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- Peter Murphy, 481 + VIII Pages. Isbn: 0-262-53256-.As you scroll through this review, you move your hand; this causes the mouse to move; in turn this causes, via a series of intermediary events, changes on your screen. A bit more reflection shows that this case is entirely mundane: causal relations are a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. Causal relations are also, according to many philosophers, at the center of phenomena like knowledge, perception, linguistic meaning, mental content, belief, free action, and right action. In fact, one is hard put to think of an important philosophical notion that has not received a causal analysis, especially in recent analytic philosophy. Consider a few from the theory of knowledge. According to the causal theory of knowledge, knowledge is true belief caused by what makes the belief true. Or, according to a competing view, knowledge is true belief caused by a reliable belief forming process, where a reliable process is one that causes a high ratio of true to false beliefs. According to the causal theory of perception, seeing that the cup is on the table consists in being in a perceptual state that is appropriately caused by the cup and the table. Causation, it seems, is absolutely central. We will need to understand causation itself if we are to understand either causal theories in philosophy or the nature of the surrounding world.No categoriesIn my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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hen Democritus (460–370 BC) said that he would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia, he signalled both the difficulty and the value of gaining causal knowledge. It is arguably the acquisition of causal knowledge that is the primary goal of scientific enquiry; and within philosophy, causation has played a central role in recent theories of reference, perception, decision making, knowledge, intentional and other mental states, and the role of theoretical terms in scientific theories. Indeed, Samuel (...)
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| | Other links: mail.rochester.edu | Scholar | More.. Is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Few question the value of having true beliefs, and insofar as having knowledge entails (at least) having a true belief, we value knowledge. But traditionally it has been assumed that whatever it takes to turn true belief into knowledge has some additional value. Traditionally, then, philosophers have been committed to what I will call the ‘Value Principle'.
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When we philosophers think about causation we are primarily interested in what causation is—what exactly is the relation between cause and effect? Or, more or less equivalently, how and in virtue of what is the cause connected to the effect? But we are also interested in an epistemic issue, viz., the possibility of causal knowledge: how, if at all, can causal knowledge be obtained? The two issues are, of course, conceptually distinct—but to many thinkers, there is a connection between them. (...)
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| | Other links: phs.uoa.gr | Scholar | More.. In his 1963 article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”1 Edmund Gettier devised a pair of counterexamples designed to illustrate that knowledge cannot be adequately defined as justified true belief. The basic idea behind both of his counterexamples is that one can be justified in believing a falsehood P from which one deduces a truth Q, in which case one has a justified true belief in Q but does not know Q. Gettier’s article inspired numerous other counterexamples, and the search was (...)
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