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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Epistemology
A New Peircean Response To Radical Skepticism, Justin Remhof
A New Peircean Response To Radical Skepticism, Justin Remhof
Philosophy Faculty Publications
The radical skeptic argues that I have no knowledge of things I ordinarily claim to know because I have no evidence for or against the possibility of being systematically fed illusions. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in pragmatic responses to skepticism inspired by C.S. Peirce. This essay challenges one such influential response and presents a better Peircean way to refute the skeptic. The account I develop holds that although I do not know whether the skeptical hypothesis is true, I still know things I ordinarily claim to know. It will emerge that although this reply appears similar …
Reasons To Realize That We Can’T Really Know About Unrealized Possibilities, Joseph Klein
Reasons To Realize That We Can’T Really Know About Unrealized Possibilities, Joseph Klein
Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects
The chief purpose of this essay is to defend the position that we do not have knowledge of unrealized possibilities. I do this first by laying out some basic concepts concerning modality. Then, I use these ideas to show that modal knowledge has sometimes been assumed without sufficient justification. Next, I provide my own argument that we have no access to such knowledge based on our understanding of evolutionary development. Finally, I discuss some potential implications for this argument and propose one way that we could reinterpret modal intuitions to explain why we came to think we had modal knowledge …
Taking Skepticism Seriously: How The Zhuang-Zi Can Inform Contemporary Epistemology, Julianne Chung
Taking Skepticism Seriously: How The Zhuang-Zi Can Inform Contemporary Epistemology, Julianne Chung
Comparative Philosophy
This paper explores a few of the ways that the Zhuang-Zi can inform contemporary analytic epistemology. I begin, in section 1, by briefly outlining and summarizing the case for my fictionalist interpretation of the text. In section 2, I discuss how the Zhuang-Zi can be brought into productive dialogue with the question of how we should respond to skeptical arguments. Specifically, I argue that the Zhuang-Zi can be reasonably interpreted as exemplifying an approach that is different from dominant contemporary responses to skeptical arguments in three ways: (i) it is fictionalist; (ii) it motivates a skeptical perspective rather than a …
Reading Others Well And Being Well Read, Nathan Louis Engel-Hawbecker
Reading Others Well And Being Well Read, Nathan Louis Engel-Hawbecker
Theses and Dissertations
The conceptual problem of other minds is over how we can so much as form thoughts or beliefs about (let alone know) mental lives other than our own. What I call the conceptual problem of other conscious minds restricts this question to others’ phenomenally conscious experiences. Past appeals to an individual’s inferential, imaginative, or perceptual faculties all more plausibly presuppose than provide a solution to this problem: such faculties allow us to form thoughts about others’ experiences only if we already have some prior means of doing so (§§2-5). This is not the case with testimony, which I introduce and …
Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes
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.
Nāgārjuna’S Pañcakoṭi, Agrippa’S Trilemma, And The Uses Of Skepticism, Ethan A. Mills
Nāgārjuna’S Pañcakoṭi, Agrippa’S Trilemma, And The Uses Of Skepticism, Ethan A. Mills
Comparative Philosophy
While the contemporary problem of the criterion raises similar epistemological issues as Agrippa’s Trilemma in ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, the consideration of such epistemological questions has served two different purposes. On one hand, there is the purely practical purpose of Pyrrhonism, in which such questions are a means to reach suspension of judgment, and on the other hand, there is the theoretical purpose of contemporary epistemologists, in which these issues raise theoretical problems that drive the search for theoretical resolution. In classical India, similar issues arise in Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī, but it is not entirely clear what Nāgārjuna’s purpose is. Contrary …
Hume's Argument That Empirical Knowledge Cannot Be Certain, From The Enquires (Argument Map), Michael Hoffmann
Hume's Argument That Empirical Knowledge Cannot Be Certain, From The Enquires (Argument Map), Michael Hoffmann
Michael H.G. Hoffmann
This argument map reconstructs David Hume's famous skeptical argument in logical form. The argument is open for debate and comments in AGORA-net (http://agora.gatech.edu/). Search for map ID 9857.
Cartesian Skepticism As Moral Dilemma, Jennifer Woodward
Cartesian Skepticism As Moral Dilemma, Jennifer Woodward
University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations
I argue that despite the fact that there can be no strong refutation of skepticism it remains that ignoring skeptical hypotheses and relying on one’s sensory experience are both sound epistemic practices. This argument comes in the form of arguing that we are justified in ignoring skeptical hypotheses on the grounds that (1) they are merely logically possible, and (2) the merely logically possible is rarely relevant in the context of everyday life. I suggest that (2) is true on the grounds that the context of everyday life is one in which our epistemic pursuit of truth is mixed with …
Whose Science And Whose Religion? Reflections On The Relations Between Scientific And Religious Worldviews, Stuart Glennan
Whose Science And Whose Religion? Reflections On The Relations Between Scientific And Religious Worldviews, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Arguments about the relationship between science and religion often proceed by identifying a set of essential characteristics of scientific and religious worldviews and arguing on the basis of these characteristics for claims about a relationship of conflict or compatibility between them. Such a strategy is doomed to failure because science, to some extent, and religion, to a much larger extent, are cultural phenomena that are too diverse in their expressions to be characterized in terms of a unified worldview. In this paper I follow a different strategy. Having offered a loose characterization of the nature of science, I pose five …