Empiricism

qas: question: What is commonly contrasted with empiricism?
answers: text: rationalism
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question: Where does rationalism say knowledge comes from?
answers: text: reason independently of the senses
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question: What is an example knowledge being derived from intuition?
answers: text: knowledge of God's existence
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question: What did Locke think some knowledge could come from?
answers: text: intuition and reasoning alone
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question: Where were the main European rationalists?
answers: text: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz
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question: Who were the main philosophical empiricists?
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question: What did John Locke say required information from one's experience?
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question: Where was philosophical empiricism popular?
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question: Why are empiricists and rationalists similar?
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question: How did empiricists discover innate ideas?
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question: What did Mill put in the gap?
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question: What did Hume think our beliefs can't be established solely by?
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question: What type of human knowledge is math?
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context: Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience. This view is commonly contrasted with rationalism, which states that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses. For example, John Locke held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly Robert Boyle, a prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we have innate ideas. The main continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method".

qas: question: What theory was Aristotle's explanation based on?
answers: text: his theory of potentiality and actuality
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question: How did Plato's Phaedo and Apology think of the mind?
answers: text: an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body on Earth
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question: Who thought the senses were more important, Aristotle or Plato?
answers: text: Aristotle
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question: Who thought the senses were less important, Aristotle or Plato?
answers: text: Plato
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question: What does "nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu" mean?
answers: text: Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses"
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question: Which commentator summarized a position in latin?
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question: What did Aristotle write?
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question: Why is Plato considered an empiricist?
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question: What position by Plato was summarized by Middle Ages commentators?
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question: Where did Aristotle say the human mind existed?
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question: What was Hume's nationality?
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question: When was abductive reasoning added?
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question: When did Galileo die?
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context: Aristotle's explanation of how this was possible was not strictly empiricist in a modern sense, but rather based on his theory of potentiality and actuality, and experience of sense perceptions still requires the help of the active nous. These notions contrasted with Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body on Earth (see Plato's Phaedo and Apology, as well as others). Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato, and commentators in the Middle Ages summarized one of his positions as "nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu" (Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses").

qas: question: What is the Stoic view?
answers: text: the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it
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question: What was Aetius's career?
answers: text: doxographer
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question: Where was Sextus from?
answers: text: Chaeronea
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question: Who wrote 'Against the Professors'?
answers: text: Sextus
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question: Whose ideas did Sextus build on?
answers: text: Aetius
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question: Where was Aetius from?
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question: What book did Aetius write?
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question: What was Sextus' career?
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question: What innate thoughts is a man born with?
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question: Who invented stoicism?
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question: When was John Locke's essay written?
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question: When was Descartes born?
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question: Who changed Dewey's solution?
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context: This idea was later developed in ancient philosophy by the Stoic school. Stoic epistemology generally emphasized that the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it. The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon." Later stoics, such as Sextus of Chaeronea, would continue this idea of empiricism in later Stoic writings as well. As Sextus contends "For every thought comes from sense-perception or not without sense-perception and either from direct experience or not without direct experience" (Against the Professors, 8.56-8).

qas: question: Whose idea was 'tabula rasa'?
answers: text: Aristotle
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question: What religion was Al Farabi?
answers: text: Islamic
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question: What does al-'aql al-hayulani mean?
answers: text: material intellect
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question: What does al-'aql al-fa'il mean?
answers: text: active intellect
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question: What is crucial for understanding?
answers: text: the immaterial "active intellect"
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question: What was Aristotle's religion?
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question: What did Al Farabi say tabula rasa was?
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question: Who developed the syllogistic method?
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question: What did Aristotle call the active intellect?
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question: What does tabula rasa mean?
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question: What did Hume think our beliefs can't be established solely by?
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question: What did Mill say might not actually exist?
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question: What sensations did Mill differentiate?
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context: During the Middle Ages Aristotle's theory of tabula rasa was developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi, developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail. For Avicenna (Ibn Sina), for example, the tabula rasa is a pure potentiality that is actualized through education, and knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts". The intellect itself develops from a material intellect (al-'aql al-hayulani), which is a potentiality "that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-'aql al-fa'il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge". So the immaterial "active intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur.

