R. Swinburne claims that "And, finally, basic propositions include very general propositions about what there is in the world and how things work—‘the Earth is hundreds of millions of years old’, ‘China is a big country’ [...] We normally do not recall how we came to learn these things, but we believe that we did learn them, have been told them often, and that everything else we learn fits well with them. They have the status of basic propositions to which the believer ascribes a high degree of prior probability, and often form our background beliefs (or ‘background evidence’ or ‘background knowledge’) which we take into account in judging the probability of beliefs of more limited scope." (Faith and Reason, p.21).

I wonder why he describes these propositions as basic beliefs?! This view seems to have important consequences. Does anybody know what is the origin of this view or any articles related to this issue? 

On So-called Myth of the given

Chaohui Zhuang

Myth of the given by Sellars is an important topic in contemporary analytical philosophy. I will show that Sellars’s argument is invalid.

1. First, Sellars found ambiguities in some sense-datum theories, but these ambiguities could be clarified. I will present a clearer sense-datum theory.

1.1 Sellars said:

“The sense-datum theorist, it would seem, must choose between saying:

(a) It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing. The existence of sense-data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge.

(b) Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed.”

For a sense-datum theory, the answer is quite easy: (a) is right. The next question is: Sensing is not knowing, then where is knowledge? The answer is also quite easy: After sensing, knowing occurs. Sensing and Knowing are different events, they are not one thing.

In our sense-datum theory, there are two activities:

a.   Sensing activity ... (read more)

Hi

I'm interested in belief formation.

Spinoza, and also the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, have argued that we automatically believe whatever enters our mind, rather than after an assessment of truth, and that it's merely disbelief that requires an assessment of truth.

However, such disbelief may occur within a fraction of a second of the formation of the belief - hence our unawareness of our initial complete credulity.

I've come to the conclusion that, from a logical point of view, belief can actually never be the product of an assessment of truth:

The content of any belief is a claim, whether it’s something profound, like ‘There’s an afterlife’, or something mundane, like ‘Tomorrow is Monday’.

However, when we assess whether a claim is true, all we can ever do is assess whether it agrees with our understanding of the matter in question at the moment that we reach our conclusion - which means assessing whether it agrees with what we believe about the matter in question at that moment.

For exa ... (read more)

In "Wright contra McDowell on Perceptual Knowledge and Scepticism" by Duncan Pritchard we read: << ..once one notices that the "prima facie" evidence that S has for believing the type-II proposition -encapsulated in the type-I proposition - is only "ultima facie" good evidence inthis regard provided that S already has independent grounds for believing that she is not a
BIV.>>
My question regards the notion of prima facie ultima facie justification and evidence in the context of epistemology; what do they refer to and what is the reason to distinguish them?
thank you very much for your consideration
Hossein Rahmani

notation : I use ! for 'not'

Perhaps you can avoid paradox but you have to admit this very strange proposition :
K !K x ->  !P K x
If you know that you ignore (x) it's impossible that you know (x)

I don't see how it could be compatible with the knowability principle :
x ->  P K x
else you can't have
(x) and (K !K x)

(excuse me if this message is out of place, I ignore the policy of tis forum,
excuse also my probable mistakes in english)

Quine criticized the so-called two dogmas of Empiricism, and Davidson criticized the so-called third dogma of Empiricism. Then, McDowell criticized the existence of non-conceptual content of experience. we will show that their arguments are all wrong. Their arguments are some kind of proof by contradiction. If we accept some principle of Empiricism, then we have to face some problems, thus we could not accept some principle of Empiricism. We will show that these problems could be solved. In fact, Wittgenstein had solved these problems. Therefore, their arguments are all invalid. At last, we will examine proof by contradiction. What contradictions can tell us? What about ability and inability of conceptual analysis?

1. The first So-called dogmas of Empiricism

Quine criticize Frege's definition of analyticity, but it doesnot mean that there are no other definition s of analyticity. In fact, Wittgenstein had given another definition of analyticity: logically true statements are analyti ... (read more)

Is the world that we experience around us, the real world itself, experienced out there where it lies? Or is our experience of the world a "picture" generated by our brain inside our head?

I posed this question in Lehar( 2003 ) and Lehar( 2003 }, and I have posted an informal cartoon outlining the issue here:

A Cartoon Epistemology
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html


What is the current state of consensus in the community on this subject? Are there more naive realists out there, or is representationalism the dominant paradigm yet?


And why is this most central and foundational issue not discussed more widely? Surely just about everything else in philosophy and psychology depends critically on getting this profound epistemological issue right. The issue is by no means irrelevant or insignificant. What is your view on this?

  Steve Lehar

Hello,
On pp. 457-458 of his admirably lucid paper Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?  Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236):452-469,Tim Crane implies that John McDowell holds the view "that the content of experience can true or false." (p. 458). Can anyone point to the discussion in McDowell where he says or implies the view? Personally I've a feeling that this is a misattribution (McDowell does concede to a possibility of error to experience, but that's not the same thing as saying that experience can be true or false, for more than one reasons).
thanks
ali

Just wondering if the irony of an article about the high quality of open science research being situated behind a pay wall was lost on anybody...

One sometimes comes across the phrase "(is) in a position to know". I think I have a rough understanding of what it means in a philosophical context, but I also sometimes wonder whether this is supposed to be a clear or even technical term. Could people point me to the sources of the phrase, if any, and/or to discussion of it? And how would people describe the notion in other words? 

Here are some very crude thoughts which may hint at my problems: It's clear that "being in a position to know" is much more restricted than ordinary usage would suggest; I am "in a position to know" what the weather was like on this date a year ago since I could find somebody who has the meteorological data; in this usage, I might even be "in a position to know" whatever is knowable (to me). But this is not the philosophical notion of "in a position to know". Sometimes people say things like that one "has" information, but that one isn't aware of ... (read more)

Hello.
I am interested in how an observer perceives the world, builds the knowledge.
My special area of interest is the theory of knowledge that deals mainly with how our knowledge is structured, based because of the act of observation, i.e. obtaining the knowledge as a spectator [observer], the very presence of an observer in the universe. 

Down below I have listed few books which I have read or have plans of reading.
Can you guys suggest other important, landmark books and journal papers in the topics I have mentioned. Because, as you can already see, none of the books I have mentioned below doesnt directly expound on the topics I am looking for.

The books I have are -
> Hume - An enquiry concerning human understanding
> Russell - Our knowledge of the external world
> Russell - Theory of knowledge
> Russell - Human Knowledge
> Hayek - The sensory order
> Russell - The analysis of mind
> Marleau Ponty - The phenomenology of perception.

So please do suggest the other important books that I am n ... (read more)

It seems to me plausible that Richard Swinburne (Epistemic Justification, 2001, p. 2ff) and William Alston ("Epistemic Desiderata", 1993) are right in suggesting that internalist and externalist conceptions of justification are not competing accounts of one thing, but are non-competing accounts of two different things.  (The debate then turns into which of the two conceptions of justification is (more) worth having, and by how much more.)  One would expect, however, that this claim would be contested by those interested in defending either internalism or externalism over against the other.  However, I am unable to find any literature contesting this claim. 

Does anyone know of any papers on this issue? 

What is your opinion about this claim?

The Philosophical Registry is a very interesting project on its own, independantly of any use other than observing and participating in the systemic life of a philosophical community. However, it could lead to various uses and raise ethical questions : suppose that in few years it has grown enough to serve as a basis for the implementation of a philosophical version of the Turing Test, then, even a vote would not suffice to dissipate the ethical issue if it had not been addressed in the beggining.

There may be also issues related to preliminary theories on the nature of philosophy - specially in the last paragraph of the article - that could make this initial forumulation unsuited for an independant method of assessment. What if the new Lao Tzu gets the poorest evaluation?

This exciting project diserves that its ethical aspects receive thorough attention and prospective.

Emmanuel

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2642

A link to an article going in the same direction:

• http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2609/2248

This guy apparently has some theories about socio-technical systems and on academic publishing as a special case of such a system - see for example: http://brianwhitworth.com/STS/STS-chapter1.pdf

Just browsing First Monday for the link I've also encountered
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2962/2580

Hello everyone,

There is a thought in McDowell that certain mediations are pernicious for our direct contact with the object while others are not (in fact they are necessary for any meaningful direct contact with the object). Thus in his discussion of Sellars, while he hails his insight that our immediate contact with the object in sense perception is conceptually structured and necessary for direct normative contact with the object, he thinks that Sellars' condition for “extra conceptual content” distorts our immediate contact with the object in intuition (and hence should be rejected) [this extra conceptual condition is supposedly Sellars' insistence that “the subject must know that the viewing circumstances are normal.”]. Now my question is this: what is it that makes the first type of mediation harmless, even necessary, for an immediate contact with the object, while the latter is damaging to it??

Ali

Hi,

Jonathan Way writes: "Some irrational states can be avoided in more than one way. For example, if you believe that you ought to A you can avoid akrasia by intending to A or by dropping the belief that you ought to A".

Rather than avoiding akrasia by dropping the belief that one ought A; Jonathan Way has very clearly given a definition of the condition. Clearly the writer has in mind a prior sense of duty in the mind of a person described. This person's path is either to perform his duty, or to discover that his proposed action is not obligatory.

I wonder if some one could explain to me the direct realist's view. I'm guessing I misunderstand it, since it just seems absurd or senseless to me.

If I assume that experience is caused by an external world, I would like to say that while I perceive objects of the external world, my perceptions are not identical with the objects that cause them, that is, they do not fill the same portion of space-time.

Put more concretely, if I see a cat run across the room it would be absurd to think a cat just ran through my head (or my mind).

What exactly is the direct realist claiming is happening when I see a cat run across the room? And what is the representationalist claiming in contrast?

And I'm guessing a representationalist don't hold that I perceive my perceptions, since that would lead to an infinite regress. I've heard some talk like this, but that's probably just messy language.

I am attempting to paraphrase Kant's argument for a material criterion of truth, based on the principle of sufficient reason, from the first critique. Two questions: (1) Is this a fair representation of Kant's argument and (2) is it circular as stated? Any additional comments are welcome.

Given: truth consists of the correspondence between a cognition and its object.


Since it is a universal condition of all experience that everything which happens has a reason for happening the way that it does rather than some other way, then every true cognition must have an object which is, or at least in principle can be, the object of an actual experience in order to determine whether it corresponds to something which does, or can, actually happen.

The theory of knowledge is concerned with the production and acquirement of knowledge. But what is the definition of knowledge? Traditionally, knowledge is defined as justified true belief (JTB). In 1963, Gettier presented examples in which the subject has a justified true belief which, intuitively, fails to count as knowledge. Although more conditions are added into the definition of knowledge, there still exist counterexamples.

I think the Gettier problem has revealed that validity of statements depend on validity of their justificaion. Take the Gettier problem as example, the statement is right just by chance. Just like I say "it will rain tomorrow". It maybe happen. But the justification is wrong, thus the conclusions is wrong. It offer an new understanding and solution for Gettier problem.

Different kinds of knowledge have different justifications. Based on different justifications, what is known could be classified into six categories: fact propositions, analytical consistent propo ... (read more)