholic theologians and philosophers (following Aristotle) consists of adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of the mind and reality. Another way of putting it states that the mind has the same form as reality. This means when the form of the computer in front of someone (the type, color, shape, capacity, etc.) is also the form that is in their mind, then what they know is true because their mind corresponds to objective reality.

The denial of an absolute reference, of an axis mundi, denies God, who equates to Absolute Truth, according to these Christian theologians. They link relativism to secularism, an obstruction of religion in human life.

Leo XIII
Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) was the first known Pope to use the word "relativism", in his encyclical Humanum genus (1884). Leo condemned Freemasonry and claimed that its philosophical and political system was largely based on relativism.

John Paul II
John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor

 * As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.

In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), he says:

 * Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.

Benedict XVI
In April 2005, in his homily during Mass prior to the conclave which would elect him as Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger talked about the world "moving towards a dictatorship of relativism":

 * How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Ephesians 4, 14). Having a clear Faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching", looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an "Adult" means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth.

On June 6, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI told educators:

 * Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own 'ego'.

Then during the World Youth Day in August 2005, he also traced to relativism the problems produced by the communist and sexual revolutions, and provided a counter-counter argument.

 * In the last century we experienced revolutions with a common programme–expecting nothing more from God, they assumed total responsibility for the cause of the world in order to change it. And this, as we saw, meant that a human and partial point of view was always taken as an absolute guiding principle. Absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism. It does not liberate man, but takes away his dignity and enslaves him. It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the Guarantor of our freedom, the Guarantor of what is really good and true.

Pope Francis
Pope Francis refers in Evangelii gaudium to two forms of relativism, "doctrinal relativism" and a "practical relativism" typical of "our age". The latter is allied to "widespread indifference" to systems of belief.

Hinduism
Hindu religion has no theological difficulties in accepting degrees of truth in other religions. A Rig Vedic hymn states that "Truth is One, though the sages tell it variously." (Ékam sat vipra bahudā vadanti)

Jainism
Mahavira (599-527 BC), the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, developed a philosophy known as Anekantavada. John Koller describes anekāntavāda as "epistemological respect for view of others" about the nature of existence, whether it is "inherently enduring or constantly changing", but "not relativism; it does not mean conceding that all arguments and all views are equal".

Sikhism
In Sikhism the Gurus (spiritual teachers) have propagated the message of "many paths" leading to the one God and ultimate salvation for all souls who tread on the path of righteousness. They have supported the view that proponents of all faiths can, by doing good and virtuous deeds and by remembering the Lord, certainly achieve salvation. The students of the Sikh faith are told to accept all leading faiths as possible vehicles for attaining spiritual enlightenment provided the faithful study, ponder and practice the teachings of their prophets and leaders. The holy book of the Sikhs called the Sri Guru Granth Sahib says: "Do not say that the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran are false. Those who do not contemplate them are false." Guru Granth Sahib page 1350; later stating: "The seconds, minutes, and hours, days, weeks and months, and the various seasons originate from the one Sun; O nanak, in just the same way, the many forms originate from the Creator." Guru Granth Sahib page 12,13.

title: Relativism


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Routing table

In computer networking, a routing table, or routing information base (RIB), is a data table stored in a router or a network host that lists the routes to particular network destinations, and in some cases, metrics (distances) associated with those routes. The routing table contains information about the topology of the network immediately around it.

The construction of routing tables is the primary goal of routing protocols. Static routes are entries that are fixed, rather than resulting from routing protocols and network topology discovery procedures.

Overview
A routing table is analogous to a distribution map in package delivery. Whenever a node needs to send data to another node on a network, it must first know where to send it. If the node cannot directly connect to the destination node, it has to send it via other nodes along a route to the destination node. Each node needs to keep track of which way to deliver various packages of data, and for this it uses a routing table. A routing table is a database that keeps track of paths, like a map, and uses these to determine which way to forward traffic. A routing table is a data file in RAM that is used to store route information about directly connected and remote networks. Nodes can also share the contents of their routing table with other nodes.

The primary function of a router is to forward a packet toward its destination network, which is the destination IP address of the packet. To do this, a router needs to search the routing information stored in its routing table. The routing table contains network/next hop associations. These associations tell a router that a particular destination can be optimally reached by sending the packet to a specific router that represents the next hop on the way to the final destination. The next hop association can also be the outgoing or exit interface to the final destination.

With hop-by-hop routing, each routing table lists, for all reachable destinations, the address of the next device along the path to that destination: the next hop. Assuming that the routing tables are consistent, the simple algorithm of relaying packets to their destination's next hop thus suffices to deliver data anywhere in a network. Hop-by-hop is the fundamental characteristic of the IP Internet layer and the OSI Network Layer.

When a router interface is configured with an IP address and subnet mask, the interface becomes a host on that attached network. A directly connected network is a network that is directly attached to one of the router interfaces. The network address and subnet mask of the interface, along with the interface type and number, are entered into the routing table as a directly connected network.

A remote network is a network that can only be reached by sending the packet to another router. Routing table entries to remote networks may be either dynamic or static. Dynamic routes are routes to remote networks that were learned automatically by the router through a dynamic routing protocol. Static routes are routes that a network administrator manually configured.

Routing tables are also a key aspect of certain security operations, such as unicast reverse path forwarding (uRPF). In this technique, which has several variants, the router also looks up, in the routing table, the source address of the packet. If there exists no route back to the source address, the packet is assumed to be malformed or involved in a network attack and is dropped.

Difficulties
The need to record routes to large numbers of devices using limited storage space represents a major challenge in routing table construction. In the Internet, the currently dominant address aggregation technology is a bitwise prefix matching scheme called Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR). Supernetworks can also be used to help control routing table size.

Contents
The routing table consists of at least three information fields:
 * 1) network identifier: The destination subnet and netmask
 * 2) metric: The routing metric of the path through which the packet is to be sent. The route will go in the direction of the gateway with the lowest metric.
 * 3) next hop: The next hop, or gateway, is the address of the next station to which the packet is to be sent on the way to its final destination

Depending on the application and implementation, it can also contain additional values that refine path selection:
 * 1) quality of service associated with the route. For example, the U flag indicates that an IP route is up.
 * 2) filtering criteria: Access-control lists associated with the route
 * 3) interface: Such as eth0 for the first Ethernet card, eth1 for the second Ethernet card, etc.

