bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Food
Authors: Telfer Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

Much human time and attention goes into the production, preparation and consumption of food; hence it is only to be expected that a number of philosophical issues should be connected with it. Recently food has attracted specific philosophical attention, but there have always been philosophical debates with a bearing on food. One such is that concerning the pleasures of eating and drinking, where we find traditional attempts (mainly stemming from Plato) to show that such pleasures must be inferior ones. Another arises from the aesthetic claims sometimes made on behalf of food: can food, or cookery, ever be an art-form, and if so then in virtue of what similarities with central, less contentious forms of art? Further discussion investigates the symbolic and ritual significance of the preparation and consumption of food, its religious and social meanings.

Moral questions arise: is there a duty to help feed the hungry of the Third World, and if so how far does this duty extend? Are there duties of proper nutrition towards oneself, and is there a compelling moral case against eating meat? Two virtues have a close connection to food: temperance (which can be seen as an Aristotelian mean between gluttony and and extreme asceticism) in the consumption of it and hospitableness in the provision of sharing it.
Presentism
Authors: Le Poidevin Robin
Published: September 2018

Presentism, as a metaphysical thesis about time, is the view that only what is present exists. The past and future are in some sense to be explained, unreal. Although this appears at first sight to be both an intuitive and a substantial thesis about the world, the first challenge to anyone wishing to espouse it is to show that it is not simply the trivial truth that only what is present exists now. One way of giving content to the presentist thesis is to provide a positive account of how past and future can be constructed from presently existing items, in ways that parallel attempts to construct possible states of affairs from actual states. Some presentists, however, would decline the invitation to provide such a construction, arguing that the flow of time allows one to say quite unproblematically that the past is what once existed, but no longer does so. A further challenge to the presentist is to account for the truth of statements that appear to require the existence of relations between non-contemporaneous items, statements that contain terms such as ‘is earlier than’, ‘is a cause of’, ‘is the larval stage of’, ‘is the remote ancestor of’, etc. Although the initial attraction of presentism is its offer to provide a more systematic statement of our pre-theoretic views, a fully worked-out and consistent presentist theory seems likely to be quite revisionary.
Properties
Authors: Daly Chris
Published: September 2018

Asked to describe a given tomato, you might cite its redness, its size, and its age. In doing so, some philosophers would claim, you have cited some of the tomato’s properties. A property is what is variously called a feature, quality, attribute, or (as some philosophers put it) a way that something is. A property is supposed to be an entity that things (including particulars, such as tomatoes or people) have.

The topic of properties is part of ontology (the study of what there is). The topic involves two key issues. The first issue concerns the nature of properties. That is, it concerns what sorts of entities properties are. One important question here is whether properties are located in space and time. Some philosophers follow Plato in thinking that properties are located in neither space nor time. Others follow Aristotle in thinking that properties are located in space and time. Another question is whether distinct individuals can literally have one and the same property. The view that they can takes properties to be repeatable entities, or universals. A rival view takes properties to be non-repeatable entities, or particulars.

The second issue concerns the existence of properties. Given a view about the nature of properties – a view about what properties are supposed to be – there is then an issue about whether there are any such entities. The traditional debate typically took properties to be universals. Realists about universals argued that universals exist, whereas Nominalists argued that they do not. With greater recognition emerging during the last century of other ways of thinking of properties, the debate about the existence of properties has become many-sided.

Philosophers who agree both about what properties are, and that properties so understood exist, may find other grounds for disagreement. This raises a subsidiary class of issues. For instance, do particulars exist in addition to properties? A given apple is edible, sweet to taste, and so on. Some philosophers argue that the apple is only a ‘bundle’ of these and other properties. Other philosophers disagree, and take the apple to be a ‘bare particular’ which has various properties, but is distinct from them. Other disagreements concern which properties exist, and how to classify them. For instance, is there a genuine distinction between so-called primary and secondary qualities? Again, is there a genuine distinction between so-called dispositional and non-dispositional (or categorical) properties?
Slingshot arguments
Authors: Rodriguez-Pereyra Gonzalo
Published: September 2018

Slingshot arguments form a family of arguments designed to make theories of facts collapse by showing that there is at most one fact, or that all true propositions are made true by or correspond to all facts, or similar conclusions. Slingshot arguments attempt to derive these undesirable consequences by showing that certain sentential connectives are truth-functional. The two most famous slingshots are associated with the names of Davidson and Gödel.
A priori
Authors: Moser Paul K.
Published: September 2018

An important term in epistemology since the seventeenth century, ‘a priori’ typically connotes a kind of knowledge or justification that does not depend on evidence, or warrant, from sensory experience. Talk of a priori truth is ordinarily shorthand for talk of truth knowable or justifiable independently of evidence from sensory experience; and talk of a priori concepts is usually talk of concepts that can be understood independently of reference to sensory experience. A priori knowledge contrasts with a posteriori knowledge, knowledge requiring evidence from sensory experience. Broadly characterized, a posteriori knowledge is empirical, experience-based knowledge, and a priori knowledge is non-empirical knowledge. Standard examples of a priori truths are the truths of mathematics, whereas standard examples of a posteriori truths are the truths of the natural sciences.
Deductive closure principle
Authors: Brueckner Anthony
Published: September 2018

It seems that one can expand one’s body of knowledge by making deductive inferences from propositions one knows. The ‘deductive closure principle’ captures this idea: if S knows that P, and S correctly deduces Q from P, then S knows that Q. A closely related principle is that knowledge is closed under known logical implication: if S knows that P and S knows that P logically implies Q, then S knows that Q. These principles, if they hold, are guaranteed by general features of the concept of knowledge. They would form part of a logic of knowledge.

An influential argument for scepticism about knowledge of the external world employs the deductive closure principle. The sceptic begins by sketching a logically possible hypothesis, or counter-possibility (for example, that one is a brain in a vat, with computer-induced sense experience) which is logically incompatible with various things one claims to know (such as that one has hands). The proposition that one has hands logically implies the falsity of the sceptical hypothesis. Supposing that one is aware of this implication, the deductive closure principle yields the consequence that if one knows that one has hands, then one knows that one is not a brain in a vat. The sceptic argues that one does not know this: if one were in a vat, then one would have just the sensory evidence one actually has. It follows that one does not know that one has hands. Some philosophers have sought to block this argument by denying the deductive closure principle.
Epistemic relativism
Authors: Stich Stephen P.
Published: September 2018

An account of what makes a system of reasoning or belief revision a good one is relativistic if it is sensitive to facts about the person or group using the system. It may then turn out that one system is best for one person or group, while a quite different system is best for another. Some of the most popular accounts of how systems of reasoning are to be assessed, including those based on reflective equilibrium and those based on the system’s truth-generating capacity, appear to be relativistic. It is sometimes claimed that epistemic relativism leads to nihilism or that it severs the connection between good reasoning and true belief.
Epistemology and ethics
Authors: Feldman Richard
Published: September 2018

Epistemology and ethics are both concerned with evaluations: ethics with evaluations of conduct, epistemology with evaluations of beliefs and other cognitive acts. Of considerable interest to philosophers are the ways in which the two kinds of evaluations relate to one another. Philosophers’ explorations of these relations divide into two general categories: examination of potential analogies between the two fields, and attempts to identify necessary or conceptual connections between the two domains.

There is little doubt that there are at least superficial similarities between ethics and epistemology: one might say that ethics is about the appraisal of social behaviour and agents, while epistemology is about the appraisal of cognitive acts and agents. On the other hand, the widely held view that behaviour subject to moral evaluation is free and voluntary while beliefs are not, suggests one important disanalogy between the two fields.
Foundationalism
Authors: Sosa Ernest
Published: September 2018

Some foundationalists are rationalists who rely on intuition and deduction. Others are empiricists, in a broad sense, and accept observation and induction or abduction or yet other ways to support beliefs by means of other beliefs. What they have in common is that they are all willing to hazard a positive view about what in general makes a belief epistemically justified in the way required for it to be a case of knowledge; and they all propose something of the following general form: belief b is justified if and only if either b is foundationally justified through a psychological process of direct apprehension p (such as rational intuition, observation, introspection, and so on) or else b is inferentially justified through a psychological process of reasoning r (such as deduction, induction, abduction, and so on) ultimately from beliefs all of which are acquired or sustained through p. If one rejects all forms of such foundationalism, then a question remains as to what distinguishes in general the cases where a belief is epistemically justified from the cases in which it is not. Can anything general and illuminating be said about what confers epistemic justification on a belief, and what gives a belief the epistemic status required for it to constitute knowledge (provided it is true)?
Hermeneutics
Authors: Inwood Michael
Published: September 2018

Hermeneutics, the ‘art of interpretation’, was originally the theory and method of interpreting the Bible and other difficult texts. Wilhelm Dilthey extended it to the interpretation of all human acts and products, including history and the interpretation of a human life. Heidegger, in Being and Time (1927), gave an ‘interpretation’ of the human being, the being that itself understands and interprets. Under his influence, hermeneutics became a central theme of continental philosophy. Hermeneutics generates several controversies. In interpreting something do we unearth the author’s thoughts and intentions, imagining ourselves in his position? Or do we relate it to a wider whole that gives it meaning? The latter view gives rise to the hermeneutic circle: we cannot understand a whole (for example, a text) unless we understand its parts, or the parts unless we understand the whole. Heidegger discovered another circle: as we inevitably bring presuppositions to what we interpret, does this mean that any interpretation is arbitrary, or at least endlessly revisable?
Introspection, epistemology of
Authors: Kornblith Hilary
Published: September 2018

If we wish to know what is going on in someone else’s mind, we must observe their behaviour; on the basis of what we observe, we may sometimes reasonably draw a conclusion about the person’s mental state. Thus, for example, on seeing someone smile, we infer that they are happy; on seeing someone scowl, we infer that they are upset. But this is not, at least typically, the way in which we come to know our own mental states. We do not need to examine our own behaviour in order to know how we feel, what we believe, what we want and so on. Our understanding of these things is more direct than our understanding of the mental states of others, it seems. The term used to describe this special mode of access which we seem to have to our own mental states is ‘introspection’.

A view which takes its inspiration from Descartes holds that introspection provides us with infallible and complete access to our states of mind. On this view, introspection provides us with a foundation for our knowledge of the physical world. On this view we come to know the physical world by first coming to recognize certain features of our mind, namely, the sensations which physical objects excite in us, and then drawing conclusions about the likely source of these mental states. Our knowledge of the physical world is thus indirect; it is grounded in the direct knowledge we have of our own minds. The view that introspection provides an infallible and complete picture of the mind, however, is no longer widely accepted.

Introspection has also been called upon to support various metaphysical conclusions. Descartes argued for dualism on the basis of introspective evidence, and certain contemporary philosophers have argued in much the same spirit. Hume noted that introspection does not reveal the presence of an enduring self, but only a series of fleeting perceptions; some have concluded, therefore, that there is no enduring self.

Philosophers concerned with self-improvement, whether epistemological or moral, have frequently called upon introspection. Introspection has been thought to aid in forming beliefs on the basis of adequate evidence, and it has been used as a tool of self-scrutiny by those concerned to understand and refine their motivations and characters.
Naturalized epistemology
Authors: Luper Steven
Published: September 2018

The term ‘naturalized epistemology’ was coined by W.V. Quine to refer to an approach to epistemology which he introduced in his 1969 essay ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Many of the moves that are distinctive of naturalized epistemology were made by David Hume, but Quine’s essay fixes the sense of the term as it is used today.

Naturalized epistemology has critical as well as constructive thrusts. In a critical spirit, ‘naturalists’ (theorists who identify with the label ‘naturalized epistemology’) abandon several assumptions that are part of the tradition. They reject Descartes’ vision of epistemology as the attempt to convert our beliefs into an edifice resting on a foundation about which we have complete certainty. Descartes is wrong to equate knowledge with certainty, and wrong to think that knowledge is available through a priori theorizing, through reasoning which makes no use of experience. Nor should epistemology continue as David Hume’s attempt to rest knowledge on an introspective study of the mind’s contents. Moreover, the global sceptic’s claim that there is no way to justify all our views at once, should either be conceded or ignored.

On the constructive side, naturalists suggest that in investigating knowledge we rely on the apparatus, techniques and assumptions of natural science. Accordingly, naturalized epistemology will be a scientific (and hence neither indefeasible nor a priori) explanation of how it is that some beliefs come to be knowledge. Issues of scepticism will be addressed only when they come up in the course of a scientific investigation.

