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Logical positivism does not deny human emotion. It simply reassigns its role. Ethical, aesthetic or religious judgements, for example, fulfil the role of expressing or eliciting emotion - and not, emphatically not, of truth-bearing. Since ethical, aesthetic and religious judgements definitely occur and since, equally definitely for logical positivists, they ...
14
Err... The phrase 'ignorance is bliss' is sarcastic. 'Ignorance is bliss' in the sense that one actually believes that the ravenous bug-blatter beast of traal will not eat us if we put a towel over our heads. The phrase is invariably used as a way of chiding someone for being willfully, stupidly, or naïvely ignorant of the way the world actually works, such ...
13
The question you ask refers to what is known as Occam's Razor or the law of Parsimony (esp. psychology). It is not an unwavering principle but more of a general heuristic or "rule of thumb". Various formulations of this idea have been offered since ancient times and various justifications have been used to support it, despite the fact that it (historically) ...
12
Your (1) and (2) are not enough. Here is an example: suppose I have excellent reasons to believe that the earth is round (I've seen photos, listened to lectures, etc.), and that it is in fact true that the earth is round, but nevertheless I do not believe it (because I'm irrational). Clearly this is not a case of knowledge.
There is a recent view, however, ...
11
"Knowledge" is the primary subject of Epistemology, one of the major branches of philosophy.
Its importance cannot be overstated.
I suggest that you look at some basic encyclopedia articles on the subject, such as the one from Stanford, the IEP, or Wikipedia.
10
As Michael points out, the notion of knowledge in philosophy is of great importance. The entire field of epistemology (which is essentially one of the top five fields of philosophy) focuses almost exclusively on knowledge: what it is, where it comes from and what it's limits are, for example.
The primary difference between knowledge and truth in a nutshell ...
10
Clearly, art and ethics, subjects that tend to be highly subjective, don't necessarily require evidence for knowledge claims, do they?
Of course they do.
What would it mean to make a claim completely devoid of evidence?
Do you think there is any philosopher who claims that murder is wrong, or that a work of art is beatiful, for no particular reason?
10
Heading into the library:
The book awaits, retrieved from a 6.5 million book warehouse:
Excitement as page 57 is present:
Compared to the consecutive pages, the page itself is rather hard to read. My first thought was that when compiling the book, it had been retrieved from a different source. But there are more similarly unclear pages later in the book, ...
10
Yes, there are, though the general question as to what might be an intrinsic good has been controversial.
In Plato's Philebus Socrates summarizes two views he is about to discuss with his interlocutor Portarchus:
Philebus says that the good for all animate beings consists in
enjoyment, pleasure, delight, and whatever can be classed as consonant
...
10
Husserl is perhaps the last truly classical figure in epistemology, he still believed in objective content of knowledge, the same for "angels and centaurs" as for humans, and the possibility of "apodictic certainty" at the end of eidetic and phenomenological investigations. He believed that by suspending ("bracketing out") stereotypes and presuppositions, ...
10
Key text here may be On opinion, knowledge and belief, CPR B 848-859.
There is conviction [Überzeugung]. It is the subjective part necessary for knowledge:
Taking something to be true is an occurrence in our understanding that
may rest on objective grounds, but that also requires subjective causes in
the mind of him who judges. If it is valid for ...
9
If you don't know what the core/essential texts are, in my opinion you are ill-equipped to read them alone, unless you are the next Einstein or something. Even otherwise very advanced readers who are new to philosophy can completely miss the subtleties of philosophical literature, particularly literature that is either not from our current era or writing ...
9
It should be said that Husserl was philosophically averse to Kant's "creative" transcendental subject, perhaps due to the dominance of absolute idealist interpretations of him at the time, and preferred to derive his lineage from Hume, whom he credits as the principal forerunner of phenomenology. See Mall's Experience and Reason on their connection, which ...
9
Logical Positivism did not fail because it denied human emotion. LP failed because it tried to reduce the concept of meaning to the process of verification, and it became increasingly clear that this was an impossible task (as the later Wittgenstein, among other, pointed out quite clearly). Logical Positivists would look at a scientific proposition — such as ...
8
"Worth Knowing" is not an objective notion, it is entirely relative
The notion of "worth knowing" is entirely dependent on circumstance. It is not worth knowing to me that there is 600 mbps of traffic going through Server X right now, but to the administrator of that server, that's probably a huge deal. Not worth knowing to me, very much worth knowing to ...
8
No. Lying implies an intent to deceive. To speak a falsehood is not necessarily to lie.
As for the truth-status of the statement, it's not at all paradoxical; it's just temporally bound.
8
Well, if someone makes the assertion that "blueism is true," what they're generally claiming is that the those statements asserted by the blueist body of theory are, individually, true. Most people tacitly accept the notion of an individual, objective truth, and most ideologues believe that their view of reality is in accord with that objective truth.
You ...
8
The answer lies in the Phaedo, not much after the passage on suicide, to which you referred. The issue of suicide arises in the context of the question, put to Socrates, why he seemed to favor death, rather than struggling to avoid it. And a part of his answer was, that the knowledge which the philosopher seeks all his life, seems to await him after death. ...
8
TL;DR: No, he did not!
To be precise, things-in-themselves may be objects of thought, i.e. abstract concepts of the realm of logic, and therefore concepts of transcendental philosophy as logically necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. But they cannot be objects of knowledge, i.e. things that are particular objects of experience subsumed ...
8
According to Eric Schwitzgebel,
Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn't involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a ...
8
I have a different opinion. The maxim ignorance is bliss can be used in a sarcastic vein, but it's actually very truthful.
Your question overlaps philosophy and psychology. Look up "cognitive dissonance," for example. Do doctors and government always tell people the truth? Of course not. Politicians often lie for sleazy reasons, but there are situations ...
7
I know that every language must have undefinable/primitive notions/concepts* but aside from within formal systems in logic, set theory, and mathematics have I seen one. Has anyone been able to prove that a particular word is undefinable?
You are using the word "language" to encompass very different kinds of languages, i.e. you are unduly mixing together ...
7
Does anyone know if the idea that something can't be proved, only disproved has a specific origin?
It was brought to prominence in modern philosophy of science by Karl Popper, who proposed falsificationism. (I cannot recommend the latter wikipedia entry though.)
I also take it that it applies to pretty much any belief, whether it's an untested hypothesis ...
7
I think it is very insightful of you to want to learn to be a better critical thinker. That action in and of itself makes me think you are already more of a critical thinker than many others -- as merely a freshman you are carefully thinking about and planning what will best help you in the future.
Not the Answer You're Looking For
Unfortunately, philosophy ...
7
No. Most human knowledge is not on the internet. Among the kinds of knowledge not available through the internet are:
Our myriad individual observations and experiences [example: I know what I ate for breakfast. I know how many pages I read yesterday. I know how many times my houseplant has had white flies.]
Forgotten knowledge. Scientist David Ehrenfeld ...
7
Frege is the founder of a program called logicism that aimed to reduce all of mathematics to logic. In order to reduce mathematics to logic Frege had to expand what is meant by logic. Before him Locke, Kant and others understood by logic only Aristotle's syllogistic, which is a manipulation of simple implications (syllogisms). Frege's Logic went much further,...
7
Not all inductive inferences are temporal, so the future "resembling" the past can be moot, a more general idea would be that various parts of nature are "uniform", "resemble" each other. But it is not logical to assume that the future will "resemble" the past, or that the nature is "uniform" in this or that aspect. In many cases such assumptions are ...
7
Aristotle, 'In the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical' ('De Anima', III, 430a, 3-4). (J.A. Smith tr., Oxford.)
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Everybody knows nowadays that logical positivism is dead. But
nobody seems to suspect that there may be a question to be asked
here—the question “Who is responsible?” or, rather, the question “Who
has done it?”. (Passmore’s excellent historical article [note 110] does not raise this question.) I fear that I
must admit responsibility. Yet I ...
7
Karl Popper refuted logical positivism in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (LScD).
One problem with the logical positivist position was that the positivists wanted to get rid of metaphysics in favour of science, but their proposed way to distinguishing between them was useless. They wanted to say science consisted of verifiable statements, but an ...
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