Epistemology is the study of knowledge, acquisition thereof, and the justification of belief in a given claim.
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How should we understand different knowledge attributions? (epistemic logic)
My main motivation is in terms of epistemic logic. In epistemic logic X knows that p if p is true in all states that X sees as epistemically indistinguishable from the current state. In this sense we ...
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Is there a limit beyond which mathematics, if used correctly, cannot be applied to reality?
And if so, why, and which?
Take this case: If I've two apples and I believe that with two more I'll have four apples, then I implicitly believe that summation applies to reality. Yet there are ...
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Nature of self-evident statements
Can there exist a "self-evident" statement? That is, can there exist a statement that offers sufficient substantiation for itself?
For example, a statement can be constructed
This statement is ...
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Does it matter possessing knowledge about the Universe if it is going to end?
To be specific, I'm referring to physical reality.
Moreover, this question might seem awkward at first glimpse. Well, it does not appear that there are any meaningful relations between the end of the ...
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Account of Priori knowledge in Critique of Reason
As I understand, a priori statements are propositions that are conceived independently of one's experience.
However, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that
The sensible world, or ...
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The relationship between truth and consistency
It is often claimed that a scientific theory can be proven false, but can never be proven true.
In abstract terms, for a particular experiment, let T represent a theoretical prediction, and let E ...
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Will AI make falsifiability obsolete?
With the advances in machine learning, data mining and process of big data, soon machines will find patterns that could either interpreted as causation or correlation while we have no idea of the ...
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Is there a theory that trying to solve intuition and fear at the same time?
I'm looking for a school of thought or theory that solves these problems, preferably at once:
The way to make a profound, advanced knowledge more straightforward and imaginative, without having to ...
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Is it possible to be 100% certain of the existence of reality?
I don't really understand why some philosophers claim that it's impossible to be absolutely certain of anything except my own consciousness. Isn't that absurd? Personally I believe that this kind of ...
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Is/should “appeal to scientificity” be considered a fallacy?
Is/should "appeal to scientificity" be considered a fallacy?
Some examples:
-Some economics theory that has no predictive power, even if it might be mathematically correct.
-Expecting that ...
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Do logic and reasoning need to be validated by an ultimate authority?
A lot of presuppositional appologists argue that the Abrahamic God is real because the Bible is self validating and that everyone "knows" God (except you have to presuppose sense perception and that ...
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What is the root of the idea of unseen causes?
As science, at least as it is now, is about the search for unseen causes, what can we say the root of this is ?
Does it start with first development of senses in organisms and the quest to find prey ...
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Regarding questions in stack exchange [migrated]
How to formulate a question here in this site??
If I don't have questions to ask how do I find one? How to make my mind search for questions? I want to ask questions but they don't come to mind right ...
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which kind of Kuhn's incommensurability rules out the convergent realism?
A standard conception of the transition from classical to relativistic physics is that although Einstein's theory of relativity supersedes Newton's theory, what we have is an improvement or ...
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Should we think twice about dualism?
With the rise of Materialism and Physicalism a dualistic ontology has fallen out of favor. The successes of Science makes makes us comfortable to deny any entity beyond the "Observable Universe". ...
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Where does Kuhn talks about the five characteristics for the choice of theory?
Kuhn (1977, 321–2) identifies five characteristics that provide the
shared basis for a choice of theory: 1. accuracy; 2. consistency (both
internal and with other relevant currently accepted ...
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Are Hume's 'impressions' Kant's 'phenomena'?
Why do some philosophers like Carl Stumpf or Immanuel Kant use the word 'Phenomena', whereas British empiricist philosophers, like Locke and Hume, or even Kant, use the word 'Impressions'?
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What are the logical fallacies of this argument?
SCIENTIFIC FACT: Nothing in the universe, ceases to exist, it just appears in some other form.
LOGICAL FACT: We can be absolutely sure that what we experience right now, exists.
Let's mark ...
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Is time more “real” than math and, if so, why?
How is time different from math? Is time a part of math?
For me time is like math rather than a "real" thing. Time is just a tool rather than a "fundamental thing".
I feel confident saying that an ...
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How can we know that we're thinking?
How can we know there isn't an illusion of thought?
This question stems from Descartes' assertion of "I think, therefor I am." He regards the notion that he thinks as an absolute fact. But how does ...
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which books or essays “Kuhn [1981]” is referred to?
I found a quote by Thomas Kuhn and the source reports:
Kuhn [1981]
but I cannot find that year in his bibliography .
By googling "Kuhn [1981]" I found the following:
What are Scientific ...
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What logic does Fitch's paradox use?
So I have been looking into Modal Logic as well as epistemic logic (and its dynamic versions) with the hopes of studying their applications to Fitch's paradox.
Fitches paradox refers to the proof ...
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How can I understand “I should email you so that you know that I know that you know that I’ve received your acceptance”?
From: Philip Johnson-Laird BA PhD Psychology (UCL), Stuart Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton. (Author isn't a logician.) How We Reason (1st edn 2008). p. 73.
Human reasoning is ...
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Where did Kuhn draw a parallel with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation?
About Thomas S. Kuhn, In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy I read:
Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268)
Which is the ...
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What does Helmuth Plessner mean by : 'the human being is at a distance to her boundary'?
Plessner defines living organims in terms of a boundary between It and the environment.
http://helmuth-plessner.de/en/helmuth-plessner/denken/
This question concerns the following statment:
...
