New answers tagged epistemology
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Yes, absolutely, but evidence for a hypothesis does not mean the hypothesis is true!
In your case the evidence is extremely weak, but it is still evidence. We can know it is evidence because if you ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
TL;DR: Yes. It follows from Bayes' theorem.
Set-up
We are going to consider a total of 5 events, whose probabilities and conditional probabilities are of interest:
First there are the three events ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Perhaps if you line up a billion people, half of them say the magic words, and more lightning hits those people than hits the control people, we have evidence to believe something.
Even then "God ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
We feel that things also happen in life that are not coincidences. And the term ‘god’ has different meaning in different religions. So I would say, “No, this ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Does an unlikely event make the existence of a god more likely? Maybe, but that might be the wrong way to think about it.
Let's approach this scientifically.
So we have an observation: a man asks God ...
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Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
If we view circular logic from the standpoint of digital logic in a computer science context, the circuit model of a circular argument is a straight piece of wire.
You always and forever get out of ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Suppose for example that a person is standing on stage and says “God, if you exist, strike me with lightning right now” and a lightning strike occurs that barely misses him, is this evidence of God? ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
It is, I believe, a widespread misconception that one should not normally expect very low probability events to happen. Nothing in probability theory implies that. Anything can happen anytime, no ...
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Is philosophy any different from emotional reasoning?
Descartes applied such scepticism about the world and it's nature. He concluded you can be certain of
"I think therefore I am"
even in the case
"I suppose there exists an extremely ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Of course, if there were an omnipotent and omniscient deity, it is plausible that it might intervene in human endeavors, creating the phenomena we tend to call miracles.
So that a) if there are so ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
It depends on what you mean by evidence. According to evidential epistemology, anything that can be construed as evidence can be used to justify a conclusion. ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
Carl Jung's concept of Synchronicity, as he intended it, says that "the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
No it doesn't imply a god exists. Think about it scientifically. How do physicists go about developing hypotheses and testing them? If you wanted to apply scientific reasoning, you would need to ...
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Can a coincidence be evidence of a god?
If I experience a coincidence or a coincidence happens in the world that seems to be at extremely low odds, does this imply that God exists?
No. Why would it? To make such an assumption would be a ...
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Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
As is evidenced by the persuasiveness, proliferation and popularity of religious apologists, including many who are academically trained, reasoning of all sorts - whether sound or not - can be ...
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Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
Although on a bare enough logical level, there isn't a direct problem with circular inferences (see Conifold's comment about A implying A), what if we frame the problem on the level of epistemic logic?...
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Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
Your question is a classic theme in epistemology, which is the topic about the circularity in reasoning also known as epistemic circularity (IEP):
An epistemically circular argument defends the ...
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Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
Your movie example is missing two unstated premises.
There exists some incentive for honesty in statements made by a film about whether it is creditable.
This film is produced by people who respond to ...
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Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
Can circular reasoning be logical, and can it provide support for the Bible?
Well, no. Here is your example:
This historical movie is creditable.
This historical movie says that it is creditable.
...
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Is all of philosophy unfalsifiable?
Generally, the term falsifiable is used in relation to hypothesis within philosophy of science. If you mean to say that all philosophical claims can be falsified, then absolutely. In fact, the ...
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Is all of philosophy unfalsifiable?
Falsifiability is a term coined by Karl Popper, who was arguably the worst philosophers ever, I myself don't even consider him a philosopher, he is an earlier version of Richard Dawkins, whom some ...
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Is all of philosophy unfalsifiable?
The answer to the question in your last paragraph is, Yes. Well, you could try falsifying the contradictory of a conjecture. But I assume that you are assuming even that wouldn't work.
There is a ...
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Is all of philosophy unfalsifiable?
The key non-sequitur in your question is an implied one in the words 'nothing more than unfalsifiable conjecture' which suggests the unjustified assumption that if something is unfalsifiable it must ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
In order to prove the supernatural doesn't exist a person would have to have traversed the whole of the universe...and beyond. But to prove the supernatural (supranatural) exists, all the deity has ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
You totally miss the point.
We play in the lottery for amusement, not financial profit.
The potential financial profit adds some sort of thrill. Some people are more addicted to than others. The "...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
In this statement:
If my ticket loses, my expectation is true and justified. So it appears to be knowledge.
The "knowledge" comprises your expectation combined with the observation, after ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
The fallacy is thinking that if you win, your decision to buy a ticket was true and justified (or the best decision of their live as some would say it). If you win, you should think: considering the ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
The notion of probability is not well defined in purely physically terms, this is an unsolved philosophical problem as pointed out by David Deutsch here. There is no known way to rigorously define ...
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Can radical skepticism be refuted?
Does the skeptic believe their position is distinct from a non skeptical perspective? If so, they believe in a notion of “difference” and this also presupposes “similarity”.
You cannot formulate a ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
Probability statements can be known.
This is true. It's the same thing as knowing the shape of the die being tossed. How many sides it has. It is not the same as knowing how it will land.
...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
You are quite simply mixing up propositions (i.e., general knowledge about how lotteries work and how likely it is to win versus the concrete result of a single draw) in the layout of your argument.
...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
My rational expectation has to be that my ticket will lose, so buying a ticket seems irrational and if I knew it would lose, I would not buy it.
However, buying a ticket can be justified because the ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
It is irrational to buy a lottery ticket, not simply because the chance of winning are low. The expected value of the money you gain is negative. In other words, if you had enough money to buy all ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
There is no paradox here. What you knew for certain before the lottery was that there were 100,000 possible outcomes, in only one of which you would win. The result of the lottery does not change the ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
In Philosophy, there's the concept of Russell's Teapot: an example which acts on the example of "disproving the existence of a tea kettle floating around Saturn"
It's a reference to the fact ...
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Antiknowledge (as epistemic antigraphs)
This is arguably a scientific and not a philosophical question. The correct answer would be to say that we simply don’t know since we don’t know how we gain knowledge and assess the truth of it from a ...
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What do we really know about lotteries?
You are making an assumption that it is irrational to play the lottery when you say that it makes no sense to buy something with a low probability. Then, you say, that because the gain is really high, ...
- 2,562
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What do we really know about lotteries?
In a lottery, the expectation that you will definitely lose is not justified. The expectation that you are very likely to lose with a tiny chance of a huge win is justified.
Now the fact that you will ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
tl;dr– It might not make sense to assert that external concepts do-or-don't exist. Below is a story to showcase the ambiguity.
Thought experiment: Intertwined simulated worlds.
Alice and Bob are ...
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Basic truths as self-justified or parajustified
Talk of "self-evident" truths, sometimes called "axioms" (though "axiom" now carries mainly the sense of "not inferred," regardless of the attendant ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
To claim the nonexistence of a metaphysical entity, you must show that it would be logically impossible for it to exist. You cannot use observation because your senses are part of the physical, so the ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
Gnosticism is probably best defined not as complete and total certainty, but rather as being as sure as we can be about (religious) claims.
Pretty much no-one would claim to be uncertain about the ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
Statistical: For example, because we all have smartphones now, people are 10x more likely to have a camera with them at any given time, so there should be approximately 10x more serious claims of ...
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Accepted
Is the unlearned nature of language a la Chomsky a way back into logical empiricist epistemology?
I think you are reading too much into Chomsky's view. An ability to string words into sentences seems to be innate, but the words themselves are not. If that were not the case you would have to ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
No phenomenon in reality is supernatural or paranormal by definition.
Only explanations can be supernatural or paranormal, i.e. outside of known physics.
Gods, ghosts and souls are not existing things,...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
You cannot prove it, and that is why the debate is endless.
What you can prove is that it is impossible for all religions to be true, since they make mutually exclusive claims, and you can point out ...
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How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?
There is a lot of poor thinking one find in theism/atheism discussions, and you have a few as assumptions in this question.
Many falsely think one cannot “show a negative”. But this is how most ...
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Is the Münchhausen trilemma really a trilemma?
Let's turn the trilemma on itself just for the fun of it.
Either the trilemma is itself satisfactorily justified or it is not.
If it is not, then either no justification is needed, else it is ...
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