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Evidentialist
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 dox ... [...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 possibili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Regress Argument
In epistemology, the regress argument is the argument that any proposition requires a justification. However, any justification itself requires support. This means that any proposition whatsoever can be endlessly (infinitely) questioned, resulting in infinite regress. It is a problem in epistemology and in any general situation where a statement has to be justified. The argument is also known as ''diallelus'' (Latin) or ''diallelon'', from Greek ''di' allelon'' "through or by means of one another" and as the epistemic regress problem. It is an element of the Münchhausen trilemma. Origin The argument is usually attributed to the Pyrrhonist philosopher Agrippa the Skeptic as part of what has become known as " Agrippa's trilemma". The argument can be seen as a response to the suggestion in Plato's '' Theaetetus'' that knowledge is justified true belief. The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus described Agrippa's trope as follows: According to the mode deriving from disput ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Truth Value
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (''true'' or '' false''). Computing In some programming languages, any expression can be evaluated in a context that expects a Boolean data type. Typically (though this varies by programming language) expressions like the number zero, the empty string, empty lists, and null evaluate to false, and strings with content (like "abc"), other numbers, and objects evaluate to true. Sometimes these classes of expressions are called "truthy" and "falsy" / "false". Classical logic In classical logic, with its intended semantics, the truth values are ''true'' (denoted by ''1'' or the verum ⊤), and '' untrue'' or '' false'' (denoted by ''0'' or the falsum ⊥); that is, classical logic is a two-valued logic. This set of two values is also called the Boolean domain. Corresponding semantics of l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University,"Robert Nozick, 1938-2002". ''Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association'', November 2002: 76(2). and was president of the . He is best known for his books '''' (1974), a |
Causal Theory Of Knowledge
"A Causal Theory of Knowing" is a philosophical essay written by Alvin Goldman in 1967, published in ''The Journal of Philosophy''. It is based on existing theories of knowledge in the realm of epistemology, the study of philosophy through the scope of knowledge. The essay attempts to define knowledge by connecting facts, beliefs and knowledge through underlying and connective series called causal chains. It provides a causal theory of knowledge. A causal chain is repeatedly described as a sequence of events for which one event in a chain causes the next. According to Goldman, these chains can only exist with the presence of an accepted fact, a belief in the fact, and a cause for the subject to believe the fact. The essay also explores the ideas of perception and memory through the use of the causal chains and the concept of knowledge. Background The essay is regarded as an improvement and rebuttal of Edmund Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", which is one of many att ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology. Education and career Goldman earned his BA from Columbia University and PhD from Princeton University and previously taught at the University of Michigan (1963–1980), the University of Illinois, Chicago (1980–1983) and the University of Arizona (1983–1994). He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1994 and retired in 2018. He is married to the ethicist Holly Martin Smith. Philosophical work Goldman has done influential work on a wide range of philosophical topics, but his principal areas of research are epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. Action theory Goldman's early book, ''A Theory of Human Action'' (a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis), presents a systematic way of classifying and relating the many actions we perform at any time. Its influ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reliabilism
Reliabilism, a category of theories in the philosophical discipline of 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. Episte ..., has been advanced as a theory both of Theory of justification, 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 Internalism and externalism#Epistemology, 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 ... [...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, t ... [...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 moder ... [...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. 341â ... [...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] |
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 ( emp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