Quine’s seminal essay lays out the core of naturalized epistemology, but subsequent naturalists disagree on the appropriate responses to several issues, among them the following: First, may theories be tested on the basis of (independently plausible) theory-neutral observation, or are observations simply more theory? Second, after being naturalized, does epistemology survive as an autonomous discipline? Quine argues that epistemology should become a subfield of natural science, presumably a part of psychology, so that there is no separate field left specifically to philosophers. But can all our questions about knowledge be answered by natural scientists? Third, the claim that epistemology explains how knowledge comes to be suggests that epistemology will merely describe the origins of beliefs we take to be known; but what is the relationship between such descriptive issues and normative issues such as that of how we ought to arrive at our views? Fourth, to what extent is the new approach to epistemology susceptible to sceptical concerns such as those that so plagued traditional epistemologists, and how effective a response can be made to those concerns?
Paradoxes, epistemic
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: September 2018

The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose. So we can infer that no ticket will win. Yet we know that some ticket will win. In the preface paradox, authors are justified in believing everything in their books. Some preface their book by claiming that, given human frailty, they are sure that errors remain. But then they justifiably believe both that everything in the book is true, and that something in it is false.

The knowability paradox results from accepting that some truths are not known, and that any truth is knowable. Since the first claim is a truth, it must be knowable. From these claims it follows that it is possible that there is some particular truth that is known to be true and known not to be true.

The final paradox concerns an announcement of a surprise test next week. A Friday test, since it can be predicted on Thursday evening, will not be a surprise yet, if the test cannot be on Friday, it cannot be on Thursday either. For if it has not been given by Wednesday night, and it cannot be a surprise on Friday, it will not be a surprise on Thursday. Similar reasoning rules out all other days of the week as well; hence, no surprise test can occur next week. On Wednesday, the teacher gives a test, and the students are taken completely by surprise.
Probability theory and epistemology
Authors: Loewer Barry
Published: September 2018

The primary uses of probability in epistemology are to measure degrees of belief and to formulate conditions for rational belief and rational change of belief. The degree of belief a person has in a proposition A is a measure of their willingness to act on A to obtain satisfaction of their preferences. According to probabilistic epistemology, sometimes called ‘Bayesian epistemology’, an ideally rational person’s degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability. For example, their degrees of belief in A and -A must sum to 1. The most important condition on changing degrees of belief given new evidence is called ‘conditionalization’. According to this, upon acquiring evidence E a rational person will change their degree of belief assigned to A to the conditional probability of A given E. Roughly, this rule says that the change should be minimal while accommodating the new evidence. There are arguments, ‘Dutch book arguments’, that are claimed to demonstrate that failure to satisfy these conditions makes a person who acts on their degrees of belief liable to perform actions that necessarily frustrate their preferences. Radical Bayesian epistemologists claim that rationality is completely characterized by these conditions. A more moderate view is that Bayesian conditions should be supplemented by other conditions specifying rational degrees of belief.

Support for Bayesian epistemology comes from the fact that various aspects of scientific method can be grounded in satisfaction of Bayesian conditions. Further, it can be shown that there is a close connection between having true belief as an instrumental goal and satisfaction of the Bayesian conditions.

Some critics of Bayesian epistemology reject the probabilistic conditions on rationality as unrealistic. They say that people do not have precise degrees of belief and even if they did it would not be possible in general to satisfy the conditions. Some go further and reject the conditions themselves. Others claim that the conditions are much too weak to capture rationality and that in fact almost any reasoning can be characterized so as to satisfy them. The extent to which Bayesian epistemology contributes to traditional epistemological concerns of characterizing knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge is controversial.
Testimony
Authors: Coady C.A.J.
Published: September 2018

Philosophical treatment of the problems posed by the concept of knowledge has been curiously blind to the role played by testimony in the accumulation and validation of knowledge or, for that matter, justified belief. This is all the more surprising, given that an enormous amount of what any individual can plausibly claim to know, whether in everyday affairs or in theoretical pursuits, is dependent in various ways upon what others have to say. The idea that someone can only really attain knowledge if they get it entirely by the use of their own resources provides a seductive ideal of autonomous knowledge that may help explain the way epistemologists have averted their gaze from the topic of testimony. But, unless they are prepared to limit the scope of knowledge dramatically, theorists who support this individualist ideal of autonomy need to explain how our wide-ranging reliance upon what we are told is consistent with it. Characteristically, those who consider the matter acknowledge the reliance, but seek to show that the individual cognizer can ‘justify’ dependence upon testimony by sole resort to the individual’s resources of observation, memory and inference. Testimony is thus viewed as a second-order source of knowledge. But this reductionist project is subject to major difficulties, as can be seen in David Hume’s version. It has problems with the way the proposed justification is structured, with its assumptions about language and with the way the individual’s epistemic resources are already enmeshed with testimony. The success or failure of the reductionist project has significant implications for other areas of inquiry.
Normative epistemology
Authors: Conee Earl
Published: September 2018

There are three kinds of normative work in epistemology. The first is the provision of epistemic advice, which offers guidance towards improving the cognitive condition of an individual or community. This advice often concerns science. Philosophers in the tradition of Francis Bacon have sought to identify and advocate proper forms of scientific research and explanation. More generally, according to some philosophers, a principal epistemological task is that of finding and recommending ways to improve the whole range of our individual and collective cognitive activities.

A second kind of epistemology is classified as normative because evaluative concepts figure in explanations. For example, A.J. Ayer explains knowledge partly in terms of having a right to be sure. Other evaluative notions enter into work in this category, such as intellectual duties, responsibilities and virtues. Some of these are specifically ethical notions; some are non-ethical evaluative notions such as proper cognitive functioning and intellectual excellence.

Epistemic concepts such as justification and rationality appear to be normative, or at least evaluative, in a way that contrasts with purely desciptive concepts. One tendency in naturalistic epistemology is to seek either to explain away this appearance or to reconcile it with a scientific worldview. Non-naturalistic efforts in epistemology commonly find no reason to undertake this project, and are consequently often counted as normative. Most historical epistemology is normative by this standard.
Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007)
Authors: Rohr Michael David
Published: September 2018

Richard Rorty is a leading US philosopher and public intellectual, and the best-known contemporary advocate of pragmatism. Trained in both analytic and traditional philosophy, he has followed Dewey in attacking the views of knowledge, mind, language and culture that have made both approaches attractive, drawing on arguments and views of the history of philosophy from sources ranging from Heidegger and Derrida to Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. He takes pragmatism to have moved beyond Dewey by learning from analytical philosophy to make ‘the linguistic turn’, and from Thomas Kuhn that there is no such thing as ‘scientific method’. Language and thought are tools for coping, not representations mirroring reality. Rorty’s characteristic philosophical positions are what might be called ‘anti-isms’, positions defined primarily by what they deny. In epistemology he endorses anti-foundationalism, in philosophy of language anti-representationalism, in metaphysics anti-essentialism and anti- both realism and antirealism, in meta-ethics ironism. He extols pragmatism as the philosophy that can best clear the road for new ways of thinking which can be used to diminish suffering and to help us find out what we want and how to get it. In the public arena, he is a leading exponent of liberalism and critic of both left and right.
Contextualism, epistemological
Authors: Brower Bruce W.
Published: September 2018

The idea that norms vary with social setting has long been recognized, but it is only in the late twentieth century that philosophers have developed precise versions of epistemological contextualism, the theory that standards of knowledge and justification vary with context. Ordinary practice seems to support this rather than the ‘invariantist’ view that epistemological standards are uniform.

Suppose, for example, that having seen my children a minute ago, I assert ‘I know my children are in the garden’. My neighbour Harold then says, ‘Good, because an escaped prisoner is seeking hostages nearby’. I may then appropriately claim, ‘On second thoughts, I do not know, I should check carefully’. Standards for knowledge appear to have shifted, since they now require further investigation.

Contextualism’s greatest advantage is its response to scepticism. Sceptics raise radical possibilities, such as that we might be dreaming. The contextualist grants that such doubts are legitimate in the sceptical context, but holds they are illegitimate in everyday situations. Yet contextualism can appear to be an objectionable form of relativism, and may be accused of confusing standards that we apply in practical conversational contexts with the true standards that determine whether someone has knowledge.
A priori knowledge and justification, recent work on
Authors: Bonjour Laurence
Published: September 2018

The recent discussion of the a priori has involved some controversies about the concept of a priori justification or warrant, but has focused mainly on the central issue of whether such justification exists at all, together with the further issues pertaining to its nature and scope should it exist. (Since a priori knowledge can be understood as knowledge whose justification is a priori, it will suffice to focus here on justification.) While there are other views as well, the main contending positions are: (1) the recently reinvigorated moderate rationalist view that a priori justification genuinely exists and is not limited to claims that are matters of definition or meaning; (2) a strong version of empiricism (hereafter referred to here as radical empiricism), deriving from W.V. Quine, that denies the existence of a priori justification of any sort; and (3) an older and less extreme version of empiricism (hereafter referred to as moderate empiricism) that holds both that there is genuine a priori justification but also that it extends only to propositions that are merely matters of definition or meaning and thus which are analytic in character.
Knowing how to
Authors: Craig Edward
Published: September 2018

