어휘 문제 연습

Consider a large heap containing ten thousand grains of sand. Nearly everyone agrees that removing a single grain from such a heap leaves another heap behind; surely one grain could never make the difference between a heap and a non-heap. Yet if this principle is applied repeatedly, grain by grain, the heap eventually ② grows to a single lonely grain, or even to no grains at all, and logic alone seems to force us to accept that this final result still counts as a heap. Something has clearly ① gone wrong along the way, since no reasonable person would call one grain of sand a heap, but pinpointing exactly which single removal transformed a heap into a non-heap seems ③ impossible. The puzzle exposes a deep discomfort with vague terms like "heap," "tall," or "bald," concepts that seem to admit no sharp ④ boundary yet are used confidently in everyday language. Some philosophers conclude that classical logic itself may need to be ⑤ revised to accommodate the genuine vagueness built into ordinary human language.

Suppose a mysterious being with a near-perfect track record of predicting human choices presents a player with two boxes. Box A always contains a visible thousand dollars, while Box B contains either a million dollars or nothing at all, depending on a prediction the being made before the game even began. If the being predicted the player would take only Box B, it ① emptied the box entirely; if it predicted the player would take both boxes, it left Box B empty. The player may choose to take only Box B, or to take both boxes, and the prediction has already been made and cannot change. One line of reasoning says taking both boxes is ② strictly better, since whatever is already inside the boxes cannot be altered by the player's choice at this point. A second line of reasoning says taking only Box B is better, since the being's near-perfect ③ accuracy means that choosing both boxes almost guarantees an empty Box B. This apparent ④ conflict between two seemingly sound arguments has made the puzzle a lasting ⑤ challenge for decision theory.

Imagine a brilliant scientist named Mary who has spent her entire life inside a black-and-white room, learning everything physical science could ever teach about color, including the exact wavelengths of light and the precise neural processes triggered when a person sees red. Despite this ① complete physical knowledge, Mary herself has never actually seen a color; every book, screen, and object in her world has been carefully restricted to shades of gray. Suppose that one day Mary is finally released from the room and shown a ripe red tomato for the first time. Philosopher Frank Jackson argued that Mary would learn something entirely ② new at that moment, namely what it actually feels like to see red, even though she already possessed every physical fact about color there was to know beforehand. If Mary genuinely gains new knowledge upon leaving the room, then physical facts alone ③ cannot capture everything there is to know about conscious experience, ④ confirming that something was indeed missing from her exhaustive scientific education all along, a conclusion that some physicalists find entirely ⑤ unsurprising.

Philosophers often pair the classic trolley problem with a companion case designed to test whether our moral intuitions are actually ① consistent. Imagine a brilliant surgeon who has five patients, each dying from the failure of a different organ, and one healthy visitor in the waiting room whose organs happen to be a perfect ② match for all five. If the surgeon secretly killed the healthy visitor and transplanted the organs, five lives would be saved at the cost of one, exactly the same arithmetic used to justify diverting a runaway trolley onto a track with a single worker. Yet almost everyone who accepts the trolley diversion ③ recoils immediately at the idea of the surgeon cutting up an unwilling patient, even though the numbers are identical in both cases. Philosophers use this contrast to argue that outcomes alone can ④ fully explain our moral judgments, since something about directly using a person's body as a mere means appears to matter deeply to most people's sense of ⑤ right and wrong.

Two drivers, equally distracted by their phones, run a red light in exactly the same careless manner. By pure chance, a child happens to be crossing the street in front of one driver but not the other; the first driver kills the child, while the second driver drives through safely and never even notices the danger. Although both drivers behaved ① identically and made exactly the same reckless choice, society judges them very differently: one faces criminal charges and lifelong guilt, while the other receives, at most, a minor traffic ticket. Philosophers call this troubling ② asymmetry moral luck, since factors entirely outside a person's control end up determining how severely we judge their moral character. If moral responsibility is supposed to ③ depend heavily on luck and circumstance rather than on what a person chooses and intends, this outcome seems deeply unfair, yet few people are willing to excuse the unlucky driver as if nothing worse had happened. Moral luck suggests that our everyday judgments rest on a foundation far ④ shakier than we usually like to admit, a fact many find genuinely ⑤ unsettling.

Political philosophers have long ① debated how much authority, if any, a government may legitimately claim over free individuals. Robert Nozick imagined a hypothetical starting point in which people live without any state at all, each relying on private arrangements to protect their own person and property. He argued that a minimal state, limited strictly to enforcing contracts and protecting citizens from violence, theft, and fraud, could arise gradually through a series of voluntary exchanges, with everyone's rights ② repeatedly being violated along the way. Critics on one side, the anarchists, insist that even this minimal government inevitably ③ violates the rights of those who never consented to join it, since a truly voluntary arrangement would allow individuals to ④ opt out entirely. Critics on the other side argue that a state limited to bare protection cannot address deeper inequalities that arise naturally in any free market. Nozick's thought experiment therefore sits at the center of an ⑤ unresolved argument about where legitimate political authority actually begins.

Consider a village green shared freely by every herder in the community, where each individual may graze as many animals as they wish without paying any fee. From the perspective of any single herder, adding one more animal to the shared pasture brings a clear personal ① loss, since the extra income belongs entirely to that herder alone. The cost of the additional grazing, however, is spread thinly across every herder who uses the green, so no single individual bears more than a tiny fraction of the ② damage. Because this calculation favors adding more animals for every rational herder, the shared pasture is gradually ③ overgrazed until it can no longer support any animals at all, harming the very community whose rational members caused the collapse. Philosophers use this scenario to illustrate a troubling gap between what benefits an individual in the short term and what preserves a shared resource in the ④ long term, a gap that voluntary self-restraint alone rarely ⑤ closes.

Medieval philosophers told the story of a hungry donkey placed exactly midway between two identical, equally fragrant piles of hay, with no factor whatsoever tipping the balance toward either option. Because the donkey is assumed to be a perfectly ① rational creature that always chooses the option supported by the strongest reason, and because neither pile offers any advantage over the other, the donkey supposedly finds itself with no rational basis for choosing one pile rather than the other. ② Paralyzed by this perfect symmetry, the donkey starves to death precisely because it can find no reason to move in either direction. Critics of the story point out that real animals, and real humans, rarely face situations of such flawless symmetry, and that even a tiny, ③ arbitrary preference is usually enough to break the tie in practice. The paradox nevertheless raises a serious question about whether purely rational deliberation can ever ④ generate action on its own, without some additional nudge that reason alone ⑤ willingly supplies.

Time travel to the past has long fascinated physicists and philosophers alike, but it also generates a famously troubling ① contradiction. Suppose a traveler journeyed backward in time and, through some combination of accident and intention, prevented their own grandfather from ever meeting their grandmother. If the grandfather never had children, the traveler themselves would never have been born, which means the traveler could never have existed to make the trip in the first place. Yet if the traveler never made the trip, the grandfather would have ② survived to meet the grandmother after all, allowing the traveler to be born and eventually travel back in time. The story therefore ③ loops endlessly, undermining itself at every turn rather than settling into any stable outcome. Some physicists resolve the paradox by arguing that any consistent timeline must ④ permit such self-defeating actions to succeed freely, while others propose that a traveler who alters the past simply branches off into a separate, parallel timeline instead, an idea many find ⑤ appealing precisely because it avoids the contradiction altogether.

Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly ① seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door. Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions: instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. Now two people exist, each with ② identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is a ③ clear and principled way to say that one of them is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. This malfunction reveals that memory and psychological continuity alone cannot fully ④ settle what personal identity actually requires, a puzzle that remains ⑤ unresolved to this day.