Shown below is an example of what the table above could look like on a computer connected to the internet via a home router:

 * The columns Network destination and Netmask together describe the Network identifier as mentioned earlier. For example, destination 192.168.0.0 and netmask 255.255.255.0 can be written as 192.168.0.0/24.
 * The Gateway column contains the same information as the Next hop, i.e. it points to the gateway through which the network can be reached.
 * The Interface indicates what locally available interface is responsible for reaching the gateway. In this example, gateway 192.168.0.1 (the internet router) can be reached through the local network card with address 192.168.0.100.
 * Finally, the Metric indicates the associated cost of using the indicated route. This is useful for determining the efficiency of a certain route from two points in a network. In this example, it is more efficient to communicate with the computer itself through the use of address 127.0.0.1 (called localhost) than it would be through 192.168.0.100 (the IP address of the local network card).

Forwarding table
Routing tables are generally not used directly for packet forwarding in modern router architectures; instead, they are used to generate the information for a simpler forwarding table. This forwarding table contains only the routes which are chosen by the routing algorithm as preferred routes for packet forwarding. It is often in a compressed or pre-compiled format that is optimized for hardware storage and lookup.

This router architecture separates the control plane function of the routing table from the forwarding plane function of the forwarding table. This separation of control and forwarding provides uninterrupted high-performance forwarding.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Routing table


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Transcendental argument for the existence of God

The Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG) is an argument that attempts to prove the existence of God by appealing to the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience and knowledge.

A version was formulated by Immanuel Kant in his 1763 work The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. C. S. Lewis's argument from reason is also a kind of transcendental argument.

Most contemporary formulations of a transcendental argument for God have been developed within the framework of Christian presuppositional apologetics and the likes of Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen.

Transcendental reasoning
"Transcendental" in this case is used as an adjective specifying a specific kind of argument, and not a noun. Transcendental arguments should not be confused with arguments for the existence of something transcendent. Rather, transcendental arguments are arguments that make inferences from what is necessarily true to possibly think and experience.

Transcendental arguments take the form of modus ponens:

 * If possibly P, then necessarily Q.
 * Actually P.
 * Therefore, necessarily Q.

They are also sometimes said to be distinct from standard deductive and inductive forms of reasoning, although this has been disputed, for instance by Anthony Genova and Graham Bird.

The argument
There are many variants of the transcendental argument for the existence of God, but they generally proceed as follows:

 * 1) If there is a transcendental unity of apperception, God exists.
 * 2) There is transcendental apperception.
 * 3) Therefore, God exists.

The TAG differs from thomistic and evidentialist arguments, which posit the existence of God in order to avoid an infinite regress of causes or motions.

Ash'ari
Medieval Ash'ari Islamic theologians formulated a type of transcendental argument based on the notion that morality, logic, etc. cannot be fully understood apart from revelation and thereby, belief in the Quran and the Islamic truth claims were necessary in order to interpret the external world. For al-Ashari and others, it does not make sense to argue against religion using a priori assumptions about morality or scientific probabilities when these can only be understood in light of divine revelation.

Criticism
Barry Stroud has criticized transcendental arguments, distinguishing between epistemic and metaphysical transcendental arguments. The former says the belief in God (which might be false) is necessary to make sense of the world, while the latter says the existence of God is necessary to make sense of the world. Stroud argues transcendental arguments often only establish the former, but assert the latter.

Presuppositional apologetics
Internet Infidels co-founder Jeffery Jay Lowder has argued that the presuppositional apologetics' version of TAG is fatally flawed for numerous reasons. First, Bahnsen fails to defend the necessity of Christianity instead of the mere sufficiency for the rational justification of the laws of logic, the laws of science, and the laws of morality. In other words, such reasoning affirms the consequent. Second, Bahnsen conflates "atheism" with "materialism" and has really presented an argument against materialism, not an argument for Christianity. Third, Bahnsen believed that the laws of logic, laws of science, and laws of morality are abstract objects, but Christianity arguably underdetermines the relationship between God and abstract objects. Some Christian philosophers, such as Peter van Inwagen, affirm Platonism and the compatibility of God and abstract objects. But other Christian philosophers argue that Platonism is incompatible with divine aseity. William Lane Craig urges Christian philosophers to consider anti-realist theories of abstract objects.

Articles

 * Derrida, Van Til and the Metaphysics of Postmodernism An appraisal of Postmodernism, specifically Deconstruction, in light of Van Til by Jacob Gabriel Hale.

Debates

 * "The Great Debate: Does God Exist?" Audio (listen/download format) of a formal debate between Christian Greg Bahnsen and skeptic Gordon Stein from the University of California, Irvine.
 * "The Verdict Is In: Assessment of the 1985 Bahnsen-Stein Debate, 'Does God Exist?'" Video (watch/download format) of the Bahnsen-Stein debate, beginning with a technical and rhetorical assessment of Bahnsen's opening statement in which he defends his transcendental argument for God's existence.
 * The Martin-Frame Debate A written debate between skeptic Michael Martin and Christian John Frame about the transcendental argument for the existence of God.
 * The Drange-Wilson Debate A written debate between skeptic Theodore Drange and Christian Douglas Wilson.
 * "Is Non-Christian Thought Futile?" A written debate between Christian Doug Jones and skeptics Keith Parsons and Michael Martin in Antithesis magazine (vol. 2, no. 4).


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Syllogism

A syllogism (συλλογισμός, syllogismos, 'conclusion, inference') is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true.

In its earliest form (defined by Aristotle in his 350 BC book Prior Analytics), a deductive syllogism arises when two true premises (propositions or statements) validly imply a conclusion, or the main point that the argument aims to get across. For example, knowing that all men are mortal (major premise), and that Socrates is a man (minor premise), we may validly conclude that Socrates is mortal. Syllogistic arguments are usually represented in a three-line form: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. In antiquity, two rival syllogistic theories existed: Aristotelian syllogism and Stoic syllogism. From the Middle Ages onwards, categorical syllogism and syllogism were usually used interchangeably. This article is concerned only with this historical use. The syllogism was at the core of historical deductive reasoning, whereby facts are determined by combining existing statements, in contrast to inductive reasoning, in which facts are predicted by repeated observations.

Within some academic contexts, syllogism has been superseded by first-order predicate logic following the work of Gottlob Frege, in particular his Begriffsschrift (Concept Script; 1879). Syllogism, being a method of valid logical reasoning, will always be useful in most circumstances, and for general-audience introductions to logic and clear-thinking.