qas: question: What was 'Abubacer' normally called?
answers: text: Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail
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question: What was 'Ebn Topnail' normally called?
answers: text: Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail
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question: What was Ibn Tufail's religion?
answers: text: Muslim
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question: What was Ibn Tufail's ethnicity?
answers: text: Andalusian
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question: When did Ibn Tufail live?
answers: text: 12th century CE
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question: When was John Locke's essay written?
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question: What was Edward Pococke the Younger's religion?
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question: Where was John Locke from?
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question: What did Ibn Tufail publish in 1671?
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question: What does Hayy ibn Yaqdhan mean?
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question: Who was a neopositivist?
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question: Who said you must base your reasoning on authority rather than your own findings?
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question: What innate thoughts is a man born with?
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context: In the 12th century CE the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) included the theory of tabula rasa as a thought experiment in his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

qas: question: When was da Vinci born?
answers: text: 1452
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question: When did da Vinci die?
answers: text: 1519
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question: What did renaissance writers question?
answers: text: the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition
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question: Who did Machiavelli disdain?
answers: text: writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals
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question: What did da Vinci advise when your experience contradicted authority?
answers: text: abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings
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question: When did Niccolo Machiavelli live?
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question: Who judged everything according to mental ideals?
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question: What was Leonardo da Vinci most famous for?
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question: Who said you must base your reasoning on authority rather than your own findings?
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question: When was Francesco Guicciardini born?
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question: What was Ludwig Wittgenstein part of?
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question: When Mill left a question of sensations unanswered, how did Berkeley answer it?
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question: What methodology by James is roundly accepted today?
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context: In the late renaissance various writers began to question the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing Niccolò Machiavelli and his friend Francesco Guicciardini initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study the "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said, "If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings."

qas: question: When was Vincenzo Galilei born?
answers: text: ca. 1520
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question: When did Vincenzo Galilei die?
answers: text: 1591
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question: Who was Vincenzo Galilei's oldest son?
answers: text: Galileo
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question: What does 'esperienza' mean?
answers: text: experiment
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question: When was Galileo born?
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question: When did Galileo die?
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question: Who wrote Music and Science in the age of Galileo?
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question: When did Vincenzo discover the meaning of Pythagoras' hammers'?
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question: Where was Galileo born?
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question: Why did Hume say we expect the sun to rise?
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question: When did Pierce begin to take excesses with data-driven empiricism?
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question: When was 'Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge' published?
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context: The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1520–1591), father of Galileo and the inventor of monody, made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment" was esperienza. It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed. Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei), arguably one of the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of 'Pythagoras' hammers' (the square of the numbers concerned yielded those musical intervals, not the actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience and demonstration" as the sine qua non of valid rational enquiry.

qas: question: When was the British empiricism period?
answers: text: 17th century
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question: What type of philosopher was Francis Bacon?
answers: text: empiricist
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question: What type of philosopher was Descartes?
answers: text: rationalist
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question: What type of philosopher was Hobbes?
answers: text: empiricist
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question: What type of philosopher was Spinoza?
answers: text: rationalist
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question: What did George Berkeley found?
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question: Who was the exponent of rationalism in the Enlightenment?
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question: What was British empiricism originally called?
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question: What was Baruch Spinoza's nationality?
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question: Who was the founder of rationalism?
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question: What did problem of the scientific method did Hume solve?
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question: What does "nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu" mean?
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question: How many categories did Kant divide the world into?
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context: British empiricism, though it was not a term used at the time, derives from the 17th century period of early modern philosophy and modern science. The term became useful in order to describe differences perceived between two of its founders Francis Bacon, described as empiricist, and René Descartes, who is described as a rationalist. Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in the next generation, are often also described as an empiricist and a rationalist respectively. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume were the primary exponents of empiricism in the 18th century Enlightenment, with Locke being the person who is normally known as the founder of empiricism as such.

