Related Research Articles
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. Debates in (contemporary) 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
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions. Empiricists may argue that traditions arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences.
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.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of comedic imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas.
Thomas Reid was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher best known for his philosophical method, his theory of perception, and its wide implications on epistemology, and as the developer and defender of an agent-causal theory of free will. He also focused extensively on ethics, theory of action and philosophy of mind.
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
The analogy of the sun is found in the sixth book of The Republic (507b–509c), written by the Greek philosopher Plato as a dialogue between his brother Glaucon and Socrates, and narrated by the latter. Upon being urged by Glaucon to define goodness, a cautious Socrates professes himself incapable of doing so. Instead he draws an analogy and offers to talk about "the child of goodness". Socrates reveals this "child of goodness" to be the Sun, proposing that just as the Sun illuminates, bestowing the ability to see and be seen by the eye, with its light, so the idea of goodness illumines the intelligible with truth. While the analogy sets forth both epistemological and ontological theories, it is debated whether these are most authentic to the teaching of Socrates or its later interpretations by Plato.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
In philosophical epistemology, there are two types of coherentism: the coherence theory of truth; and the coherence theory of justification.
Roderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception.
A pragmatic theory of truth is a theory of truth within the philosophies of pragmatism and pragmaticism. Pragmatic theories of truth were first posited by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. The common features of these theories are a reliance on the pragmatic maxim as a means of clarifying the meanings of difficult concepts such as truth; and an emphasis on the fact that belief, certainty, knowledge, or truth is the result of an inquiry.
Virtue epistemology is a current philosophical approach to epistemology that stresses the importance of intellectual and specifically epistemic virtues. Virtue epistemology evaluates knowledge according to the properties of the persons who hold beliefs in addition to or instead of the properties of the propositions and beliefs. Some advocates of virtue epistemology also adhere to theories of virtue ethics, while others see only loose analogy between virtue in ethics and virtue in epistemology.
Anti-foundationalism is any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach. An anti-foundationalist is one who does not believe that there is some fundamental belief or principle which is the basic ground or foundation of inquiry and knowledge.
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.
Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.
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.
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable or a truth of logic.
The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is an argument in the philosophy of mathematics for the existence of abstract mathematical objects such as numbers and sets, a position known as mathematical platonism. It was named after the philosophers Willard Quine and Hilary Putnam, and is one of the most important arguments in the philosophy of mathematics.
References
- 1 2 Cartwright, Nancy; Cat, Jordi; Fleck, Lola; Uebel, Thomas E. (2008). "On Neurath's Boat". Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics. Ideas in Context. Vol. 38. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 89–94. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511598241.004. ISBN 9780521041119. OCLC 231660530.
- 1 2 3 Neurath, Otto (1973) [1921]. "Anti-Spengler" . Empiricism and Sociology. Vienna Circle Collection. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. pp. 158–213 (199). doi:10.1007/978-94-010-2525-6_6. ISBN 978-90-277-0259-3. OCLC 780516135.
- ↑ Kelly, Thomas (2014). "Quine and Epistemology". In Harman, Gilbert; LePore, Ernest (eds.). A Companion to W.V.O. Quine. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Vol. 55. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 17–37 (28, 34). doi:10.1002/9781118607992.ch1. ISBN 9780470672105. OCLC 869526283. On such epistemological analogies in general, from Descartes and Neurath and others, see: Thagard, Paul; Beam, Craig (July 2004). "Epistemological Metaphors and the Nature of Philosophy" (PDF). Metaphilosophy . 35 (4): 504–516. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.2004.00333.x. JSTOR 24439714.
- ↑ Stöltzner, Michael (2001). "An Auxiliary Motive for Buridan's Ass: Otto Neurath on Choice Without Preference in Science and Society". philsci-archive.pitt.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-28.
- 1 2 Lorenzen, Paul (1987) [Chapter first published in German in 1968]. "Methodical Thinking". Constructive Philosophy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. pp. 3–29. ISBN 0870235648. OCLC 14376554.
If we envision natural language as a ship at sea, then our situation can be described as follows: If we are unable to make landfall, then our ship must have been constructed on the high seas—not by us but by our ancestors. Our ancestors must have been able to swim and have somehow carpentered together a raft out of, say, driftwood. They then continually improved on this raft until today the raft has become a comfortable ship. So comfortable that we no longer have the courage to jump into the water and once more start from scratch. To solve the problem of the method for thought, we must put ourselves in such a shipless condition, that is, bereft of language, and then attempt to retrace the activities whereby we could, while swimming free in the middle of the sea of life, build for ourselves a raft or even a ship.
- ↑ Haack, Susan (1974). Deviant Logic: Some Philosophical Issues. London; New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 37. ISBN 052120500X. OCLC 1200917.
Certainly some logic is taken for granted in the presentation of the pragmatist picture. But to suppose that this shows that picture to be incoherent is to forget, what is crucial, that we are, to use Neurath's figure, rebuilding our raft while afloat on it.
- ↑ Sosa, Ernest (1991) [Chapter first published in 1980]. "The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence Versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge". Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 165–191. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625299.011. ISBN 0521356288. OCLC 22206442.
The coherentists reject the metaphor of the pyramid in favor of one that they owe to the positivist Neurath, according to whom our body of knowledge is a raft that floats free of any anchor or tie. Repairs must be made afloat, and though no part is untouchable, we must stand on some in order to replace or repair others. Not every part can go at once.
- ↑ Mercer, Mark (November 1990). "Book Review: Constructive Philosophy, by Paul Lorenzen" (PDF). International Studies in Philosophy . 22 (3): 130–131. doi:10.5840/intstudphil199022349.
- ↑ Misak, Cheryl (1995). Verificationism: Its History and Prospects. Philosophical Issues in Science. London; New York: Routledge. p. 113. doi:10.4324/9780203980248. ISBN 0415125979. OCLC 32239039.
Peirce's view is similar to Neurath's. Inquiry is the process of acquiring beliefs by making adjustments to our body of background belief. We revise our beliefs (and add or subtract beliefs) so as to better account for and deal with experience. ... Peirce uses a metaphor similar in spirit to Neurath's boat. Inquiry 'is not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way.' (CP 5.589)
- 1 2 3 Stanovich, Keith E. (2004). The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226771199.001.0001. ISBN 0226770893. OCLC 52942713.