Early history
In antiquity, two rival syllogistic theories existed: Aristotelian syllogism and Stoic syllogism.

Aristotle
Aristotle defines the syllogism as "a discourse in which certain (specific) things having been supposed, something different from the things supposed results of necessity because these things are so." Despite this very general definition, in Prior Analytics Aristotle limits himself to categorical syllogisms that consist of three categorical propositions, including categorical modal syllogisms.

The use of syllogisms as a tool for understanding can be dated back to the logical reasoning discussions of Aristotle. Before the mid-12th century, medieval logicians were only familiar with a portion of Aristotle's works, including such titles as Categories and On Interpretation, works that contributed heavily to the prevailing Old Logic, or logica vetus. The onset of a New Logic, or logica nova, arose alongside the reappearance of Prior Analytics, the work in which Aristotle developed his theory of the syllogism.

Prior Analytics, upon rediscovery, was instantly regarded by logicians as "a closed and complete body of doctrine", leaving very little for thinkers of the day to debate, and reorganize. Aristotle's theory on the syllogism for assertoric sentences was considered especially remarkable, with only small systematic changes occurring to the concept over time. This theory of the syllogism would not enter the context of the more comprehensive logic of consequence until logic began to be reworked in general in the mid-14th century by the likes of John Buridan.

Aristotle's Prior Analytics did not, however, incorporate such a comprehensive theory on the modal syllogism—a syllogism that has at least one modalized premise, that is, a premise containing the modal words necessarily, possibly, or contingently. Aristotle's terminology in this aspect of his theory was deemed vague, and in many cases unclear, even contradicting some of his statements from On Interpretation. His original assertions on this specific component of the theory were left up to a considerable amount of conversation, resulting in a wide array of solutions put forth by commentators of the day. The system for modal syllogisms laid forth by Aristotle would ultimately be deemed unfit for practical use, and would be replaced by new distinctions and new theories altogether.

Boethius
Boethius (c. 475–526) contributed an effort to make the ancient Aristotelian logic more accessible. While his Latin translation of Prior Analytics went primarily unused before the 12th century, his textbooks on the categorical syllogism were central to expanding the syllogistic discussion. Rather than in any additions that he personally made to the field, Boethius' logical legacy lies in his effective transmission of prior theories to later logicians, as well as his clear and primarily accurate presentations of Aristotle's contributions.

Peter Abelard
Another of medieval logic's first contributors from the Latin West, Peter Abelard (1079–1142), gave his own thorough evaluation of the syllogism concept, and accompanying theory in the Dialectica—a discussion of logic based on Boethius' commentaries and monographs. His perspective on syllogisms can be found in other works as well, such as Logica Ingredientibus. With the help of Abelard's distinction between de dicto modal sentences and de re modal sentences, medieval logicians began to shape a more coherent concept of Aristotle's modal syllogism model.

Jean Buridan
The French philosopher Jean Buridan (c. 1300 – 1361), whom some consider the foremost logician of the later Middle Ages, contributed two significant works: Treatise on Consequence and Summulae de Dialectica, in which he discussed the concept of the syllogism, its components and distinctions, and ways to use the tool to expand its logical capability. For 200 years after Buridan's discussions, little was said about syllogistic logic. Historians of logic have assessed that the primary changes in the post-Middle Age era were changes in respect to the public's awareness of original sources, a lessening of appreciation for the logic's sophistication and complexity, and an increase in logical ignorance—so that logicians of the early 20th century came to view the whole system as ridiculous.

Modern history
The Aristotelian syllogism dominated Western philosophical thought for many centuries. Syllogism itself is about drawing valid conclusions from assumptions (axioms), rather than about verifying the assumptions. However, people over time focused on the logic aspect, forgetting the importance of verifying the assumptions.

In the 17th century, Francis Bacon emphasized that experimental verification of axioms must be carried out rigorously, and cannot take syllogism itself as the best way to draw conclusions in nature. Bacon proposed a more inductive approach to the observation of nature, which involves experimentation, and leads to discovering and building on axioms to create a more general conclusion. Yet, a full method of drawing conclusions in nature is not the scope of logic or syllogism, and the inductive method was covered in Aristotle's subsequent treatise, the Posterior Analytics.

In the 19th century, modifications to syllogism were incorporated to deal with disjunctive ("A or B") and conditional ("if A then B") statements. Immanuel Kant famously claimed, in Logic (1800), that logic was the one completed science, and that Aristotelian logic more or less included everything about logic that there was to know. (This work is not necessarily representative of Kant's mature philosophy, which is often regarded as an innovation to logic itself.) Kant's opinion stood unchallenged in the West until 1879, when Gottlob Frege published his Begriffsschrift (Concept Script). This introduced a calculus, a method of representing categorical statements (and statements that are not provided for in syllogism as well) by the use of quantifiers and variables.

A noteworthy exception is the logic developed in Bernard Bolzano's work Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science, 1837), the principles of which were applied as a direct critique of Kant, in the posthumously published work New Anti-Kant (1850). The work of Bolzano had been largely overlooked until the late 20th century, among other reasons, because of the intellectual environment at the time in Bohemia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire. In the last 20 years, Bolzano's work has resurfaced and become subject of both translation and contemporary study.

This led to the rapid development of sentential logic and first-order predicate logic, subsuming syllogistic reasoning, which was, therefore, after 2000 years, suddenly considered obsolete by many. The Aristotelian system is explicated in modern fora of academia primarily in introductory material and historical study.

One notable exception to this modern relegation is the continued application of Aristotelian logic by officials of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the Apostolic Tribunal of the Roman Rota, which still requires that any arguments crafted by Advocates be presented in syllogistic format.

Boole's acceptance of Aristotle
George Boole's unwavering acceptance of Aristotle's logic is emphasized by the historian of logic John Corcoran in an accessible introduction to Laws of Thought. Corcoran also wrote a point-by-point comparison of Prior Analytics and Laws of Thought. According to Corcoran, Boole fully accepted and endorsed Aristotle's logic. Boole's goals were "to go under, over, and beyond" Aristotle's logic by:

 * 1) providing it with mathematical foundations involving equations;
 * 2) extending the class of problems it could treat, as solving equations was added to assessing validity; and
 * 3) expanding the range of applications it could handle, such as expanding propositions of only two terms to those having arbitrarily many.

More specifically, Boole agreed with what Aristotle said; Boole's 'disagreements', if they might be called that, concern what Aristotle did not say. First, in the realm of foundations, Boole reduced Aristotle's four propositional forms to one form, the form of equations, which by itself was a revolutionary idea. Second, in the realm of logic's problems, Boole's addition of equation solving to logic—another revolutionary idea—involved Boole's doctrine that Aristotle's rules of inference (the "perfect syllogisms") must be supplemented by rules for equation solving. Third, in the realm of applications, Boole's system could handle multi-term propositions and arguments, whereas Aristotle could handle only two-termed subject-predicate propositions and arguments. For example, Aristotle's system could not deduce: "No quadrangle that is a square is a rectangle that is a rhombus" from "No square that is a quadrangle is a rhombus that is a rectangle" or from "No rhombus that is a rectangle is a square that is a quadrangle."

Basic structure
A categorical syllogism consists of three parts:
 * 1) Major premise
 * 2) Minor premise
 * 3) Conclusion/Consequent

Each part is a categorical proposition, and each categorical proposition contains two categorical terms. In Aristotle, each of the premises is in the form "All S are P," "Some S are P", "No S are P" or "Some S are not P", where "S" is the subject-term and "P" is the predicate-term:

 * "All S are P," and "No S are P" are termed universal propositions;
 * "Some S are P" and "Some S are not P" are termed particular propositions.

More modern logicians allow some variation. Each of the premises has one term in common with the conclusion: in a major premise, this is the major term (i.e., the predicate of the conclusion); in a minor premise, this is the minor term (i.e., the subject of the conclusion). For example:

 * Major premise: All humans are mortal.
 * Minor premise: All Greeks are humans.
 * Conclusion/Consequent: All Greeks are mortal.

Each of the three distinct terms represents a category. From the example above, humans, mortal, and Greeks: mortal is the major term, and Greeks the minor term. The premises also have one term in common with each other, which is known as the middle term; in this example, humans. Both of the premises are universal, as is the conclusion.

 * Major premise: All mortals die.
 * Minor premise: All men are mortals.
 * Conclusion/Consequent: All men die.

Here, the major term is die, the minor term is men, and the middle term is mortals. Again, both premises are universal, hence so is the conclusion.

Polysyllogism
A polysyllogism, or a sorites, is a form of argument in which a series of incomplete syllogisms is so arranged that the predicate of each premise forms the subject of the next until the subject of the first is joined with the predicate of the last in the conclusion. For example, one might argue that all lions are big cats, all big cats are predators, and all predators are carnivores. To conclude that therefore all lions are carnivores is to construct a sorites argument.

Types
Square of opposition, set diagrams.svg

(Black areas are empty, red areas are nonempty.)]]

There are infinitely many possible syllogisms, but only 256 logically distinct types and only 24 valid types (enumerated below). A syllogism takes the form (note: M – Middle, S – subject, P – predicate.):

 * Major premise: All M are P.
 * Minor premise: All S are M.
 * Conclusion/Consequent: All S are P.

The premises and conclusion of a syllogism can be any of four types, which are labeled by letters as follows. The meaning of the letters is given by the table:

In Prior Analytics, Aristotle uses mostly the letters A, B, and C (Greek letters alpha, beta, and gamma) as term place holders, rather than giving concrete examples. It is traditional to use is rather than are as the copula, hence All A is B rather than All As are Bs. It is traditional and convenient practice to use a, e, i, o as infix operators so the categorical statements can be written succinctly. The following table shows the longer form, the succinct shorthand, and equivalent expressions in predicate logic:

The convention here is that the letter S is the subject of the conclusion, P is the predicate of the conclusion, and M is the middle term. The major premise links M with P and the minor premise links M with S. However, the middle term can be either the subject or the predicate of each premise where it appears. The differing positions of the major, minor, and middle terms gives rise to another classification of syllogisms known as the figure. Given that in each case the conclusion is S-P, the four figures are:

(Note, however, that, following Aristotle's treatment of the figures, some logicians—e.g., Peter Abelard and Jean Buridan—reject the fourth figure as a figure distinct from the first.)

Putting it all together, there are 256 possible types of syllogisms (or 512 if the order of the major and minor premises is changed, though this makes no difference logically). Each premise and the conclusion can be of type A, E, I or O, and the syllogism can be any of the four figures. A syllogism can be described briefly by giving the letters for the premises and conclusion followed by the number for the figure. For example, the syllogism BARBARA below is AAA-1, or "A-A-A in the first figure".

The vast majority of the 256 possible forms of syllogism are invalid (the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises). The table below shows the valid forms. Even some of these are sometimes considered to commit the existential fallacy, meaning they are invalid if they mention an empty category. These controversial patterns are marked in italics. All but four of the patterns in italics (felapton, darapti, fesapo and bamalip) are weakened moods, i.e. it is possible to draw a stronger conclusion from the premises.

The letters A, E, I, and O have been used since the medieval Schools to form mnemonic names for the forms as follows: 'Barbara' stands for AAA, 'Celarent' for EAE, etc.

Next to each premise and conclusion is a shorthand description of the sentence. So in AAI-3, the premise "All squares are rectangles" becomes "MaP"; the symbols mean that the first term ("square") is the middle term, the second term ("rectangle") is the predicate of the conclusion, and the relationship between the two terms is labeled "a" (All M are P).

The following table shows all syllogisms that are essentially different. The similar syllogisms share the same premises, just written in a different way. For example "Some pets are kittens" (SiM in Darii) could also be written as "Some kittens are pets" (MiS in Datisi).

In the Venn diagrams, the black areas indicate no elements, and the red areas indicate at least one element. In the predicate logic expressions, a horizontal bar over an expression means to negate ("logical not") the result of that expression.

It is also possible to use graphs (consisting of vertices and edges) to evaluate syllogisms.

Celarent (EAE-1)
Similar: Cesare (EAE-2)

Darii (AII-1)
Similar: Datisi (AII-3)

Ferio (EIO-1)
Similar: Festino (EIO-2), Ferison (EIO-3), Fresison (EIO-4)

Celaront (EAO-1)
Similar: Cesaro (EAO-2)

Camestros (AEO-2)
Similar: Calemos (AEO-4)

Felapton (EAO-3)
Similar: Fesapo (EAO-4)

Table of all syllogisms
This table shows all 24 valid syllogisms, represented by Venn diagrams. Columns indicate similarity, and are grouped by combinations of premises. Borders correspond to conclusions. Those with an existential assumption are dashed.

Terms in syllogism
With Aristotle, we may distinguish singular terms, such as Socrates, and general terms, such as Greeks. Aristotle further distinguished types (a) and (b):

1. terms that could be the subject of predication; and

2. terms that could be predicated of others by the use of the copula ("is a").

Such a predication is known as a distributive, as opposed to non-distributive as in Greeks are numerous. It is clear that Aristotle's syllogism works only for distributive predication, since we cannot reason All Greeks are animals, animals are numerous, therefore all Greeks are numerous. In Aristotle's view singular terms were of type (a), and general terms of type (b). Thus, Men can be predicated of Socrates but Socrates cannot be predicated of anything. Therefore, for a term to be interchangeable—to be either in the subject or predicate position of a proposition in a syllogism—the terms must be general terms, or categorical terms as they came to be called. Consequently, the propositions of a syllogism should be categorical propositions (both terms general) and syllogisms that employ only categorical terms came to be called categorical syllogisms.

It is clear that nothing would prevent a singular term occurring in a syllogism—so long as it was always in the subject position—however, such a syllogism, even if valid, is not a categorical syllogism. An example is Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal. Intuitively this is as valid as All Greeks are men, all men are mortal therefore all Greeks are mortals. To argue that its validity can be explained by the theory of syllogism would require that we show that Socrates is a man is the equivalent of a categorical proposition. It can be argued Socrates is a man is equivalent to All that are identical to Socrates are men, so our non-categorical syllogism can be justified by use of the equivalence above and then citing BARBARA.

Existential import
If a statement includes a term such that the statement is false if the term has no instances, then the statement is said to have existential import with respect to that term. It is ambiguous whether or not a universal statement of the form All A is B is to be considered as true, false, or even meaningless if there are no As. If it is considered as false in such cases, then the statement All A is B has existential import with respect to A.

It is claimed Aristotle's logic system does not cover cases where there are no instances. Aristotle's goal was to develop a logic for science. He relegates fictions, such as mermaids and unicorns, to the realms of poetry and literature. In his mind, they exist outside the ambit of science, which is why he leaves no room for such non-existent entities in his logic. This is a thoughtful choice, not an inadvertent omission. Technically, Aristotelian science is a search for definitions, where a definition is "a phrase signifying a thing's essence." Because non-existent entities cannot be anything, they do not, in Aristotle's mind, possess an essence. This is why he leaves no place for fictional entities like goat-stags (or unicorns).

However, many logic systems developed since do consider the case where there may be no instances. Medieval logicians were aware of the problem of existential import and maintained that negative propositions do not carry existential import, and that positive propositions with subjects that do not supposit are false.

The following problems arise:

1. In natural language and normal use, which statements of the forms, All A is B, No A is B, Some A is B, and Some A is not B, have existential import and with respect to which terms?

2. In the four forms of categorical statements used in syllogism, which statements of the form AaB, AeB, AiB and AoB have existential import and with respect to which terms?

3. What existential imports must the forms AaB, AeB, AiB and AoB have for the square of opposition to be valid?

4. What existential imports must the forms AaB, AeB, AiB and AoB have to preserve the validity of the traditionally valid forms of syllogisms?

5. Are the existential imports required to satisfy (d) above such that the normal uses in natural languages of the forms All A is B, No A is B, Some A is B and Some A is not B are intuitively and fairly reflected by the categorical statements of forms AaB, AeB, AiB and AoB?

For example, if it is accepted that AiB is false if there are no As and AaB entails AiB, then AiB has existential import with respect to A, and so does AaB. Further, if it is accepted that AiB entails BiA, then AiB and AaB have existential import with respect to B as well. Similarly, if AoB is false if there are no As, and AeB entails AoB, and AeB entails BeA (which in turn entails BoA) then both AeB and AoB have existential import with respect to both A and B. It follows immediately that all universal categorical statements have existential import with respect to both terms. If AaB and AeB is a fair representation of the use of statements in normal natural language of All A is B and No A is B respectively, then the following example consequences arise:

 * "All flying horses are mythical" is false if there are no flying horses.
 * If "No men are fire-eating rabbits" is true, then "There are fire-eating rabbits" is true; and so on.

If it is ruled that no universal statement has existential import then the square of opposition fails in several respects (e.g. AaB does not entail AiB) and a number of syllogisms are no longer valid (e.g. BaC, AaB->AiC).

These problems and paradoxes arise in both natural language statements and statements in syllogism form because of ambiguity, in particular ambiguity with respect to All. If "Fred claims all his books were Pulitzer Prize winners", is Fred claiming that he wrote any books? If not, then is what he claims true? Suppose Jane says none of her friends are poor; is that true if she has no friends?

The first-order predicate calculus avoids such ambiguity by using formulae that carry no existential import with respect to universal statements. Existential claims must be explicitly stated. Thus, natural language statements—of the forms All A is B, No A is B, Some A is B, and Some A is not B—can be represented in first order predicate calculus in which any existential import with respect to terms A and/or B is either explicit or not made at all. Consequently, the four forms AaB, AeB, AiB, and AoB can be represented in first order predicate in every combination of existential import—so it can establish which construal, if any, preserves the square of opposition and the validity of the traditionally valid syllogism. Strawson claims such a construal is possible, but the results are such that, in his view, the answer to question (e) above is no.

Syllogistic fallacies
People often make mistakes when reasoning syllogistically.

For instance, from the premises some A are B, some B are C, people tend to come to a definitive conclusion that therefore some A are C. However, this does not follow according to the rules of classical logic. For instance, while some cats (A) are black things (B), and some black things (B) are televisions (C), it does not follow from the parameters that some cats (A) are televisions (C). This is because in the structure of the syllogism invoked (i.e. III-1) the middle term is not distributed in either the major premise or in the minor premise, a pattern called the "fallacy of the undistributed middle". Because of this, it can be hard to follow formal logic, and a closer eye is needed in order to ensure that an argument is, in fact, valid.

Determining the validity of a syllogism involves determining the distribution of each term in each statement, meaning whether all members of that term are accounted for.

