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.
A belief is a subjective attitude that a proposition is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance, take, or opinion about something. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection. For example, few carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be occurrent, but can instead be dispositional.
Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic mark of the mental by many philosophers. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.
Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception.
A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent or organism toward a proposition.
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.
De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinction is used regularly in metaphysics and in philosophy of language.
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.
David Benjamin Kaplan is an American philosopher. He is the Hans Reichenbach Professor of Scientific Philosophy at the UCLA Department of Philosophy. His philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of Frege and Russell. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, propositions, and reference in intensional contexts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
Rudolph Lingens is a fictional character often used by contemporary analytic philosophers as a placeholder name in a hypothetical scenario which illustrates some feature of the indexicality of natural language. He was created by the logician Gottlob Frege in the course of one of the earliest systematic discussions of indexicals. A number of philosophers picking up on Frege's discussion of indexicals, notably John Perry, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker, have adopted Lingens to make their own points about indexicals.
Nathan U. Salmon is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic.
In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs — for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language — an extensional context is a syntactic environment in which a sub-sentential expression e can be replaced by an expression with the same extension and without affecting the truth-value of the sentence as a whole. Extensional contexts are contrasted with opaque contexts where truth-preserving substitutions are not possible.
Originally, fallibilism is the philosophical principle that propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or justified, or that neither knowledge nor belief is certain. The term was coined in the late nineteenth century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, as a response to foundationalism. Theorists, following Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, may also refer to fallibilism as the notion that knowledge might turn out to be false. Furthermore, fallibilism is said to imply corrigibilism, the principle that propositions are open to revision. Fallibilism is often juxtaposed with infallibilism.
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.
The Journal of Philosophy is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal on philosophy, founded in 1904 at Columbia University. Its stated purpose is "To publish philosophical articles of current interest and encourage the interchange of ideas, especially the exploration of the borderline between philosophy and other disciplines." Subscriptions and online access are managed by the Philosophy Documentation Center.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction, used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
De se is Latin for "of oneself" and, in philosophy, it is a phrase used to delineate what some consider a category of ascription distinct from "de dicto and de re". Such ascriptions are found with propositional attitudes, mental states held by an agent toward a proposition. Such de se ascriptions occur when an agent holds a mental state towards a proposition about themselves, knowing that this proposition is about themselves.
Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people know?", "How do we know what we know?", and "Why do we know what we know?". Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.
This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language
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.