It is sometimes said that when philosophers have thought about knowledge they have attended exclusively to knowing that p (or ‘propositional knowledge’, since p stands here for a proposition), scarcely at all to knowing how to A (or ‘practical knowledge’, since A stands here for a type of action, as in ‘knows how to play the violin’). Gilbert Ryle drew attention to this distinction, but his account of it remained imprecise, his thought about it overshadowed by his interest in other, related but different, questions. Whether the antithesis is as sharp as some, including Ryle, have apparently believed, might well be thought a crucial question for epistemology to answer. And if we think that ‘knows how to’ designates a relation between a subject and an action, whereas ‘knows that’ designates a relation between a subject and a proposition, this may well encourage the hope that there is a largely uninvestigated epistemic relation out there waiting to be explored – for since action-types and propositions are such very different objects, probably their epistemic relations with subjects are very different too. But this line of thought will look less promising if, as some maintain, knowing how to is a subspecies of knowing that, involving propositional knowledge about methods of doing things. Still, those who are hoping for a new space for epistemology need not give up; even if knowing how to is a form of knowing that, it might still have its own distinctive features. This possibility does not at the time of writing (2004) seem to have attracted much research.
Experimental philosophy
Authors: Mallon Ron , Nichols Shaun
Published: September 2018

Experimental philosophy is not a philosophy, it is a method that is supposed to contribute to philosophical inquiry. Characteristically, experimental philosophers use empirical techniques to investigate philosophically significant intuitions about cases. An intuition, in this context, is a spontaneous judgement a person makes about a case with little or no conscious reason for their judgement.

Intuitions play a key role in much philosophical theorizing. The attempt to provide a conceptual analysis or definition for important philosophical concepts, e.g. knowledge, meaning, responsibility, has long been a major theoretical concern in philosophy. One prominent philosophical view holds that the meaning of our concepts is given by the folk theory (or set of common-sense beliefs) in which the concepts are embedded. Intuitions about cases are thought to reveal the contours of the folk theory and the meaning of the concept. As a result, in pursuing conceptual analyses, many philosophers rely on intuitions about cases to descry the folk theories in which those concepts are embedded.

In addition to their role in conceptual analysis, philosophers invoke intuitions as evidence for substantive philosophical claims, perhaps in much the same way as empirical scientists invoke observation as evidence. For instance, the intuition that it is wrong to push one man in front of a speeding trolley to save five others is invoked as evidence that utilitarianism does not give the right theory of how we ought to act. Similarly, intuitions are used to support substantive claims about knowledge, meaning and responsibility.

When philosophers use intuitions - whether in the service of conceptual analysis or in the effort to establish a more substantive philosophical claim - the traditional methodology looks a priori. That is, one arrives at one’s judgements without relying on evidence from sensory perception. For instance, to analyse the concept intentional a philosopher might consult their intuitions about whether the concept applies in various actual and possible circumstances, and a condition of adequacy upon the definition is that it best conforms to these intuitions. In contrast, experimental philosophers use experimental techniques to study intuitions about philosophically important concepts.
Epistemic Luck
Authors: Broncano-Berrocal Fernando , Carter J. Adam
Published: September 2018

In almost any domain of endeavour, successes can be attained through skill, but also by dumb luck. An archer’s wildest shots occasionally hit the target. Against enormous odds, some fair lottery tickets happen to win. The same goes in the case of purely cognitive or intellectual endeavours. As inquirers, we characteristically aim to believe truly rather than falsely, and to attain such standings as knowledge and understanding. Sometimes such aims are attained with commendable competence, but of course, not always. Epistemic luck is a species of luck which features in circumstances where a given cognitive success – in the broadest sense, some form of cognitive contact with reality – is attained in a manner that is (in some to-be-specified sense) interestingly lucky – viz., chancy, accidental or beyond our control. In the paradigmatic case, this involves the formation of a belief that is luckily true, and where the subject plausibly deserves little credit for having got things right. Although the literature on epistemic luck has focused predominantly on the relationship between luck and propositional knowledge – which is widely taken to (in some sense) exclude luck – epistemologists are increasingly exploring the compatibility of epistemic luck with other kinds of epistemic standings, such as knowledge-how and understanding.
Metaphysics of knowledge
Authors: Kallestrup Jesper
Published: September 2018

