Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Essays on epistemology
The roles of epistemology
Essay on the problems of epistemology
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Essays on epistemology
‘Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?’ - Bonjour Bonjour criticizes all forms of epistemological foundationalism. He describes the various forms of foundationalism and the main argument surrounding them as well as the justification regress problem - Justification of a belief is justified by another belief which must also be justified...etc. This epistemic regress gives the foundationalist four options: (i) The regress ends with beliefs that have no justification. (No good because unjustified arbitrary beliefs cannot justify beliefs.) (ii) The regress is infinite (No good because there is no justification.) (iii) The regress is circular (A form of coherence justification but it is no good because circular justification is not justification.) (iv) The regress ends with beliefs that are justified without the justification of other beliefs. The Foundationalist argues for (iv) because all other options are no good. Bonjour disagrees, (iv) does not solve the regress of justification problem. He argues against the claim that some empirical beliefs are justified intrinsicall...
It is crucial that every belief must be thoroughly explored and justified to avoid any future repercussions. Clifford provides two examples in which, regardless of the outcome, the party that creates a belief without comprehensive justification ends up at fault. It is possible to apply the situations in The Ethics of Belief to any cases of belief and end up with the conclusion that justification is of utmost importance. Justifying beliefs is so important because even the smallest beliefs affect others in the community, add to the global belief system, and alter the believer moral compass in future decisions.
When all the evidence is noted (and there is even more beyond that which is stated here), one can not ignore the overwhelming presence of a
It is apparent that both authors provide insights into aiding the reader in making a conclusive determination, however, as mentioned; the reader may be misled by the author’s personal perceptive. Although much factual “doctrines” are exclusively used to provide a certain perceptive, both authors give their account as best as possible, however, neither side can conclusively claim their perceptive as ligament claims.
The term justified belief refers to belief that is formed by the existence of proper evidence and logic. William K Clifford tells us of a story of a ship owner and deaths caused by his unjustified beliefs.
#3. The existence of a contingent being must be explained by something other than itself.
(1) Kelly, Thomas (2005). “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement.” Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Eds. Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pg.1 – 36.
Hick’s pluralistic theory faces one major difficulty though, the contradicting claims that each different religions makes. How can all major religions be responses of the same ultimate reality when they contradict one another? For a pluralistic view to be plausible, the hypothesis has to sufficiently explain how religions can make incompatible claims while at the same time be responses of the same ultimate reality.
In this paper I will present an argument I have found in the Second Analogy for the necessity of presupposing the causal determination of each event. I will begin by briefly describing Robert Paul W...
that the idea of a God may be questioned or less acceptable to the people, when
Almost all epistemologists, since Edmund Gettier’s 1963 article, have agreed that he disproved the justified-true-belief conception of knowledge. He proposed two examples
Bertrand Russell, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern age, argued extensively in his book, “The Problems of Philosophy”, that the belief in inductive reasoning is only rational on the grounds of its intrinsic evidence; it cannot be justified by an appeal to experience alone (Russell 1998). Inductive reasoning refers to a form of reasoning that constructs or assesses propositions that are generalizations of observations (Russell 1998). Inductive reasoning is thus, in simple terms, probabilistic. The premises of an inductive logical argument provide some degree of support for the conclusion, but that support is in no way definitive or conclusive (Browne, 2004). Yet even if one agrees with Russell and concludes that there are no rational justifications for the principle of induction in and of itself, one can still maintain that there is a pragmatic justification for maintaining a belief in the principle. Simply put, there are still perfectly sound reasons for behaving as if the principle of induction holds true, regardless of whether or not the principle itself is rationally justifiable (Browne, 2004). This type of justification can be used across many of the belief systems that we as human beings hold, even stretching to the playing field of religion. In this paper I will outline not only why it is pragmatically justifiable to believe in the principle of induction, but also why it is equally as justifiable to believe in an infinite God, regardless of whether or not deductive reasoning provides us with definitive support for such conclusions.
Furthermore, another theory in this debate according to Harris and Shaw (2000) is that the UCR is primaril...
This essay attempts to capitalize on Goldman 's “What is justified belief?” to form an opinion about his ideas. Goldman makes a break from traditional views of knowledge to form a theory of externalism. He gives the reader a new point of view for observing the relationship between knowledge and justification. The following passage will weed out some important aspects of his theory and how they relate to his theory as a whole.
Popper claims basic statements are not justified by experience, but accepted by choice or convention. This claim is argued through a rejection of ‘psychologism’ and inductivism. According to Popper, scientific theory can be seen the fog above a swamp full of basic statements; the acceptance of a theory comes from an evaluation of basic statements and the conscious decision to accept or reject the theory. Popper comes to this conclusion after considering the problem of psychologism, distinguishing science from non-science, examining the falsification of theories and their testability, and then comparing perceptual experience and basic statements to illustrate how we come to form and accept scientific theory as empirical. Poppers arguments are
Some of the objections, such as the ones made by Edmund Gettier, claim that three conditions are not nearly enough to justify a true belief, and that at the very least a fourth must be added. Gettier presents a very valid criticism of the JTB theory of knowledge, and his counter examples highlight flaws in the JTB theory that make it an inadequate theory of knowledge. Gettier claims takes an issue with the third part of the JTB theory, which states that proposition P must be true. Gettier makes the interesting observation that person S may very well be justified in believing in proposition P even if P is false