The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

Why would God institute the practice of efficacious petitionary prayer? Why would God not simply give us what we need before we ask? I examine recently proposed solutions to this puzzle and argue that they are inadequate to explain why an omniscient and perfectly good God would act differently in response to prayer. I propose that God has reasons to not always maximize a creature’s good, even in a sinless world, and that petitionary prayer functions as a means to reward (...) those who trust God, to enable us to actively love those we cannot otherwise help, and to give the petitioner personal evidence of God’s existence and care for her, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing faith. I refine this proposal by responding to several objections involving human responsibility and the epistemology of divine action. Along the way, I offer several ways petitioners can recognize God’s having answered a prayer and how God might help us with some common obstacles to prayer. (shrink)

This paper deals with two different problems in which infinity plays a central role. I first respond to a claim that infinity renders counting knowledge-level beliefs an infeasible approach to measuring and comparing how much we know. There are two methods of comparing sizes of infinite sets, using the one-to-one correspondence principle or the subset principle, and I argue that we should use the subset principle for measuring knowledge. I then turn to the normalizability and coarse tuning objections to fine-tuning (...) arguments for the existence of God or a multiverse. These objections center on the difficulty of talking about the epistemic probability of a physical constant falling within a finite life-permitting range when the possible range of that constant is infinite. Applying the lessons learned regarding infinity and the measurement of knowledge, I hope to blunt much of the force of these objections to fine-tuning arguments. (shrink)

Should we defer to or strongly prefer the majority opinion in theology, whether it be the majority opinion over the history of the church (as in G. K. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”) or the majority opinion of contemporary theologians? I argue that because of the vast differences in accessible evidence between past and present-day theologians, diachronic majority opinion is not a good indicator of where the truth lies. In the synchronic case, ignorance of minority arguments, biases, selection effects, and (...) the difficulty to deciding who gets to vote present many opportunities for majorities to be wrong. Finally, I consider whether the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit could rescue the democracy of the dead, but conclude that given the gentle way God corrects us, diachronic majority opinion, apart from belief in a very basic set of truths, is not epistemically bolstered by the Spirit. (shrink)

Kant's epistemology and the Buddhist philosophy are an idealism. But these two different philosophies have in themselves the contradictory element, namely the element of the outer sense of bodies and of the inner mind. Although Kant's transcendental idealism and the school Vijnanavadin (唯識學派) acknowledge only the representations and the consciousnesses., the mind need to be affected by the outer part. In Kant's theoretical philosophy the outer sense of bodies plays an alien role. It stands outside the subject. In spite of (...) this, the subject have to relate itself to the outer element. And in the Buddhism, in order to have consciousnesses, the subject have to be transformed from the fundamental ground, the Alayavijnana (第8 識). But the Alyavijnana need to have a certain moment in order to be transformed. In my paper I have concentrated myself on the problem of relation of the mind to the matter. I have tried to see into the way in which these two philosophies develop this relation. Moreover I am also interested in the problem in relation to the theoretical, practical, and aesthetical fields. (shrink)