A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION MATHEMATICAL logic differs from the traditional formal logic so markedly in method, and so far surpasses it in power and subtlety, ...

I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind of sacrifice: God can (...) never make tradeoffs that diminish God’s overall greatness, even when those diminishments are relatively small (like forgetting a particular proposition) and the (altruistic) rewards of making the tradeoff substantial. I argue that God’s inability to make such tradeoffs is not a trivial cost for traditional perfect-being theologians who also believe that God is in loving relationships with creatures. Along the way, I explore the prospects for a less traditional form of perfect being theology, perfect being kenoticism, and different models for divine forgetting. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

These essays, along with several manuscripts published here for the first time, offer a more complete and highly defined picture than ever before of one of the ...

The qualities that distinguished him in any discussion are on clear display in this volume, which features him in dialogue with his predecessors and peers, his ...

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect (...) to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

The current appeal of non-standard economic alternatives is backgrounded against the vulnerability of mainstream capitalism to meltdown and crisis as shown in recent times. There is an increasing number of governments, institutions, and civil societies (NGOs) that have been advocating economic systems, structures, or dynamics that would promote the good of the human person (dignity, personhood, values, and worth). People have started to realize that doing economics is not always within the realm of rationalized judgments and mathematized calculations (highly impersonal) (...) but must look after the human person, at all costs. This paper attempts to contribute to this agendum by employing an interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and economics; drawing a moral-cultural framework towards a compassion-based economics. Together with the positive traits of today’s economic alternatives and the salient features of Jesus’ praxis of compassion, this paper would offer fourteen (14) criteria as basis for what could be the most feasible base/locus for an economics of compassion. Eventually, what has been considered as the suitable base/locus is the Basic Ecclesial Communities (BECs). Hence, a BEC-based Economics of Compassion or BEC-EC. (shrink)

A respected Harvard logician and philosopher gathers together twenty-nine writings dealing with the foundations of mathematics, Rudolf Carnap, lin-guistics, ...

" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...

It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback edition. This is gratifying because it vindicates the editors' belief in the permanent im portance of Quine's philosophy and in the value of the papers com menting on it which were collected in our volume. Apart from a couple of small corrections, only one change has been made. The list of Professor Quine's writings has been brought up to (...) date. The editors cannot claim any credit for this improvement, however. We have not tried to imitate the Library of Living Philosophers volumes and to include Professor Quine's autobiography in this volume, but we are fortunate to publish here his brand-new auto bibliography. 1975 THE EDITORS TABLE OF CONTENTS V PREFACE 1 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 1. 1. C. SMAR T / Quine's Philosophy of Science 3 GILBERT HARMAN / An Introduction to 'Translation and Meaning', Chapter Two of Word and Object 14 ERIK STENIUS / Beginning with Ordinary Things 27 NOAM CHOMSKY / Quine's Empirical Assumptions 53 1AAKKO HINTIKKA / Behavioral Criteria of Radical Translation 69 BARRY STROUD / Conventionalism and the Indeterminacy of Translation 82 P. F. STRA WSON / Singular Terms and Predication 97 118 H. P. GRICE / Vacuous Names P. T. (shrink)

Provides comprehensive coverage of logical structure as well as the techniques of formal reasoning.

Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.

Quine's areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.

For the faithful there is much to ponder. In this short book, based on lectures delivered in Spain in 1990, Quine begins by locating his work historically.

This is an extensively revised edition of Mr. Quine's introduction to abstract set theory and to various axiomatic systematizations of the subject.

Suppose now that two philosophers, McX and I, differ over ontology. Suppose McX maintains there is something which I maintain there is not. McX can, quite consistently with his own point of view, describe our difference of opinion by saying that I refuse to recognize certain entities. I should protest of course that he is wrong in his formulation of our disagreement, for I maintain that there are no entities, of the kind which he alleges, for me to recognize; but (...) my finding him wrong in his formulation of our disagreement is unimportant, for I am committed to considering him wrong in his ontology anyway. When I try to formulate our difference of opinion, on the other hand, I seem to be in a predicament. I cannot admit that there are some things which McX countenances and I do not, for in admitting that there are such things I should be contradicting my own rejection of them. (shrink)

Kant's question 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' pre- cipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwith- standing, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant's own clearest purported.

W. V. Quine was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century American analytic philosophy. Although he wrote predominantly in English, in Brazil in 1942 he gave a series of lectures on logic and its philosophy in Portuguese, subsequently published as the book O Sentido da Nova Lógica. The book has never before been fully translated into English, and this volume is the first to make its content accessible to Anglophone philosophers. Quine would go on to develop revolutionary ideas about (...) semantic holism and ontology, and this book provides a snapshot of his views on logic and language at a pivotal stage of his intellectual development. The volume also includes an essay on logic which Quine also published in Portuguese, together with an extensive historical-philosophical essay by Frederique Janssen-Lauret. The valuable and previously neglected works first translated in this volume will be essential for scholars of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Provides advice on connecting with God's glory when dealing with the monotony of everyday life.

This article will study a class of deduction systems that allow for a limited use of the modus ponens method of deduction. We will show that it is possible to devise axiom systems α that can recognize their consistency under a deduction system D provided that: (1) α treats multiplication as a 3-way relation (rather than as a total function), and that (2) D does not allow for the use of a modus ponens methodology above essentially the levels of Π1 (...) and Σ1 formulae. Part of what will make this boundary-case exception to the Second Incompleteness Theorem interesting is that we will also characterize generalizations of the Second Incompleteness Theorem that take force when we only slightly weaken the assumptions of our boundary-case exceptions in any of several further directions. (shrink)