qas: question: When was 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' published?
answers: text: 1689
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question: Who wrote 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'?
answers: text: John Locke
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question: What does 'tabula rasa' mean?
answers: text: blank tablet
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question: What did Locke say 'tabula rasa' meant?
answers: text: white paper
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question: What did Locke's 'tabula rasa' concept say happens to the mind?
answers: text: on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written
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question: What did Descarte call our knowledge of things?
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question: What did Descarte publish in 1689?
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question: When was Descartes born?
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question: Who founded continental rationalism?
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question: Why are primary qualities non-essential?
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question: What did Ibn Tufail publish in 1671?
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question: Who wrote 'Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge'?
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question: What was the analytic-synthetic distinction?
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context: In response to the early-to-mid-17th century "continental rationalism" John Locke (1632–1704) proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) a very influential view wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori, i.e., based upon experience. Locke is famously attributed with holding the proposition that the human mind is a tabula rasa, a "blank tablet", in Locke's words "white paper", on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written. There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. In both cases, a distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are unanalysable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Without specific primary qualities, an object would not be what it is. For example, an apple is an apple because of the arrangement of its atomic structure. If an apple was structured differently, it would cease to be an apple. Secondary qualities are the sensory information we can perceive from its primary qualities. For example, an apple can be perceived in various colours, sizes, and textures but it is still identified as an apple. Therefore, its primary qualities dictate what the object essentially is, while its secondary qualities define its attributes. Complex ideas combine simple ones, and divide into substances, modes, and relations. According to Locke, our knowledge of things is a perception of ideas that are in accordance or discordance with each other, which is very different from the quest for certainty of Descartes.

qas: question: Who wrote 'Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge'?
answers: text: George Berkeley
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question: When was 'Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge' published?
answers: text: 1710
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question: What religion was George Berkeley?
answers: text: Anglican
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question: What nationality was George Berkeley?
answers: text: Irish
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question: Who wrote 'Alciphron'?
answers: text: George Berkeley
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question: When was Alciphron published?
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question: What was Locke's religion?
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question: Who responded to George Berkeley?
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question: Whom did Locke claim created order?
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question: When was abductive reasoning added?
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question: What was Ludwig Wittgenstein part of?
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question: What do indirect experiences produce?
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context: A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685–1753), determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism. In response to Locke, he put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it.) In his text Alciphron, Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism.

qas: question: What did Hume bring to empiricism?
answers: text: a new level of skepticism
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question: What was Hume's nationality?
answers: text: Scottish
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question: What two types of arguments did Locke say there are?
answers: text: demonstrative and probable
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question: When was Hume born?
answers: text: 1711
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question: When did Hume die?
answers: text: 1776
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question: Who argued that skepticism was a form of empiricism?
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question: When did David Hume respond to Berkeley?
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question: How many arguments did Berkeley say there were?
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question: What was Locke's nationality?
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question: Who was Locke's contemporary?
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question: Who came up with 'instrumentalism'?
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question: What did Mill put in the gap?
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question: Who said you must base your reasoning on authority rather than your own findings?
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context: The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) responded to Berkeley's criticisms of Locke, as well as other differences between early modern philosophers, and moved empiricism to a new level of skepticism. Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. He wrote for example, "Locke divides all arguments into demonstrative and probable. On this view, we must say that it is only probable that all men must die or that the sun will rise to-morrow, because neither of these can be demonstrated. But to conform our language more to common use, we ought to divide arguments into demonstrations, proofs, and probabilities—by ‘proofs’ meaning arguments from experience that leave no room for doubt or opposition." And,

qas: question: What types of human knowledge did Hume say there are?
answers: text: relations of ideas and matters of fact
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question: What type of human knowledge is math?
answers: text: relations of ideas
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question: What type of human knowledge is observing the world?
answers: text: matters of fact
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question: What type of human knowledge is "the sun rises in the East"?
answers: text: matters of fact
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question: Where did Hume say people's ideas come from?
answers: text: their "impressions"
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question: How many categories did Kant divide the world into?
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question: What would the incorrect phrase "the sun rises in the west" be?
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question: Why are sensations considered copies of ideas?
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question: What was the analytic-synthetic distinction?
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question: Who developed the syllogistic method?
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question: Why does Hume say we can know the sun will rise in the east?
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question: How can't a finite set of statements be described?
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context: Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides") are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world (e.g. "the sun rises in the East") are examples of the second. All of people's "ideas", in turn, are derived from their "impressions". For Hume, an "impression" corresponds roughly with what we call a sensation. To remember or to imagine such impressions is to have an "idea". Ideas are therefore the faint copies of sensations.

qas: question: What did Hume think our beliefs are?
answers: text: a result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences
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question: What did Hume think our beliefs can't be established solely by?
answers: text: reason
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question: What did Hume think is a circular argument?
answers: text: the justification for inductive reasoning
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question: What did Hume say we can't know by inductive reasoning?
answers: text: that the sun will continue to rise in the East
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question: Why did Hume say we expect the sun to rise?
answers: text: because it has repeatedly done so in the past
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question: Who invented the circular argument?
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question: Why does Hume say we can know the sun will rise in the east?
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question: What did problem of the scientific method did Hume solve?
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question: Where does Hume say the sun sets?
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question: Humes argues there is no way to know the past will be like what?
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question: Who was the founder of rationalism?
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question: What did Mill say might not actually exist?
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question: When was abductive reasoning added?
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context: Hume maintained that all knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, cannot be conclusively established by reason. Rather, he maintained, our beliefs are more a result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Among his many arguments Hume also added another important slant to the debate about scientific method — that of the problem of induction. Hume argued that it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument. Among Hume's conclusions regarding the problem of induction is that there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. Thus, as a simple instance posed by Hume, we cannot know with certainty by inductive reasoning that the sun will continue to rise in the East, but instead come to expect it to do so because it has repeatedly done so in the past.

qas: question: What conclusion do most of Hume's followers disagree with?
answers: text: that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable
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question: What did Hume say can't be rationally justified?
answers: text: belief in an external world
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question: What is phenomenalism?
answers: text: physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events
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question: What is subjective idealism closely related to?
answers: text: Phenomenalism
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question: What did John Stuart Mill say matter is?
answers: text: the "permanent possibility of sensation"
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question: Who founded the phenomenalism philosophy?
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question: When did DW Hamlin publish his essays?
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question: Why did John Stuart Mill disagree with Hume?
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question: When did Phenomenalism begin?
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question: Who argued for subjective idealism?
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question: When Mill left a question of sensations unanswered, how did Berkeley answer it?
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question: What does "nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu" mean?
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question: When was Peirce born?
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context: Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let the issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit. According to an extreme empiricist theory known as phenomenalism, anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences. Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist — hence the closely related term subjective idealism. By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences. This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part. As John Stuart Mill put it in the mid-19th century, matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation". Mill's empiricism went a significant step beyond Hume in still another respect: in maintaining that induction is necessary for all meaningful knowledge including mathematics. As summarized by D.W. Hamlin:

qas: question: What did Mill say knowledge comes from?
answers: text: an inductive inference from direct experience
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question: What sensations did Mill differentiate?
answers: text: actual and possible sensations
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question: When Mill left a question of sensations unanswered, how did Berkeley answer it?
answers: text: God
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question: What did Mill say might not actually exist?
answers: text: gap-filling entities
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question: What did Mill misrepresent about math?
answers: text: the structure and method of mathematical science, the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures
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question: What did Mill put in the gap?
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question: What do indirect experiences produce?
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question: Who disagreed that "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all"?
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question: what did Mill realize about mathematics?
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question: What does subjective idealism lead to?
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question: Why did Pierce prefer the data-driven empiricist view?
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question: How can't a finite set of statements be described?
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question: Why did Pierce reject rationalism?
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context: Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind is not from direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience. The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position center around the following issues: Firstly, Mill's formulation encounters difficulty when it describes what direct experience is by differentiating only between actual and possible sensations. This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in the first place. Berkeley put God in that gap; the phenomenalists, including Mill, essentially left the question unanswered. In the end, lacking an acknowledgement of an aspect of "reality" that goes beyond mere "possibilities of sensation", such a position leads to a version of subjective idealism. Questions of how floor beams continue to support a floor while unobserved, how trees continue to grow while unobserved and untouched by human hands, etc., remain unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable in these terms. Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves open the unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all". Thirdly, Mill's position, by calling mathematics merely another species of inductive inference, misapprehends mathematics. It fails to fully consider the structure and method of mathematical science, the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures which do not, either today or at the time Mill wrote, fall under the agreed meaning of induction.

qas: question: What phase of empiricism ended in the 1940s?
answers: text: phenomenalist
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question: How can't a finite set of statements be described?
answers: text: in purely sensory terms
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question: What is necessary to explain a doctor's normality in sensory terms?
answers: text: a second doctor
is_impossible: no

question: When did the phenomenalist phase begin?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was the problem of the third man published?
is_impossible: yes

question: How must a finite set of statements be described?
is_impossible: yes

question: How many doctors do you need to satisfy the hypothetical problem?
is_impossible: yes

question: How did it become possible for physical object statements to translate into sense-data statements?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who argued that skepticism was a form of empiricism?
is_impossible: yes

question: Where did Aristotle say the human mind existed?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was Descartes born?
is_impossible: yes
context: The phenomenalist phase of post-Humean empiricism ended by the 1940s, for by that time it had become obvious that statements about physical things could not be translated into statements about actual and possible sense data. If a physical object statement is to be translatable into a sense-data statement, the former must be at least deducible from the latter. But it came to be realized that there is no finite set of statements about actual and possible sense-data from which we can deduce even a single physical-object statement. Remember that the translating or paraphrasing statement must be couched in terms of normal observers in normal conditions of observation. There is, however, no finite set of statements that are couched in purely sensory terms and can express the satisfaction of the condition of the presence of a normal observer. According to phenomenalism, to say that a normal observer is present is to make the hypothetical statement that were a doctor to inspect the observer, the observer would appear to the doctor to be normal. But, of course, the doctor himself must be a normal observer. If we are to specify this doctor's normality in sensory terms, we must make reference to a second doctor who, when inspecting the sense organs of the first doctor, would himself have to have the sense data a normal observer has when inspecting the sense organs of a subject who is a normal observer. And if we are to specify in sensory terms that the second doctor is a normal observer, we must refer to a third doctor, and so on (also see the third man).

qas: question: What are other terms for logical empiricism?
answers: text: logical positivism or neopositivism
is_impossible: no

question: When was logical empricism formulated?
answers: text: early 20th-century
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question: What did logical empiricism try to combine with mathematical logic?
answers: text: British empiricism
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question: What was Otto Neurath an important member of?
answers: text: Logical empiricism
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question: What was AJ Ayer an important member of?
answers: text: Logical empiricism
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question: When were Gottlob Frege's mathematical insights published?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who named neopositivism?
is_impossible: yes

question: What was Ludwig Wittgenstein part of?
is_impossible: yes

question: What was Ludwig Wittgenstein's nationality?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who founded the Vienna Circle?
is_impossible: yes

question: What did James rename pragmaticism as?
is_impossible: yes

question: What was 'Ebn Topnail' normally called?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was Dewey born?
is_impossible: yes
context: Logical empiricism (also logical positivism or neopositivism) was an early 20th-century attempt to synthesize the essential ideas of British empiricism (e.g. a strong emphasis on sensory experience as the basis for knowledge) with certain insights from mathematical logic that had been developed by Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Some of the key figures in this movement were Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick and the rest of the Vienna Circle, along with A.J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach.

qas: question: When was Bertrand Russell born?
answers: text: 1872
is_impossible: no

question: When did Bertrand Russell die?
answers: text: 1970
is_impossible: no

question: What did Frege say about math?
answers: text: all mathematical truths are logical
is_impossible: no

question: What did Wittgenstein say about logic?
answers: text: all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies
is_impossible: no

question: What are pseudoproblems?
answers: text: most metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems
is_impossible: no

question: When was Frege's thesis published?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was Wittgenstein born?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did Wittgenstein die?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who was a neopositivist?
is_impossible: yes

question: What gave a sentence meaning?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did William James die?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did William James die?
is_impossible: yes

question: What did Peirce later call his ideas instead of pragmatism?
is_impossible: yes
context: The neopositivists subscribed to a notion of philosophy as the conceptual clarification of the methods, insights and discoveries of the sciences. They saw in the logical symbolism elaborated by Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) a powerful instrument that could rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into an ideal, logically perfect, language that would be free of the ambiguities and deformations of natural language. This gave rise to what they saw as metaphysical pseudoproblems and other conceptual confusions. By combining Frege's thesis that all mathematical truths are logical with the early Wittgenstein's idea that all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies, they arrived at a twofold classification of all propositions: the analytic (a priori) and the synthetic (a posteriori). On this basis, they formulated a strong principle of demarcation between sentences that have sense and those that do not: the so-called verification principle. Any sentence that is not purely logical, or is unverifiable is devoid of meaning. As a result, most metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems came to be considered pseudoproblems.

