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Evidentialism
Evidentialism is a thesis in epistemology which states that one is justified to believe something if and only if that person has evidence which supports said belief. Evidentialism is, therefore, a thesis about which beliefs are justified and which are not. Evidentialism enjoys wide popular support and has for centuries. Perhaps the earliest known proponents of evidentialism is David Hume who said "A wise man apportions his beliefs to the evidence." Similarly, Hitchens's Razor states "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Carl Sagan has also stated "Extraordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence." All of these statements imply acceptance of philosophical evidentialism. For philosophers Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, evidentialism is the strongest argument for justification because it identifies the primary notion of epistemic justification. They argue that if a person's attitude towards a proposition fits their evidence, then their d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Faith
Faith, derived from Latin ''fides'' and Old French ''feid'', is confidence or trust in a person, thing, or In the context of religion, one can define faith as "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion". Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, or evidence while others who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as simply belief without evidence.Russell, Bertrand"Will Religious Faith Cure Our Troubles?" ''Human Society in Ethics and Politics''. Ch 7. Pt 2. Retrieved 16 August 2009. Etymology The English word ''faith'' is thought to date from 1200 to 1250, from the Middle English ''feith'', via Anglo-French ''fed'', Old French ''feid'', ''feit'' from Latin ''fidem'', accusative of ''fidēs'' (trust), akin to ''fīdere'' (to trust). Stages of faith development James W. Fowler (1940–2015) proposes a series of stages of faith-development (or spiritual development) across the human lifespa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hitchens's Razor
Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor (a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims) that states "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." The razor was created by and named after author and journalist Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011). It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief. Analysis The dictum appears in Hitchens's 2007 book titled '' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything''. The term 'Hitchens's razor' itself was used by atheist blogger Rixaeton in December 2010, and popularised ''inter alia'' by evolutionary biologist and atheist activist Jerry Coyne after Hitchens died in December 2011. Some pages earlier in ''God Is Not Great'', Hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reformed Epistemology
In the philosophy of religion, Reformed epistemology is a school of philosophical thought concerning the nature of knowledge (epistemology) as it applies to religious beliefs. The central proposition of Reformed epistemology is that beliefs can be justified by more than evidence alone, contrary to the positions of evidentialism, which argues that while belief other than through evidence may be beneficial, it violates some epistemic duty. Central to Reformed epistemology is the proposition that belief in God may be "properly basic" and not need to be inferred from other truths to be rationally warranted. William Lane Craig describes Reformed epistemology as "One of the most significant developments in contemporary religious epistemology ... which directly assaults the evidentialist construal of rationality." Reformed epistemology was so named because it represents a continuation of the 16th-century Reformed theology of John Calvin, who postulated a '' sensus divinitatis'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas: # The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification # Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony # The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs # Philosophical skepticism, which questions the pos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Skepticism
Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the person doubts that these claims are accurate. In such cases, skeptics normally recommend not disbelief but suspension of belief, i.e. maintaining a neutral attitude that neither affirms nor denies the claim. This attitude is often motivated by the impression that the available evidence is insufficient to support the claim. Formally, skepticism is a topic of interest in philosophy, particularly epistemology. More informally, skepticism as an expression of questioning or doubt can be applied to any topic, such as politics, religion, or pseudoscience. It is often applied within restricted domains, such as morality ( moral skepticism), atheism (skepticism about the existence of God), or the supernatural. Some theorists distinguish "good" or m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Foundationalism
Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon non-inferential justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises.Simon Blackburn, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy'', 2nd (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)p 139 The main rival of the foundationalist theory of justification is the coherence theory of justification, whereby a body of knowledge, not requiring a secure foundation, can be established by the interlocking strength of its components, like a puzzle solved without prior certainty that each small region was solved correctly. Identifying the alternatives as either circular reasoning or infinite regress, and thus exhibiting the regress problem, Aristotle made foundationalism his own clear choice, positing basic beliefs underpinning others.Ted Poston"Foundationalism"(Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Descartes, the most famed foundationalist, discovered a foundati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Basic Beliefs
Basic beliefs (also commonly called foundational beliefs or core beliefs) are, under the epistemological view called foundationalism, the axioms of a belief system. Categories of beliefs Foundationalism holds that all beliefs must be justified in order to be known. Beliefs therefore fall into two categories: * Beliefs that are properly basic, in that they do not depend upon justification of other beliefs, but on something outside the realm of belief (a "non-doxastic justification") * Beliefs that derive from one or more basic beliefs, and therefore depend on the basic beliefs for their validity Description Within this basic framework of foundationalism exist a number of views regarding which types of beliefs qualify as ''properly'' basic; that is, what sorts of beliefs can be justifiably held without the justification of other beliefs. In classical foundationalism, beliefs are held to be properly basic if they are either self-evident axioms, or evident to the senses ( empiri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coherentism
In philosophical epistemology, there are two types of coherentism: the coherence theory of truth; and the coherence theory of justification (also known as epistemic coherentism). Coherent truth is divided between an anthropological approach, which applies only to localized networks ('true within a given sample of a population, given our understanding of the population'), and an approach that is judged on the basis of universals, such as categorical sets. The anthropological approach belongs more properly to the correspondence theory of truth, while the universal theories are a small development within analytic philosophy. The coherentist theory of justification, which may be interpreted as relating to either theory of coherent truth, characterizes epistemic justification as a property of a belief only if that belief is a member of a coherent set. What distinguishes coherentism from other theories of justification is that the set is the primary bearer of justification. As an epi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Doxastic Logic
Doxastic logic is a type of logic concerned with reasoning about beliefs. The term ' derives from the Ancient Greek (''doxa'', "opinion, belief"), from which the English term ''doxa'' ("popular opinion or belief") is also borrowed. Typically, a doxastic logic uses the notation \mathcalx to mean "It is believed that x is the case", and the set \mathbb : \left \ denotes a set of beliefs. In doxastic logic, belief is treated as a modal operator. There is complete parallelism between a person who believes propositions and a formal system that derives propositions. Using doxastic logic, one can express the epistemic counterpart of Gödel's incompleteness theorem of metalogic, as well as Löb's theorem, and other metalogical results in terms of belief. Smullyan, Raymond M., (1986''Logicians who reason about themselves'' Proceedings of the 1986 conference on Theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge, Monterey (CA), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (CA), pp. 341 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reliabilism
Reliabilism, a category of theories in the philosophical discipline of epistemology, has been advanced as a theory both of justification and of knowledge. Process reliabilism has been used as an argument against philosophical skepticism, such as the brain in a vat thought experiment. Process reliabilism is a form of epistemic externalism. Overview A broadly reliabilist theory of knowledge is roughly as follows: One knows that ''p'' (''p'' stands for any proposition—e.g., that the sky is blue) if and only if ''p'' is true, one believes that ''p'' is true, and one has arrived at the belief that ''p'' through some ''reliable process.'' A broadly reliabilist theory of justified belief can be stated as follows: One has a justified belief that ''p'' if, and only if, the belief is the result of a reliable process. Moreover, a similar account can be given (and an elaborate version of this has been given by Alvin Plantinga) for such notions as 'warranted belief' or 'epistemically rat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Infinitism
Infinitism is the view that knowledge may be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. It belongs to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that considers the possibility, nature, and means of knowledge. Epistemological infinitism Since Gettier, "knowledge" is no longer widely accepted as meaning " justified true belief" only. However, some epistemologists still consider knowledge to have a justification condition. Traditional theories of justification (foundationalism and coherentism) and indeed some philosophers consider an infinite regress not to be a valid justification. In their view, if ''A'' is justified by ''B'', ''B'' by ''C'', and so forth, then either # The chain must end with a link that requires no independent justification (a foundation), # The chain must come around in a circle in some finite number of steps (the belief may be justified by its coherence), or # Our beliefs must not be justified after all (as is posited by philosophical skeptics). Infinitism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophers
A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras (6th century BCE).. In the Classics, classical sense, a philosopher was someone who lived according to a certain way of life, focusing upon resolving Meaning of life, existential questions about the human condition; it was not necessary that they discoursed upon Theory, theories or commented upon authors. Those who most arduously committed themselves to this lifestyle would have been considered ''philosophers''. In a modern sense, a philosopher is an intellectual who contributes to one or more branches of philosophy, such as aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics, social theory, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. A philosopher may also be someone who has worked in the hum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
