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Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called theory of knowledge, it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.
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.
Justification is a property of beliefs that fulfill certain norms about what a person should believe. Epistemologists often identify justification as a component of knowledge distinguishing it from mere true opinion. They study the reasons why someone holds a belief. Epistemologists are concerned with various features of belief, which include the ideas of warrant, knowledge, rationality, and probability, among others.
Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. Hence, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who has actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.
The epistemic virtues, as identified by virtue epistemologists, reflect their contention that belief is an ethical process, and thus susceptible to intellectual virtue or vice. Some epistemic virtues have been identified by W. Jay Wood, based on research into the medieval tradition. Epistemic virtues are sometimes also called intellectual virtues.
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.
In the philosophy of religion, Reformed epistemology is a school of philosophical thought concerning the nature of knowledge (epistemology) as it applies to religious beliefs. The central proposition of Reformed epistemology is that beliefs can be justified by more than evidence alone, contrary to the positions of evidentialism, which argues that while non-evidential belief may be beneficial, it violates some epistemic duty. Central to Reformed epistemology is the proposition that belief in God may be "properly basic" and not need to be inferred from other truths to be rationally warranted. William Lane Craig describes Reformed epistemology as "One of the most significant developments in contemporary religious epistemology ... which directly assaults the evidentialist construal of rationality."
Laurence BonJour is an American philosopher and Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Washington.
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
Alvin Ira Goldman was an American philosopher who was emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
Stephen P. Stich is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Emeritus at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology. His 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in later years, as indicated in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind.
Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. Since 2007 he has been Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, but he spent most of his career at Brown University.
John L. Pollock (1940–2009) was an American philosopher known for influential work in epistemology, philosophical logic, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.
Tamar Szabó Gendler is an American academic and philosopher. She has been the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University, where she is also the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences. Her academic research focuses on issues in philosophical psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and areas related to philosophical methodology.
Jennifer Lackey is an American academic; she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Lackey 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.
Susanna Siegel is an American philosopher. She is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and well known for her work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, especially on perception.
Martin Davies is a British philosopher who is Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he taught from 2006 until 2017. He works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology and philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.
Lisa Bortolotti is an Italian philosopher who is currently professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Her work is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, including philosophy of psychology and philosophy of psychiatry, as well as bioethics and medical ethics. She was educated at the University of Bologna, King's College London, University of Oxford and the Australian National University, and worked briefly at the University of Manchester before beginning at Birmingham, where she has been a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and now professor.
Jennifer. Nagel is a Canadian philosopher at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. She has also written on 17th century (Western) philosophy, especially John Locke and René Descartes.
Robert D. Rupert is an American philosopher. His primary academic appointment is at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), where he is Professor of Philosophy, a fellow of UCB's Institute of Cognitive Science, and a member of UCB's Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science. He is Regular Visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre and is the co-editor in chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
References
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- ↑ "Affiliates". Rutgers. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
- 1 2 3 "Schellenberg, Susanna". Rutgers. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
- ↑ Leiter, Brian. "Rutgers Raids the ANU: Schaffer, Schellenberg to New Brunswick in 2011". Leiter Reports. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
- 1 2 3 Weatherson, Brian (20 November 2009). "Rutgers News". Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants.
- ↑ "Oxford University Press". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 13 September 2018.
- 1 2 3 Marshall, Richard. "epistemic forces and perception". 3:AM Magazine. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
- 1 2 Schellenberg, Susanna. "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-02-06.
- ↑ "Graduate Placement". University of Pittsburgh.
- ↑ Kvanvig, Jonathan. "Adding to Rutgers Strength in Epistemology". Certain Doubts. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