In simple syllogistic patterns, the fallacies of invalid patterns are:

 * Undistributed middle: Neither of the premises accounts for all members of the middle term, which consequently fails to link the major and minor term.
 * Illicit treatment of the major term: The conclusion implicates all members of the major term (P – meaning the proposition is negative); however, the major premise does not account for them all (i.e., P is either an affirmative predicate or a particular subject there).
 * Illicit treatment of the minor term: Same as above, but for the minor term (S – meaning the proposition is universal) and minor premise (where S is either a particular subject or an affirmative predicate).
 * Exclusive premises: Both premises are negative, meaning no link is established between the major and minor terms.
 * Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise: If either premise is negative, the conclusion must also be.
 * Negative conclusion from affirmative premises: If both premises are affirmative, the conclusion must also be.

Other types

 * Disjunctive syllogism
 * Hypothetical syllogism
 * Legal syllogism
 * Polysyllogism
 * Prosleptic syllogism
 * Quasi-syllogism
 * Statistical syllogism

title: Syllogism


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Engrish

Engrish is a slang term for the inaccurate, poorly translated, nonsensical or ungrammatical use of the English language by native speakers of other languages. The word itself relates to Japanese speakers' tendency to struggle to pronounce the English and  distinctly arising from the fact Japanese has only one liquid phoneme (usually romanized r), but its definition encompasses many more errors. Terms such as Japanglish, Japlish, Jinglish, or Janglish are more specific to Japanese Engrish. The related Japanese term wasei-eigo (和製英語: 'Japanese-made English') refers to pseudo-anglicisms that have entered everyday Japanese.

The term Engrish first appears in the 1940s (suggestive of a mispronunciation of English) but it was not until the 1980s that it began to be used as a byname for defective Asian English. While the term may refer to spoken English, it often describes written English. In Japan, it is common to add English text to items for decorative and fashion purposes (see Cool). Such text is often added to create a cosmopolitan feeling rather than to be read by native English speakers, and so may often be meaningless or grammatically incorrect. Engrish can be found in many places, including signs, menus, and advertisements. The words are frequently humorous to speakers of English.

Japanese Engrish / Japanglish
Japanese and English have significantly different grammar: Japanese word order, the frequent omission of subjects in Japanese, the absence of articles, a near-complete absence of consonant clusters, and difficulties in distinguishing /l/ and /r/, or /θ/ and /s/ sounds, all contribute to substantial problems using Standard English effectively. Japanese people have tended to score comparatively poorly on international tests of English.

Further, English is frequently used in Japan (and elsewhere) for aesthetic rather than functional purposes; i.e., for Japanese consumption, not for English speakers per se, as a way of appearing "smart, sophisticated and modern", in much the same way as Japanese and similar writing scripts are used in Western fashion. Such decorative English is not meant to be read and understood by native English speakers, so emphasis is not placed on coherence or accuracy.

The Japanese language also makes extensive use of loanwords, especially from English in recent decades, and these words are transliterated into a Japanese form of pronunciation using the katakana syllabary. Japanese speakers may thus only be familiar with the Japanese pronunciation or Japanese meaning, rather than its original pronunciation or meaning. This is particularly the case when the source English word contains sounds or sound clusters which have no equivalent in katakana.

Examples include:
 * "Modan gāru" vs "Modern girl"
 * For a more recent example: Sega's Mega Drive is spelled in katakana as メガドライブ, hence it is pronounced as Mega Doraibu; the console was renamed for the market of the United States of America as Sega Genesis.
 * The Casiopea jazz fusion band (est. 1976) has its name based on "Cassiopeia": neither the double s nor the three-vowel -eia would fit the katakana format.

In popular culture
Engrish has been featured occasionally in South Park, an American animated TV show by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. One example is the song "Let's Fighting Love", used in the episode "Good Times with Weapons", which parodies the poorly translated opening theme sequences sometimes shown in anime. Parker and Stone's feature-length film Team America: World Police (2004) also features Engrish when the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is depicted singing the song "I'm so Ronery".

Monty Python's Flying Circus featured a parody of the drama series Elizabeth R, where they portrayed the cast riding motor-scooters and speaking Engrish, thus changing the title to "Erizabeth L".

In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, the Parker family goes to a Chinese restaurant for their Christmas dinner, and are serenaded by the waitstaff with Engrish Christmas carols, such as "Deck the harrs wis boughs of horry, fa ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra" and "Jingre berrs, jingre berrs, jingre arr the way, oh what fun it is to ride in one-horse open sreigh!"

The British fashion brand Superdry, which takes inspiration from Japanese clothing styles, has established a style of placing meaningless Japanese text such as 'Sunglasses company' and 'membership certificate' on clothing sold in Britain. The company explained to a Japanese television news programme that most translations were done using simple automatic translation programs such as Babel Fish, without attempting to make the texts accurate.

title: Engrish


text:
Autonomous robot

An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars.

Industrial robot arms that work on assembly lines inside factories may also be considered autonomous robots, though their autonomy is restricted due to a highly structured environment and their inability to locomote.

Self-maintenance
The first requirement for complete physical autonomy is the ability for a robot to take care of itself. Many of the battery-powered robots on the market today can find and connect to a charging station, and some toys like Sony's Aibo are capable of self-docking to charge their batteries.

Self-maintenance is based on "proprioception", or sensing one's own internal status. In the battery charging example, the robot can tell proprioceptively that its batteries are low, and it then seeks the charger. Another common proprioceptive sensor is for heat monitoring. Increased proprioception will be required for robots to work autonomously near people and in harsh environments. Common proprioceptive sensors include thermal, optical, and haptic sensing, as well as the Hall effect (electric).

Sensing the environment
Exteroception is sensing things about the environment. Autonomous robots must have a range of environmental sensors to perform their task and stay out of trouble. The autonomous robot can recognize sensor failures and minimize the impact on the performance caused by failures.

 * Common exteroceptive sensors include the electromagnetic spectrum, sound, touch, chemical (smell, odor), temperature, range to various objects, and altitude.

Some robotic lawn mowers will adapt their programming by detecting the speed in which grass grows as needed to maintain a perfectly cut lawn, and some vacuum cleaning robots have dirt detectors that sense how much dirt is being picked up and use this information to tell them to stay in one area longer.

Task performance
The next step in autonomous behavior is to actually perform a physical task. A new area showing commercial promise is domestic robots, with a flood of small vacuuming robots beginning with iRobot and Electrolux in 2002. While the level of intelligence is not high in these systems, they navigate over wide areas and pilot in tight situations around homes using contact and non-contact sensors. Both of these robots use proprietary algorithms to increase coverage over simple random bounce.

The next level of autonomous task performance requires a robot to perform conditional tasks. For instance, security robots can be programmed to detect intruders and respond in a particular way depending upon where the intruder is. For example, Amazon (company) launched its Astro for home monitoring, security and eldercare in September 2021.

Indoor navigation
For a robot to associate behaviors with a place (localization) requires it to know where it is and to be able to navigate point-to-point. Such navigation began with wire-guidance in the 1970s and progressed in the early 2000s to beacon-based triangulation. Current commercial robots autonomously navigate based on sensing natural features. The first commercial robots to achieve this were Pyxus' HelpMate hospital robot and the CyberMotion guard robot, both designed by robotics pioneers in the 1980s. These robots originally used manually created CAD floor plans, sonar sensing and wall-following variations to navigate buildings. The next generation, such as MobileRobots' PatrolBot and autonomous wheelchair, both introduced in 2004, have the ability to create their own laser-based maps of a building and to navigate open areas as well as corridors. Their control system changes its path on the fly if something blocks the way.

At first, autonomous navigation was based on planar sensors, such as laser range-finders, that can only sense at one level. The most advanced systems now fuse information from various sensors for both localization (position) and navigation. Systems such as Motivity can rely on different sensors in different areas, depending upon which provides the most reliable data at the time, and can re-map a building autonomously.

Rather than climb stairs, which requires highly specialized hardware, most indoor robots navigate handicapped-accessible areas, controlling elevators, and electronic doors. With such electronic access-control interfaces, robots can now freely navigate indoors. Autonomously climbing stairs and opening doors manually are topics of research at the current time.

As these indoor techniques continue to develop, vacuuming robots will gain the ability to clean a specific user-specified room or a whole floor. Security robots will be able to cooperatively surround intruders and cut off exits. These advances also bring concomitant protections: robots' internal maps typically permit "forbidden areas" to be defined to prevent robots from autonomously entering certain regions.

Outdoor navigation
Outdoor autonomy is most easily achieved in the air, since obstacles are rare. Cruise missiles are rather dangerous highly autonomous robots. Pilotless drone aircraft are increasingly used for reconnaissance. Some of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are capable of flying their entire mission without any human interaction at all except possibly for the landing where a person intervenes using radio remote control. Some drones are capable of safe, automatic landings, however. SpaceX operates a number of Autonomous spaceport drone ships, used to safely land and recover Falcon 9 rockets at sea.

Outdoor autonomy is the most difficult for ground vehicles, due to:
 * Three-dimensional terrain
 * Great disparities in surface density
 * Weather exigencies
 * Instability of the sensed environment

Open problems in autonomous robotics
There are several open problems in autonomous robotics which are special to the field rather than being a part of the general pursuit of AI. According to George A. Bekey's Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Implementation and Control, problems include things such as making sure the robot is able to function correctly and not run into obstacles autonomously. Reinforcement learning has been used to control and plan the navigation of autonomous robots, specifically when a group of them operate in collaboration with each other.

Researchers concerned with creating true artificial life are concerned not only with intelligent control, but further with the capacity of the robot to find its own resources through foraging (looking for food, which includes both energy and spare parts).
 * Energy autonomy and foraging

This is related to autonomous foraging, a concern within the sciences of behavioral ecology, social anthropology, and human behavioral ecology; as well as robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.

Societal impact and issues
As autonomous robots have grown in ability and technical levels, there has been increasing societal awareness and news coverage of the latest advances, and also some of the philosophical issues, economic effects, and societal impacts that arise from the roles and activities of autonomous robots.

Elon Musk, a prominent business executive and billionaire has warned for years of the possible hazards and pitfalls of autonomous robots; however, his own company is one of the most prominent companies that is trying to devise new advanced technologies in this area.

In 2021, a United Nations group of government experts, known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons – Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, held a conference to highlight the ethical concerns which arise from the increasingly advanced technology for autonomous robots to wield weapons and to play a military role.

Early robots
The first autonomous robots were known as Elmer and Elsie, constructed in the late 1940s by W. Grey Walter. They were the first robots programmed to "think" the way biological brains do and were meant to have free will. Elmer and Elsie were often labeled as tortoises because of how they were shaped and the manner in which they moved. They were capable of phototaxis, the movement that occurs in response to light stimulus.

Space probes
The Mars rovers MER-A and MER-B (now known as Spirit rover and Opportunity rover) found the position of the Sun and navigated their own routes to destinations, on the fly, by:

 * Mapping the surface with 3D vision
 * Computing safe and unsafe areas on the surface within that field of vision
 * Computing optimal paths across the safe area towards the desired destination
 * Driving along the calculated route
 * Repeating this cycle until either the destination is reached, or there is no known path to the destination

The planned ESA Rover, Rosalind Franklin rover, is capable of vision based relative localisation and absolute localisation to autonomously navigate safe and efficient trajectories to targets by:

 * Reconstructing 3D models of the terrain surrounding the Rover using a pair of stereo cameras
 * Determining safe and unsafe areas of the terrain and the general "difficulty" for the Rover to navigate the terrain
 * Computing efficient paths across the safe area towards the desired destination
 * Driving the Rover along the planned path
 * Building up a navigation map of all previous navigation data

During the final NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge in 2016, a rover, named Cataglyphis, successfully demonstrated fully autonomous navigation, decision-making, and sample detection, retrieval, and return capabilities. The rover relied on a fusion of measurements from inertial sensors, wheel encoders, Lidar, and camera for navigation and mapping, instead of using GPS or magnetometers. During the 2-hour challenge, Cataglyphis traversed over 2.6 km and returned five different samples to its starting position.

General-use autonomous robots

The Seekur robot was the first commercially available robot to demonstrate MDARS-like capabilities for general use by airports, utility plants, corrections facilities and Homeland Security.

The DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge have encouraged development of even more autonomous capabilities for ground vehicles, while this has been the demonstrated goal for aerial robots since 1990 as part of the AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition.

Between 2013 and 2017, TotalEnergies has held the ARGOS Challenge to develop the first autonomous robot for oil and gas production sites. The robots had to face adverse outdoor conditions such as rain, wind and extreme temperatures.

Some significant current robots include:
 * Sophia is an autonomous robot that is known for its human-like appearance and behavior compared to previous robotic variants. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Sophia imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversations on predefined topics (e.g. on the weather). The AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows it to improve responses in the future.
 * Nine other robot humanoid "siblings" who were also created by Hanson Robotics. Fellow Hanson robots are Alice, Albert Einstein Hubo, BINA48, Han, Jules, Professor Einstein, Philip K. Dick Android, Zeno, and Joey Chaos. Around 2019–20, Hanson released "Little Sophia" as a companion that could teach children how to code, including support for Python, Blockly, and Raspberry Pi.

Military autonomous robots
Lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) are a type of autonomous robot military system that can independently search for and engage targets based on programmed constraints and descriptions. LAWs are also known as lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), autonomous weapon systems (AWS), robotic weapons, killer robots or slaughterbots. LAWs may operate in the air, on land, on water, under water, or in space. The autonomy of current systems was restricted in the sense that a human gives the final command to attack - though there are exceptions with certain "defensive" systems.

 * UGV Interoperability Profile (UGV IOP), Robotics and Autonomous Systems – Ground IOP (RAS-G IOP), was originally a research program started by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) to organize and maintain open architecture interoperability standards for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV).   The IOP was initially created by U.S. Army Robotic Systems Joint Project Office (RS JPO):
 * In October 2019, Textron and Howe & Howe unveiled their Ripsaw M5 vehicle, and on 9 January 2020, the U.S. Army awarded them a contract for the Robotic Combat Vehicle-Medium (RCV-M) program. Four Ripsaw M5 prototypes are to be delivered and used in a company-level to determine the feasibility of integrating unmanned vehicles into ground combat operations in late 2021.  It can reach speeds of more than 40 mph, has a combat weight of 10.5 tons and a payload capacity of 8000 lb. The RCV-M is armed with a 30 mm autocannon and a pair of anti-tank missiles. The standard armor package can withstand 12.7×108mm rounds, with optional add-on armor increasing weight to up to 20 tons. If disabled, it will retain the ability to shoot, with its sensors and radio uplink prioritized to continue transmitting as its primary function.
 * Crusher is a 13200 lb autonomous off-road Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle developed by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center for DARPA. It is a follow-up on the previous Spinner vehicle. DARPA's technical name for the Crusher is Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle and Perceptor Integration System, and the whole project is known by the acronym UPI, which stands for Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle PerceptOR Integration.
 * CATS Warrior will be an autonomous wingman drone capable of take-off & landing from land & in sea from an aircraft carrier, it will team up with the existing fighter platforms of the IAF like Tejas, Su-30 MKI and Jaguar which will act like its mothership.
 * The Warrior is primarily envisioned for the Indian Air Force use and a similar, smaller version will be designed for the Indian Navy. It would be controlled by the mothership and accomplish tasks such as scouting, absorbing enemy fire, attacking the targets if necessary with its internal & external pylons weapons or sacrifice itself by crashing into the target.
 * The SGR-A1 is a type of autonomous sentry gun that was jointly developed by Samsung Techwin (now Hanwha Aerospace) and Korea University to assist South Korean troops in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is widely considered as the first unit of its kind to have an integrated system that includes surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition. While units of the SGR-A1 have been reportedly deployed, their number is unknown due to the project being "highly classified".

Humanoid
Tesla Robot and NVIDIA GR00T are humanoid robots.

Delivery robot
A delivery robot is an autonomous robot used for delivering goods.

Charging Robot
An Automatic Charging Robot, unveiled on July 27, 2022, is an arm-shaped automatic charging robot, charging an electric vehicle. It has been running a pilot operation at Hyundai Motor Group's headquarters since 2021. VISION AI System based on deep learning technology has been applied. When an electric vehicle is parked in front of the charger, the robot arm recognizes the charger of the electric vehicle and derives coordinates. And automatically insert a connector into the electric car and operate fast charging. The robot arm is configured in a vertical multi-joint structure so that it can be applied to chargers at different locations for each vehicle. In addition, waterproof and dustproof functions are applied.

Construction robots
Construction robots are used directly on job sites and perform work such as building, material handling, earthmoving, and surveillance.

Research and education mobile robots
Research and education mobile robots are mainly used during a prototyping phase in the process of building full scale robots. They are a scaled down version of bigger robots with the same types of sensors, kinematics and software stack (e.g. ROS). They are often extendable and provide comfortable programming interface and development tools. Next to full scale robot prototyping they are also used for education, especially at university level, where more and more labs about programming autonomous vehicles are being introduced.

Legislation
In March 2016, a bill was introduced in Washington, D.C., allowing pilot ground robotic deliveries. The program was to take place from September 15 through the end of December 2017. The robots were limited to a weight of 50 pounds unloaded and a maximum speed of 10 miles per hour. In case the robot stopped moving because of malfunction the company was required to remove it from the streets within 24 hours. There were allowed only 5 robots to be tested per company at a time. A 2017 version of the Personal Delivery Device Act bill was under review as of March 2017.

In February 2017, a bill was passed in the US state of Virginia via the House bill, HB2016, and the Senate bill, SB1207, that will allow autonomous delivery robots to travel on sidewalks and use crosswalks statewide beginning on July 1, 2017. The robots will be limited to a maximum speed of 10 mph and a maximum weight of 50 pounds. In the states of Idaho and Florida there are also talks about passing the similar legislature.

It has been discussed that robots with similar characteristics to invalid carriages (e.g. 10 mph maximum, limited battery life) might be a workaround for certain classes of applications. If the robot was sufficiently intelligent and able to recharge itself using the existing electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure it would only need minimal supervision and a single arm with low dexterity might be enough to enable this function if its visual systems had enough resolution.

In November 2017, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors announced that companies would need to get a city permit in order to test these robots. In addition, the Board banned sidewalk delivery robots from making non-research deliveries.

Scientific concepts

 * Artificial intelligence
 * Cognitive robotics
 * Developmental robotics
 * Evolutionary robotics
 * Simultaneous localization and mapping
 * Teleoperation
 * von Neumann machine
 * Wake-up robot problem
 * William Grey Walter

Types of robots

 * Autonomous car
 * Autonomous research robot
 * Autonomous spaceport drone ship
 * Domestic robot
 * Humanoid robot

Specific robot models

 * AIBO
 * Amazon Scout
 * Microbotics
 * PatrolBot
 * RoboBee
 * Robomow

Others

 * Remote-control vehicle
 * Robot control

title: Autonomous robot