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Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises. 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.
Internalism and externalism are two opposing ways of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings.
Philosophy of religion is "the philosophical examination of the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions". Philosophical discussions on such topics date from ancient times, and appear in the earliest known texts concerning philosophy. The field is related to many other branches of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
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.
Justification is a concept in epistemology used to describe beliefs that one has good reason for holding. Epistemologists are concerned with various epistemic features of belief, which include the ideas of warrant, knowledge, rationality, and probability, among others. Loosely speaking, justification is the reason that someone holds a rationally admissible belief.
In philosophical epistemology, there are two types of coherentism: the coherence theory of truth; and the coherence theory of justification.
In philosophy, a distinction is often made between two different kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Whereas knowledge by description is something like ordinary propositional knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance is familiarity with a person, place, or thing, typically obtained through perceptual experience. According to Bertrand Russell's classic account of acquaintance knowledge, acquaintance is a direct causal interaction between a person and some object that the person is perceiving.
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 their belief. Evidentialism is therefore a thesis about which beliefs are justified and which are not.
Virtue epistemology is a contemporary philosophical approach to epistemology that stresses the importance of intellectual and specifically epistemic virtues. A distinguishing factor of virtue theories is that they use for the evaluation of knowledge the properties of the persons who hold beliefs in addition to or instead of the properties of propositions and beliefs. Some advocates of virtue epistemology claim to more closely follow theories of virtue ethics, while others see only a looser analogy between virtue in ethics and virtue in epistemology.
Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from many traditional philosophical questions. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology. Replacement naturalism maintains that traditional epistemology should be abandoned and replaced with the methodologies of the natural sciences. The general thesis of cooperative naturalism is that traditional epistemology can benefit in its inquiry by using the knowledge we have gained from the cognitive sciences. Substantive naturalism focuses on an asserted equality of facts of knowledge and natural facts.
In metaphilosophy and epistemology, metaepistemology is the study of the conceptual and methodological foundations of epistemology. The conceptual foundations of epistemology include questions regarding the semantics, metaphysics, normativity and epistemology of epistemology, and of the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons. The methodological foundations of epistemology include questions about the legitimacy of the use of intuitions in epistemological inquiry and the relationship between scientific methodology and philosophical methodology.
Infallibilism is the epistemological view that propositional knowledge is incompatible with the possibility of being wrong.
Robert N. Audi is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics, rationality and the theory of action. He is O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and previously held a Chair in the Business School there. His 2005 book, The Good in the Right, updates and strengthens Rossian intuitionism and develops the epistemology of ethics. He has also written important works of political philosophy, particularly on the relationship between church and state. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Society of Christian Philosophers.
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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to epistemology:
Epistemic conservatism is a view in epistemology about the structure of reasons or justification for belief. While there are various forms, epistemic conservatism is generally the view that a person's believing some claim is a reason in support of the claim, at least on the face of it. Others formulate epistemic conservatism as the view that one is, to some degree, justified in believing something simply because one believes it.
Formative epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. According to formative epistemology, knowledge is gained through the imputation of thoughts from one human being to another in the societal setting. Humans are born without intrinsic knowledge and through their evolutionary and developmental processes gain knowledge from other human beings. Thus, according to formative epistemology, all knowledge is completely subjective and truth does not exist.
Jennifer Lackey is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. She is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of The Epistemology of Testimony and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays.
Conciliationism is a view in the epistemology of disagreement according to which one should revise one's opinions closer to one's epistemic peers in the face of epistemic disagreement. Nathan Ballantyne and E.J. Coffman define the view as follows:
References
- ↑ For a collection of articles about this issue see: Feldman, Richard; Warhead, Ted A, eds. (2010). disagreement. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-922608-5.
- 1 2 3 Frances, Frances; Matheson, Jonathann. "Disagreement". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 ed.).
- ↑ Kelly, Thomas (2005). Hawthorne, John; Gendler, Tamar (eds.). The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement. Oxford University Press. pp. 167–196.
- ↑ Matheson, Jonathan (2018-05-14). "The Epistemology of Disagreement". 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology.
- ↑ Weintraub, Ruth (2013). "Can Steadfast Peer Disagreement Be Rational?". Philosophical Quarterly. Wiley-Blackwell. 63 (253): 740–759. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.12065.