qas: question: Who were extreme empiricists?
answers: text: neopositivists
is_impossible: no

question: Who attacked logical positivism?
answers: text: Nelson Goodman, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, and Richard Rorty
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question: What position does Dummett take?
answers: text: anti-realists
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question: Who abandoned phenomenalism?
answers: text: Carnap and Neurath
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question: When did Carnap and Neurath leave phenomenalism?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did Michael Dummett begin championing neopositivism?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was logical positivism at its most popular?
is_impossible: yes

question: What war led to the abandonment of phenomenalism?
is_impossible: yes

question: What position did Hilary Putnam favour?
is_impossible: yes

question: What did Descarte call our knowledge of things?
is_impossible: yes

question: What two types of arguments did Locke say there are?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who was a neopositivist?
is_impossible: yes
context: In the extreme empiricism of the neopositivists—at least before the 1930s—any genuinely synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of ultimate assertions) that expresses direct observations or perceptions. In later years, Carnap and Neurath abandoned this sort of phenomenalism in favor of a rational reconstruction of knowledge into the language of an objective spatio-temporal physics. That is, instead of translating sentences about physical objects into sense-data, such sentences were to be translated into so-called protocol sentences, for example, "X at location Y and at time T observes such and such." The central theses of logical positivism (verificationism, the analytic-synthetic distinction, reductionism, etc.) came under sharp attack after World War II by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, and Richard Rorty. By the late 1960s, it had become evident to most philosophers that the movement had pretty much run its course, though its influence is still significant among contemporary analytic philosophers such as Michael Dummett and other anti-realists.

qas: question: When did pragmatism arise?
answers: text: In the late 19th and early 20th century
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question: Who developed pragmatism?
answers: text: Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
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question: Where did Peirce and James meet?
answers: text: Harvard
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question: When did Peirce and James meet?
answers: text: in the 1870s
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question: What did Peirce later call his ideas instead of pragmatism?
answers: text: pragmaticism
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question: What year did Charles Sanders Peirce graduate from harvard?
is_impossible: yes

question: What did James rename pragmaticism as?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did James and Pierce split ways?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did pragmatic philosophy die out?
is_impossible: yes

question: What was the tangent of pragmatism that Peirce didn't like?
is_impossible: yes

question: Where were James's pragmatism and radical empiricism intertwined?
is_impossible: yes

question: What was Hume's nationality?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was Bertrand Russell born?
is_impossible: yes
context: In the late 19th and early 20th century several forms of pragmatic philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms, developed mainly from discussions between Charles Sanders Peirce and William James when both men were at Harvard in the 1870s. James popularized the term "pragmatism", giving Peirce full credit for its patrimony, but Peirce later demurred from the tangents that the movement was taking, and redubbed what he regarded as the original idea with the name of "pragmaticism". Along with its pragmatic theory of truth, this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking.

qas: question: When was Peirce born?
answers: text: 1839
is_impossible: no

question: When did Peirce die?
answers: text: 1914
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question: What view did Peirce think had been driven to excess?
answers: text: the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view
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question: Who formed the basis for modern scientific method?
answers: text: Charles Peirce
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question: Whose rationalism did Peirce criticize?
answers: text: Descartes
is_impossible: no

question: When did Pierce begin to take excesses with data-driven empiricism?
is_impossible: yes

question: Why did Pierce reject rationalism?
is_impossible: yes

question: Which philosopher did Pierce agree with the most?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was the strict-empiricist view started?
is_impossible: yes

question: Why did Pierce prefer the data-driven empiricist view?
is_impossible: yes

question: Where was Galileo born?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was the British empiricism period?
is_impossible: yes

question: What did George Berkeley found?
is_impossible: yes
context: Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was highly influential in laying the groundwork for today's empirical scientific method.[citation needed] Although Peirce severely criticized many elements of Descartes' peculiar brand of rationalism, he did not reject rationalism outright. Indeed, he concurred with the main ideas of rationalism, most importantly the idea that rational concepts can be meaningful and the idea that rational concepts necessarily go beyond the data given by empirical observation. In later years he even emphasized the concept-driven side of the then ongoing debate between strict empiricism and strict rationalism, in part to counterbalance the excesses to which some of his cohorts had taken pragmatism under the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view.

