buridan's ass
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
Alternative spelling of Buridan's ass (“the hypothetical donkey who is the subject of a philosophical paradox concerning choices of equal value”).
Example Sentences
- "Buridan is best-known to philosophers for the example of "Buridan's Ass," starving to death between two equidistant and equally tempting bales of hay, [...]"
- "They remain like Buridan's Ass, in a kind of frozen indecisiveness, between total freedom and total regulation."
- "Did you refuse to choose between saving your son sentenced to death penalty and saving your son sentenced to slavery for life? Is that not an indication that you find no difference between them, and are frozen, as Buridan's ass, into an inability to choose between them, and have instead chosen to starve morally, rather than make such a choice?"
- "The worst case for productivity is probably when two _perfectly equivalent_ ways exist. Buridan's ass notoriously starved to death in just such a worst-case situation; groups of programmers may not go quite as far, but are sure to waste lots of time & energy deciding."
- "Since either haystack is better than starvation, and since neither haystack is known to be worse than the other, Buridan's ass has a good reason to choose either. Suppose it chooses haystack A, rejecting haystack B as well as starvation."
- "This Narrator is like the famous or infamous Buridan's ass, protagonist of a problem or example that, in one form or another, can be found in philosophical discourse from Aristotle to Schpenhauer."
Etymology
After the fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes.