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Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, and 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 possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments
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. 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.
The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
Religious philosophy is philosophical thinking that is influenced and directed as a consequence of teachings from a particular religion. It can be done objectively, but it may also be done as a persuasion tool by believers in that faith. Religious philosophy is concerned with the nature of religion, theories of salvation, and conceptions of god, gods, and/or the divine.
An unobservable is an entity whose existence, nature, properties, qualities or relations are not directly observable by humans. In philosophy of science, typical examples of "unobservables" are the force of gravity, causation and beliefs or desires. The distinction between observable and unobservable plays a central role in Immanuel Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena as well as in John Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The theory that unobservables posited by scientific theories exist is referred to as scientific realism. It contrasts with instrumentalism, which asserts that we should withhold ontological commitments to unobservables even though it is useful for scientific theories to refer to them. There is considerable disagreement about which objects should be classified as unobservable, for example, whether bacteria studied using microscopes or positrons studied using cloud chambers count as unobservable. Different notions of unobservability have been formulated corresponding to different types of obstacles to their observation.
Ian MacDougall Hacking was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and was a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.
In philosophy of perception and epistemology, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. When referred to as direct realism, naïve realism is often contrasted with indirect realism.
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences; out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside the mind's perception of them. Conceptualism is anti-realist about abstract objects, just like immanent realism is.
Early modern philosophy is a period in the history of philosophy that overlaps with the beginning of the period known as modern philosophy.
Philosophical realism – usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters – is the view that a certain kind of thing has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding. This can apply to items such as the physical world, the past and future, other minds, and the self, though may also apply less directly to things such as universals, mathematical truths, moral truths, and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality entirely.
In the philosophy of science, underdetermination or the underdetermination of theory by data is the idea that evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it. The underdetermination thesis says that all evidence necessarily underdetermines any scientific theory.
Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.
Scottish common sense realism, also known as the Scottish school of common sense, is a realist school of philosophy that originated in the ideas of Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, James Beattie, and Dugald Stewart during the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. Reid emphasized man's innate ability to perceive common ideas and that this process is inherent in and interdependent with judgement. Common sense, therefore, is the foundation of philosophical inquiry. Though best remembered for its opposition to the pervasive philosophy of David Hume, Scottish common sense philosophy is influential and evident in the works of Thomas Jefferson and late 18th-century American politics.
Tamara Horowitz was an American philosopher who worked on epistemology, feminist philosophy and the philosophy of science. She spent much of her career at the University of Pittsburgh, and was appointed chair of the philosophy department there in September 1999, but died a few months later.
Alan Richard White was an analytic philosopher who worked mainly in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and, latterly, legal philosophy. Peter Hacker notes that he was "the most skillful developer of Rylean ... ideas in philosophical psychology" and that "if anyone surpassed Austin in subtlety and refinement in the discrimination of grammatical differences, it was White." Richard Swinburne remarks that "during the heyday of 'ordinary language philosophy' no tongue practised it better."
Dutch philosophy is a broad branch of philosophy that discusses the contributions of Dutch philosophers to the discourse of Western philosophy and Renaissance philosophy. The philosophy, as its own entity, arose in the 16th and 17th centuries through the philosophical studies of Desiderius Erasmus and Baruch Spinoza. The adoption of the humanistic perspective by Erasmus, despite his Christian background, and rational but theocentric perspective expounded by Spinoza, supported each of these philosopher's works. In general, the philosophy revolved around acknowledging the reality of human self-determination and rational thought rather than focusing on traditional ideals of fatalism and virtue raised in Christianity. The roots of philosophical frameworks like the mind-body dualism and monism debate can also be traced to Dutch philosophy, which is attributed to 17th century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes was both a mathematician and philosopher during the Dutch Golden Age, despite being from the Kingdom of France. Modern Dutch philosophers like D.H. Th. Vollenhoven provided critical analyses on the dichotomy between dualism and monism.
Richard Anthony Fumerton is a Canadian American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa with research interests in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and value theory. He has been cited as an influential expert on the position of "metaepistemological scepticism". He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1971 and his M.A. and PhD from Brown University in 1973 and 1974, respectively. He has been the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa since 2003.
References
- ↑ Broadie, Frederick (1977). "Epistemological Direct Realism in Descartes' Philosophy". Philosophical Books. 18 (1): 17–18. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0149.1977.tb01698.x. ISSN 1468-0149.
- ↑ Watson, Richard A. (1977). "Epistemological Direct Realism in Descartes' Philosophy (review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 15 (3): 342–343. doi:10.1353/hph.2008.0161. ISSN 1538-4586. S2CID 144433850.
- ↑ "O'Neil Lecture Series". Department of Philosophy, The University of New Mexico.
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