qas: question: How long before Peirce did Hume write?
answers: text: a century
is_impossible: no

question: How did Peirce view inductive vs deductive reasoning?
answers: text: complementary
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question: How did Hume view inductive vs deductive reasoning?
answers: text: competitive
is_impossible: no

question: What did fallibilism say?
answers: text: the conclusions of science are always tentative
is_impossible: no

question: What does the scientific method's rationality depend on?
answers: text: its self-corrective character
is_impossible: no

question: When was abductive reasoning added?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was the doctrine of fallibilism published?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who said the doctrines of science are always definitive?
is_impossible: yes

question: Why does the scientific method rely on its certainty?
is_impossible: yes

question: What type of human knowledge is math?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who came up with 'instrumentalism'?
is_impossible: yes

question: What was Ludwig Wittgenstein's nationality?
is_impossible: yes
context: Among Peirce's major contributions was to place inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in a complementary rather than competitive mode, the latter of which had been the primary trend among the educated since David Hume wrote a century before. To this, Peirce added the concept of abductive reasoning. The combined three forms of reasoning serve as a primary conceptual foundation for the empirically based scientific method today. Peirce's approach "presupposes that (1) the objects of knowledge are real things, (2) the characters (properties) of real things do not depend on our perceptions of them, and (3) everyone who has sufficient experience of real things will agree on the truth about them. According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".

qas: question: Who wrote 'Lectures on Pragmatism'?
answers: text: Peirce
is_impossible: no

question: When was 'Lectures on Pragmatism' published?
answers: text: 1903
is_impossible: no

question: What is 'haecceity'?
answers: text: unique individuality or "thisness"
is_impossible: no

question: What did Irvin Rock write about?
answers: text: indirect perception
is_impossible: no

question: Where has 'perception as abduction' come up repeatedly?
answers: text: in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research
is_impossible: no

question: In what essay was haecceity defined?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did Irvin Rock publish his essay?
is_impossible: yes

question: What school did Irvin Rock attend?
is_impossible: yes

question: What is the inverse relation between theories and senses?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who subverted the peripatetic-thomist observation?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who wrote 'Against the Professors'?
is_impossible: yes

question: When did William James die?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who came up with 'instrumentalism'?
is_impossible: yes
context: In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" (L: cos, cotis whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism". First among these he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception is a two-way street. That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses. Hence, if theories are theory-laden then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference, its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique – in a word, incorrigible. This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness" – what the Scholastics called its haecceity – that stands beyond control and correction. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them. This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with the work of Irvin Rock on indirect perception.

qas: question: Who came up with 'radical empiricism'?
answers: text: William James
is_impossible: no

question: Where were James's pragmatism and radical empiricism intertwined?
answers: text: in James's published lectures
is_impossible: no

question: When was William James born?
answers: text: 1842
is_impossible: no

question: When did William James die?
answers: text: 1910
is_impossible: no

question: When did James come up with 'radical empiricism'?
answers: text: Around the beginning of the 20th century
is_impossible: no

question: Why is James' method considered radical?
is_impossible: yes

question: What methodology by James is roundly accepted today?
is_impossible: yes

question: Where did James prove pragmatism and radical empiricism could be dealt with separately?
is_impossible: yes

question: How did James argue for the importance of the supernatural?
is_impossible: yes

question: When were Gottlob Frege's mathematical insights published?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was abductive reasoning added?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was Galileo born?
is_impossible: yes
context: Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842–1910) coined the term "radical empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism – though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support", by which he meant to rule out the perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. James's "radical empiricism" is thus not radical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term "empirical". (His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today.)

qas: question: Who came up with 'instrumentalism'?
answers: text: John Dewey
is_impossible: no

question: What did Dewey think about reality?
answers: text: reality is determined by past experience
is_impossible: no

question: When was Dewey born?
answers: text: 1859
is_impossible: no

question: When did Dewey die?
answers: text: 1952
is_impossible: no

question: What was instrumentalism a modification of?
answers: text: James' pragmatism
is_impossible: no

question: How did James define reality?
is_impossible: yes

question: Why is Dewey's system considered a priori?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who changed Dewey's solution?
is_impossible: yes

question: Why is basic thought crucial to Dewey's theory?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who claimed that humans create experiments based on the perceived future?
is_impossible: yes

question: When was Alciphron published?
is_impossible: yes

question: Who was the exponent of rationalism in the Enlightenment?
is_impossible: yes

question: What did Mill say might not actually exist?
is_impossible: yes
context: John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form a theory known as instrumentalism. The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test the pragmatic values of such experience. The value of such experience is measured experientially and scientifically, and the results of such tests generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation, in physical sciences as in ethics. Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori.