20
votes
Accepted
How could one distinguish crankery from serious work?
How do I know which of the two it could be?
Look for somebody who does understand it. People who come up with novel thoughts often (but not always) find it difficult to describe those thoughts in ...
- 1,997
15
votes
How could one distinguish crankery from serious work?
The obvious answer is that you have to make a serious effort to understand the matter from first principles. For mathematics, that would mean reading all of the definitions of all of the individual ...
- 1,733
8
votes
Can I know something but not be able to justify it to anyone else?
Yes. And this is true of most of what we know.
Almost everything we know, we learn thru first person empiricism. It may be possible to translate and detail at least some first person empirical ...
- 10.5k
6
votes
Accepted
What does "true" mean in "justified true belief"?
This is slightly tricky as not everyone uttering that may have the same conception of truth, but generally speaking I think the definition only makes sense for some external/correspondence notion of ...
- 1,942
5
votes
Accepted
Defending the Unpopular: Foundationalism
To expand slightly on what Conifold mentioned, according to IEP the "modest foundationalism" has Alvin Platinga as a prime exponent; Wikipedia mostly covers that under "reformed ...
- 1,942
5
votes
Accepted
To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's own subjective experiences?
Intersubjective agreement isn't required at all, strictly speaking. But it does help.
For one particular topic, if we grant that some reasonable portion of humans are rational, it suggests that those ...
- 5,414
5
votes
Accepted
Can private experiences justify private belief in supernaturalism?
It is important to discriminate between certainty and knowledge. Certainty is a subjective feeling, which can be highly convincing for oneself. Knowledge requires the ability to give supporting ...
- 24.1k
4
votes
To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's own subjective experiences?
There should always be some room for skepticism, even in the face of high intersubjective agreement.
For example, there are many common optical illusions, which most people mis-interpret (even if you ...
- 1,108
4
votes
To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's own subjective experiences?
To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's subjective experiences?
There's no convention by which one can answer this question across all societies....
- 22.8k
4
votes
To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's own subjective experiences?
I just watched a Star Trek episode in which someone says "I know this, trust me". The captain immediately swings into action, because he knows the person and trusts their judgement. In the ...
- 1,729
4
votes
Accepted
Can God make the belief in His own existence justified (if He exists)?
Reliabilist and skeptical claims notwithstanding...(as pointed out by Conifold)
this is the crux of the atheistic Argument from Divine Hiddenness:
(1) Necessarily, if God exists, then God perfectly ...
- 1,409
4
votes
What does "true" mean in "justified true belief"?
It might be easier to think about this in terms of the meaning of the word ‘know’. In that case, the ‘true’ part of JTB amounts to the following claim:
If S knows that p, then p
For example, if I ...
- 6,466
4
votes
Can I know something but not be able to justify it to anyone else?
The skeptic view (in the sense of questioning beliefs, not radical philosophical skepticism) is, roughly speaking, that if you cannot justify something, you shouldn't believe it.
The above means being ...
- 5,414
4
votes
Accepted
What would constitute as justification?
The word justification has an extended family of epistemological uses. In no particular order of generality (and not exhaustively), see:
Artemov and Fitting, "Justification Logic."
Hasan ...
- 12.3k
3
votes
Is this a case of JTB that may be true, but not knowledge?
Note that we know this well enough that entire industries depend upon it, and they are considered safe. RSA Public Key Cryptography is an international standard that backs SSL and other internet ...
- 1,098
3
votes
Can I know something but not be able to justify it to anyone else?
The examples @Dcleve gives in his answers for knowing "from pure first person thinking" seem to me examples for the experience of inner certainty. In most cases there is no problem to ...
- 24.1k
3
votes
What would constitute as justification?
Kristian, as usual, is thorough. From a tertiary source:
Justification in the epistemological sense is an essentially contested concept:
The term essentially contested concepts gives a name to a ...
- 22.8k
3
votes
Can God make the belief in His own existence justified (if He exists)?
Nothing is preventing God from revealing to you in person if you are eligible. Just like this site doesn’t tolerate every kind of question and every kind of person for a good reason , similarly God ...
- 1,841
2
votes
Can God make the belief in His own existence justified (if He exists)?
I do not know whether He/She can. Actually He does not want.
A mighty personal being, having created the world but not showing any interest to communicate in an understandable way with his creatures, ...
- 24.1k
2
votes
A priori vs false witness statement
First of all, Lisa can't do much to "expose John's statement as being false". It's not falsifiable. It might be true, for all she knows.
You are right to say that the probability of her ...
- 2,232
2
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between warrant and justification according to Plantinga?
This one is right in the WP article on Alvin Plantinga:
Plantinga discusses his view of Reformed epistemology and proper functionalism in a three-volume series. In the first book of the trilogy, ...
- 22.8k
2
votes
What does "true" mean in "justified true belief"?
As Fizz correctly points out, this is an expression of the correspondence theory - and external realism - at the base of the JTB theory of knowledge: When we say that we do know something about the ...
- 13.5k
2
votes
What does "true" mean in "justified true belief"?
"Justified" and "belief" already hinted our knowledge innately dooms to have some nuanced subjective nature. Thus without the only remaining "true" requirement, there won'...
- 3,843
2
votes
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 ...
- 12.3k
2
votes
To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's own subjective experiences?
Trust or distrust is a subjective experience. It arises both in the presence and in the absence of intersubjective agreement. Justification efforts sometimes arise alongside the trust or distrust in ...
- 634
1
vote
Is the (truth of) justification of political beliefs necessary given Pyrrhonism?
To my knowledge, all justifications are (easy) prey to Agrippa's trilemma. I've seen political debates and they do consist of arguments in the philophical sense - we should raise/lower taxes, we ...
- 3,196
1
vote
Accepted
How do we know (i.e. justify our belief) that time exists without "proving too much"?
This is a basic question of epistemology. How do we know ANYTHING exists.
There are three basic methods:
Rationalism -- establish what is the case by reasoning
Direct knowledge -- we know what is, ...
- 10.5k
1
vote
Is the axiomatic method an inherently well-founded method?
I'm out of my depth but maybe this is helpful from https://youtu.be/j4dlamySLuE?t=379. It seems like the presenter Elaine Landry disagrees with your "the purpose of axioms...is to provide for ...
- 2,385
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible