Questions tagged [knowledge]
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something, which can include facts, information, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education.
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What is the purpose of learning?
This is a question I've been thinking about the last week or so, and this question on Meta SF got me itching to ask it somewhere. Oh, look! Philosophy SE!
What is the purpose of learning? By ...
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Isn't a Gettier case just lack of adequate justification?
As I understand it a Gettier case happens when there is a true belief that is justified but only by luck.
Common scenarios include
looking at a broken watch and it just happens to be the time on ...
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What is the absolute ultimate subject (like math, literature, etc)? [closed]
Seems like all subjects are branches of more general subject. Pretty much all sciences seem to find their roots in physics but physics is just math. There are many branches of math but still all just ...
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Please help me understand Huxley, agnosticism and christianity
There are people who say "I don't think we can ever know whether God exists or not but I would like to believe he exists." Are they agnostic theists? Knowledge and belief are two different things ...
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Through The Internet, do we have access to all human scientific knowledge so far [closed]
When I say The Internet, i mean all different types of networks be it private, public, governmental etc... all of them.
EDIT:
by human knowledge I'm not talking about what people had for breakfast or ...
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Approximately what is the proportion of philosophers who support each of the main responses to scepticism?
There are lots of ways we can respond to the sceptic: the Moorean approach, externalism, contextualism or deny closure. (There maybe other common responses I've forgotten.)
Very roughly, what ...
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How much is our understanding of Kant's Categorical Framework (published in German in 1781) obscured by translation and basic semantics?
Upon reading about and later researching [1] Kant's famous Categorical Framework, which is included as a key part of his classic Critique of Pure Reason (1781), I am struck by aspects that are quite ...
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Does anyone have the missing page 57 of Nozick's dissertation?
I have painstakingly scanned (as in: put on a scanner to make a PDF) 352 pages of a hard copy version of Nozick's 1963 dissertation The Normative Theory of Individual Choice.
I don't have page 57.
I ...
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Is DNA a database about the environment? The concept of Knowledge applied to bio-data
Living creatures have DNA that basically tell how the organism should be constructed. This DNA evolves in response to the environment by trial and error. For example, a mammal living in cold ...
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How can we know some characters are not belongs to that language? [closed]
OK, I assume most of the readers here understand only English. From this assumed start point, consider then the follow scenario: If I were to show you two Chinese characters, one pair is correctly ...
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How can I develop my critical thinking skills?
I am a freshman engineering student going to college. I want to learn how to think critically and to become a critical thinker and a sharp arguer. I am interested in philosophy, because I am curious ...
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is science against philosophy? [closed]
I am asking this because I've seen articles, graphics, and quotes of science against philosophy. I believe Hawking have said something about philosophy being killed by science, this article:
Dear ...
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Is questioning the execution of knowledge still epistemology or another branch of philosophy?
Suppose I have a question that is concerned not with 'what is knowledge' or 'how we acquire knowledge,' but instead how we are able to implement it, are we still talking about epistemology or about ...
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What does it mean to have a sense of geometry innate to us - if that is in fact the case?
Most people, if asked whether they know any geometry, will answer no; but most, if not all, can recognise a straight line, a right angle, or a circle; of course they will not be able to define them as ...
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How to distinguish between 'a priori/posteriori' and 'analytic/synthetic'?
What I think I know
A priori knowledge that can be gained by contemplating only the meaning of a statement's words.
A posteriori knowledge can be gained only by comparing a statement's meaning with ...
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What is value of a philosphical argument/theory when a conclusion can never be reached?
I have seen several questions and discussions recently on this forum concerning p-zombies, whether or not what we call consciousness is a tangible entity or merely an illusion or elaborate scheme ...
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I'm running into this weirdness using the concept of certainty. Why?
I cannot be certain of anything. (Assumption.)
I am not certain that I cannot be certain of anything.
By asserting (2), I am certain that I am not certain that I cannot be certain of anything.
I can ...
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Is modern information technology fundamentally changing the way humans acquire and process knowledge?
It would appear that in the contemporary world, it is hardly necessarily for the individual to 'know' anything. Far more important is the ability to cull knowledge from readily available repositories ...
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Are we necessarily born with innate knowledge?
The way we use to learn things is to associate a concept with something that we already know. I see no other way of learning things, there are books explaining how to memorize a horribly long sequence ...
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Why is philosophy the root of Wikipedia? [closed]
Go to any English Wikipedia page.
Click the first link (not in brackets, italics or in a box).
Repeat n times.
Why do you end up at the philosophy page 95% of the time?
I expect it has to do ...
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Does languange somehow filter what we can know?
I've read a proposition somewhere: That our languange acts as a filter, allowing us to know certain things while making it impossible to know the rest(1). It seems that mathematics has some things ...
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What are the main differences between Berkeley's and Locke's view of ideas?
I'm currently taking Modern Philosophy at my university, and we went over Berkeley and Locke in a span of ten minutes in order to get to Hume. As far as what they (Berkeley and Locke) thought about "...
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The coherentist solution to Agrippa’s Trilemma and the possibility of pure/impure justification?
I'm trying to get a grasp on coherentism and what is proposes is the epistemological justification for knowledge. From what I've taken so far, coherentism relies on what is commonly referred to as "...
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What useful definitions have no direct or indirect reference to reality?
(late edit: I have come to the conclusion that no words (or claims) have 'direct' reference to reality since all words are about people's conception. Words reference particular concepts in people's ...
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A priori - knowledge that must be independent of experience?
In "Naming and Necessity" Kripke talks a lot about the notion of a priori.
At one point (quoted below) he mentions that some philosophers changed the "can" in the definition of a priori knowledge to ...
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Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal?
There is broad agreement that knowledge is more than just true belief. What, though, must be added to true belief to get knowledge? According to traditional epistemology, two more ingredients are ...
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Homogeneity and human knowledge
The advances in technology and the unprecedented levels of knowledge-sharing in the last few decades could be extrapolated to suggest that the human race as a whole will eventually converge to perhaps ...
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What does "is true" mean in the phrase "a philosophical position is true"?
I have run into an online discussion about philosophies and world views (theism, atheism, humanism, nihilism, and all the other "isms") where phrases like "*ism is true" and "*ism is false" are used. ...
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How could the concept of 'evidence' be defined, and how significant is it?
What is evidence, and how much of it means that a proposition is true? Does a partial / total lack of evidence mean that a proposition should be ignored?
Is the concept evidence more important to ...
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Do we have to know whether earth revolves around the sun or not? How does it effect our day-to-day life? [closed]
Does the revolution of the earth bother us in our day-to-day activities? If yes, how? If not, then why do we teach and study these thing?
Isn't it right that we have to study only those things that ...
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Is complete mutual knowledge possible?
Consider a piece of information. I know it and so do you. Moreover, I know that you know it, and you know that I know it. Further, I know that you know that I know it, you know that I know that you ...
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Origin of the idea that something can't be proved, only disproved
Does anyone know if the idea that something can't be proved, only disproved has a specific origin? I often hear it and would like to make a reference to it in a term paper I'm writing. Is it from the ...
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Can applicable skills be gained through dreaming?
Recently had a dream where I was in a situation I have never been before in "real life" - (no real experience prior to the dream of this situation).
After waking, all the feelings, thoughts, ...
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How can I know that I am not immortal? [closed]
You think that you will die just because everyone dies. And you would like to know if you are immortal. How can you know if you are immortal or not?
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Does knowledge exist outside human consciousness?
Wikipedia defines knowledge as "familiarity with someone or something" and Plato defined knowledge as "justified true belief". Belief and familiarity is something that only a sentient being can have, ...
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Is there a philosophical term or theory that defines or describes the idea of 'epiphany'?
I am new to the philosophy stack exchange, so please let me know if I need to clarify this question further. I am curious if there is a distinction made in philosophical fields between a typical step-...
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Does "knowledge" imply certainty? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Is Knowledge Fallible?
My question is about the definition of knowledge as used by philosophers in the area of epistemology.
I am wondering if knowledge implies certainty. In ...
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“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” - Christopher Hitchens [closed]
In terms of science, this claim has a pretty straightforward answer. Evidence is the base of all scientific claims, and without sufficient evidence any knowledge claim is meaningless. However, what ...
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Is there any literature reference for types of judgement: analytic, synthetic and evaluative?
I am trying to search for literature that describes the various types of judgements people make based on their content. Most of the well-known works like that of Kant talk about two types of ...
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The preface paradox and the psychology of belief [closed]
For those who don't know, the "preface paradox" is an epistemic paradox wherein an author painstakingly researches every single fact he asserts in a new book he's releasing. As a result, he believes ...
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Can something be actually possible yet logically impossible?
By actual possibility I mean the possibility which is implied by ability or power.
By logical possibility I mean whether concepts of reality contradict each other or not.
I believe that knowledge ...
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How does the Twin Earth illustration show that "meanings just aren't in the head?"
Hiliary Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment goes like this:
We begin by supposing that elsewhere in the universe there is a planet exactly like earth in virtually all respects, which we ...
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How does Robert Nozick explain the Gettier problem?
Nozick agrees that the Gettier counterexamples to the JTB analysis of knowledge are cases where someone has a JTB but does not know. What is his explanation of what has gone wrong in those cases? ...
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To what extent does our knowledge derive from the senses?
By tradition, the problem that dictates where our knowledge is derived divides from two philosophical circles; those who affirm that our knowledge of the world comes from our senses, such as David ...
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Definabilty and Primitive Notions
Towards the beginning of a course on knowledge (we were reading the beginning of Theaetetus) we discussed definitions and what a definition or rather a good definition is. I'd like to know more about ...
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Does knowing imply knowing that you know? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Do we know whether we know something?
I have come across this idea a few times now that knowing does not imply knowing that you know. However, I am having troubled ...
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What are the "essential/core" texts any student of philosophy should have read?
I'm really interested in Philosophy and want to learn more, so I'd like to read the main bodies of work that have built up the discipline of Philosophy. The reason being that if I read a modern text ...
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When given limited information, is the simplest solution that matches that information most likely correct?
Is there any basis in philosophy for the idea that when given limited information, the simplest solution that matches that information should be presumed correct or most likely to be correct?
For ...
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One sentence to describe everything [closed]
How would you put together a reasonably short sentence, in order to describe everything?
By everything, I mean that the sentence would be broad enough to cover any possible subject by recursive ...
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How can I solve my contradictory thoughts about the relevance of human knowledge?
I have been thinking about how much we can know and more importantly: which knowledge should be relevant to us? First I will explain my thoughts to you. They will end in a questionable conclusion for ...
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