Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Epistemology Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Rationality

Discipline
Institution
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Epistemology

Ideology, Issue Consistency, & Rationality In Political Preferences Among Bgsu Students, Cassidy Kroggel Dec 2025

Ideology, Issue Consistency, & Rationality In Political Preferences Among Bgsu Students, Cassidy Kroggel

Honors Projects

Affective polarization — negative feelings toward the opposing political party — is increasing in the United States. As partisanship becomes weaponized, an individual’s ideological consistency becomes an important determiner for their negative feelings toward other individuals with different beliefs. This concern reaches beyond mere disagreement, and has serious implications for the future of our democratic principles: open dialogue, compromise, and policy making. Rationality and the ability to change one’s mind seems to be at the forefront of this issue, acting as a bottom-up driver for policy preference formation. This research analyzes the connection between ideological consistency, rationality, and affective polarization …


Internalism, Externalism, And The Phenomenology Of Epistemic Justification, Steven Winterfeldt Jan 2025

Internalism, Externalism, And The Phenomenology Of Epistemic Justification, Steven Winterfeldt

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation applies a phenomenological method of analysis to the dispute between analytic internalists and externalists regarding epistemic justification. Traditionally, the justification condition on knowledge has been interpreted as an internal condition, but the growing popularity of the externalist antithesis has placed internalism on the defensive. Ultimately, however, the dispute appears to have fallen into an impasse. I identify a set of four arguments or cases that, when taken together, prompt us to adopt a set of contradictory conclusions about the necessary and sufficient conditions for justified belief. Moreover, none of the analytic views of justification surveyed seem to be …


Fragmentation And Some Applications, Joseph Bendana Jun 2024

Fragmentation And Some Applications, Joseph Bendana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of the idea that human minds are fragmented and its implications for some ongoing debates in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Let Fragmentation be, minimally, the view that human cognitive information access is best modeled as having a structure that permits for selective, variable-mediated access, instead of a structure that enables always-on, global access. In chapter 1, I canvass the motivation for this view, its many variants, and some of the key open questions that it raises, situating this project in the broader landscape of work on the view. In chapter 2 I argue …


Approaches To Narrative Instruction For Second Language Learners, Mathew Peters May 2021

Approaches To Narrative Instruction For Second Language Learners, Mathew Peters

MA TESOL Collection

Narratives have reemerged as a dominant form of rhetoric over the last fifty years. This dominant use of narrative discourse has only increased with the rise of social media. Walther Fisher (1987) proposed the narrative paradigm as a unifying theory of human communication. His major claim is that people are inherently storytellers and that people use a narrative rationality and a logic of good reasons to inform their beliefs, values, and actions. This paper utilizes his theories, along with recent findings in neuroscience, to establish an argument for greater inclusion of narratives into second language teaching. Narratives can have a …


Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes Jul 2016

Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand at least one prevalent religious epistemology in the Churches of Christ by exploring the work of Thomas B. Warren. To accomplish this goal, I first offer a descriptive analysis of Warren’s theory of knowledge followed by an assessment of its strong and weak points. Ultimately finding his epistemology unsatisfying, I conclude the thesis by highlighting recent developments in religious epistemology that might point the way forward in accounting for knowledge of God in a theologically and philosophically robust way.


From Political Liberalism To Para-Liberalism: Epistemological Pluralism, Cognitive Liberalism & Authentic Choice, Musa Al-Gharbi Jul 2016

From Political Liberalism To Para-Liberalism: Epistemological Pluralism, Cognitive Liberalism & Authentic Choice, Musa Al-Gharbi

Comparative Philosophy

Advocates of political liberalism hold it as a superior alternative to perfectionism on the grounds that it avoids superfluous and/or controversial claims in favor of a maximally-inclusive approach undergirded by a "free-standing" justification for the ideology. These assertions prove difficult to defend: political interpretations of liberalism tend to be implicitly ethnocentric; they often rely upon a number of controversial, and even empirically falsified, assumptions about rationality--and in many ways prove more parochial than their perfectionist cousins. It is possible to reform political liberalism to address these challenges, but generally at the expense of the supposed normative force and universality of …


Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram Jan 2005

Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.


Rescher On The Justification Of Rationality, Harvey Siegel Jan 1992

Rescher On The Justification Of Rationality, Harvey Siegel

Philosophy Articles and Papers

In his recent book Rationality, Nicholas Rescher offers a provocative attempt to justify rationality. In this paper I critically assess that attempt. After clarifying the philosophical problem at issue, I examine Rescher's effort to solve it. I argue that Rescher's justification succeeds, but that he mistakenly characterizes it as pragmatic. It succeeds only if it is understood non-pragmatically. Consequently, Rescher must give up either his justificatory argument, or his commitment to a pragmatic justification.