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Thomas Kuhn's “paradigm” and its 22 different uses
Thomas S. Kuhn, both in his Second Thoughts of Paradigms [1971] and in the Postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1970], refers to someone who found 22 different ...
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Does non-empirical knowledge exist?
I think this question might be dismissed very easily, but I'd like to try to provoke a sort of blurring-the-lines idea that may be interesting.
I'll start by putting two definitions here, the first ...
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Is Deductive Reasoning Alien to the Material World?
A quick survey of literature:
Goel V. Anatomy of deductive reasoning. Trends Cogn Sci. 2007 Oct
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2685028/
García-Madruga JA, Gutiérrez F, ...
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What is the name of the school of thought that holds “humans did it”?
My world view is that there is no way to peek behind the curtains of the universe to reveal its truths-- whether spiritual, religious, or even scientific.
I don't think the word to describe this is ...
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Should/could politics and/or political science abide to the same epistemological notions as hard formal-empirical sciences? [closed]
Is it reasonable to expect that politics and/or political science should/could abide to the same epistemological notions as hard formal-empirical sciences?
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Responses to the problem of Underdetermination
Underdetermination and the arationality in the process of theory choice is often brought up by anti-realists on science as a proof of the problems with the scientific process in tracking truth.
What ...
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Please explain Good's solution to why we should make new observations
IJ Good's paper (1967) gives a solution to Ayer's problem on why we should make new observations.
I'm trying to follow the steps in his solution.
His assumptions are that:
There are r mutually ...
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Do we need knowledge, defined as “Justified, True Belief”, at all?
The Justified, True Belief account of knowledge is problematic and none of the solutions proposed seems to solve all possible Gettier problems (at least, that's what I have come to believe).
Do we ...
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Can “Gettier problems” be solved by changing Justified, True Belief without introducing a fourth condition?
It seems to me Gettier problems challenge the Justified, True Belief account of knowledge.
As I see it, they can be solved by assuming that knowledge requires something else: a set of propositions Q ...
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integrity and identity
I have a quite straight forward question yet the answer does not appear to me as straight forward as I would like it to be. I would appreciate it, if someone could help me with the difference between ...
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Nietzche quoting Descartes… without source
In the Will to Power Nietzche quotes Descartes
omne illud verum est, quod clare et distincte percipitur
However I cannot find the quoted source. Can anyone identify it?
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Are there non-empirical kinds of aposteriori justifcation?
I'm asking here about what exactly constitutes aposteriori statement.
The idea is that an aposteriori statement is one whose truth necessitate experiential evidence to be established. like in ...
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At base, do all disagreements in philosophy come down to differences in intuition?
I am coming at this from outside philosophy, though I have had a lifelong amateur interest. It seems to me that rigorous philosophical writing sets out clear axioms before using propositional logic to ...
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How is the concept of “beyond word” viewed in many school of thoughts?
This is my review on the concept of "beyond word":
Taoism and Buddhism seems to share that wisdom can't be grasped intellectually. In Zen practice, the koans are presented as nonsensical questions so ...
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Is there such a thing as philosophical rigour?
Is rigour always related to definitions and axioms?
Whatever be the case, can a set of philosophical analyses be rated in terms of rigour?
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The social aspect of epistemology
Though not an issue in the debates surrounding rigorous, theoretical epistemology, in practice culture and trust in authorities plays an enormous role for most of our beliefs outside of our expertise.
...
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What is the relationship between subjectivity and vagueness?
Suppose statement S is talking about concept C. There are 4 different possibilities:
S is subjective and C is vague.
S is objective and C is definite.
S is subjective and C is definitie.
S is ...
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Swinburne's solution to Grue
In the new riddle of induction, Swinburne proposes the idea that there is a genuine distinction to be made between the predicate 'green' and the predicate 'grue' in that 'green' is a qualitative ...
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How does a Bayesian respond to the Grue-hypothesis?
According to Bayesian inference/confirmation theory, your confidence in a hypothesis increases as you observe more and more evidence predicted by that hypothesis (according to bayes theorem and the ...
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What is wrong in the first premise of open question argument?
Let us use the original argument:
Premise 1: If X is good, then the question "Is it true that X is good?" is meaningless.
Premise 2: The question "Is it true that X is good?" is not meaningless.
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How can an omniscient being prove it 's omniscient and not just delusional?
Let's assert the existence of an omniscient being for the sake of this question. (Questioning possibility of existence is e.g. done here.)
By its very nature, the being knows it is omniscient. It ...
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How do I know what I should know? [closed]
I think this is a tough question, because every time the moment you know for sure that you know one thing, you realize that you don't know anything about it, not to say that whether you should know it ...
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Pascal's cœur = Aristotle νόος = Scholastics' intellectus? Pascal's raison = Aristotle's ἐπιστήμη = Scholastics' scientia?
Copleston, S.J., quotes, on p. 164 of A History of Philosophy (vol. 4): Descartes to Leibniz, the following from Pascal's Pensées, S142/L110:
Nous connaissons la vérité non seulement par la raison ...
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Is it possible to know a priori the statement 'I know mathematical theorem X a priori' providing X is true
I'm looking for arguments against the idea that you can have a priori knowledge of a priori knowledge.
Perhaps appealing to an internalist account of knowledge and claim that the justification for the ...
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Does epistemology = logic?
Is epistemology—the study of knowledge, how knowledge is acquired—really the same as logic? If not, what are the differences between epistemology and logic?
By logic, I mean the art by which we order ...