Epistemology has traditionally been concerned with the scope, sources and structure of knowledge and other epistemic statuses such as justified belief. Metaphysics of knowledge seeks to answer metaphysical questions about knowledge and its place in the world as they arise in such epistemological pursuits. More generally, metaphysics of epistemology can be understood to include metaphysical questions about a broader range of epistemic statuses. In either case, answers to such questions may help solve distinctive problems in epistemology or neighbouring fields, or they may be of independent theoretical importance. Since modal logic, possible worlds semantics and related formal frameworks are frequently brought to bear in traditional metaphysics, for example Williamson 2013, metaphysical inquiries about knowledge may also utilize such modal tools. But metaphysics of knowledge is distinct from both modal epistemology, which concerns the necessary links between belief and truth that supposedly constitute knowledge, and epistemology of modality, which concerns knowledge of modalities – that is, of what is necessary, possible, contingent and so on. Metaphysics of knowledge sits at the intersection of epistemology and metaphysics, whereas modal epistemology is an externalist branch of epistemology, and epistemology of modality is a sub-discipline within philosophy of modality. Both modal epistemology and epistemology of modality may of course shed light on metaphysical aspects of knowledge, for example, if it turns out knowledge is essentially a modally sensitive or safe belief. However, the intended scope of metaphysics of knowledge is much broader, encompassing not just the essential nature of knowledge, but also its metaphysical ground and its physical realization.
Experimental epistemology
Authors: Beebe James
Published: September 2018

Experimental epistemology is the branch of experimental philosophy devoted to the empirical study of our shared practices of reasoning and making judgments about knowledge, evidence, and justified belief. In addition to trying to construct an empirically grounded account of folk epistemology, experimental epistemologists also attempt to use the results of their studies to make contributions to ongoing debates within mainstream epistemology.

Mainstream contemporary epistemologists generally take themselves to be providing an account of epistemic concepts that are shared by all rational agents. Although the most fundamental questions in epistemology may not be empirical ones, it is an empirical question whether all rational agents employ the same epistemic concepts or reason about them in the same way. If it were discovered that individuals from different cultures made widely varying epistemic judgments about the same cases or that philosophers’ thinking about knowledge diverged significantly from that of ordinary individuals, this would have a major impact on how epistemologists approached their subject. It is on empirical questions such as these that experimental epistemology focuses its attention.
Assertion
Authors: Yang Guiming , Goldberg Sanford C.
Published: September 2018

In the past two to three decades, most of the philosophical attention that has been paid to the speech act of assertion aims to characterize the nature of the act.

A first question that is pursued concerns where the speech act of assertion fits within the domain of assertives (the category speech acts in which a proposition is presented-as-true). Simply put, assertions are those assertive speech acts in which the speaker advances a claim. But what is it to perform this sort of speech act? What is the nature of the act? Philosophers have proposed six main answers. These include the attitude view (which characterizes the nature of the act in terms of its role in expressing belief), the grammatical view (on which assertion is picked out by the vehicles used to make acts of this kind, namely, declarative sentences), the common ground view (where assertion is understood in terms of its essential effect on a conversation’s common ground), the commitment view (where assertion is characterized in terms of the kind of commitment that is engendered or reconfirmed by the performance of acts of this type), the constitutive rule view (according to which assertions are individuated by the distinctive rule that governs acts of this type) and the no-assertion view (which holds that there is no unique, interesting speech act type picked out by ‘assertion’).

Of these six views, the one that has received the most attention (both critical and supportive) is the constitutive rule view. Such a view has been developed (and criticized) at great length. A leading version of the constitutive rule view is the view that the rule in question requires that one assert only what one knows. The main considerations offered in defense of this version of the view include its role in explaining various features of our assertoric practice, including the paradoxicality of assertions of sentences of the form ‘p, but I do not know that p’, its role in explaining why propositions expressed with, for example, ‘My lottery ticket lost’ are not properly assertable on merely probabilistic grounds (even when the odds of one’s winning are arbitrarily small) and its role in explaining why ‘How do you know?’ is a proper response to an assertion (even when the assertion’s explicit content has nothing to do with the speaker’s knowledge). However, many authors have responded to these arguments for the knowledge rule, finding them unconvincing.

Interestingly, a great amount of attention has also been devoted to forging connections between the speech act of assertion and a variety of other topics of philosophical interest. These include topics in philosophy of language (pragmatics, semantics), epistemology (the epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, the nature of epistemic authority, the division of epistemic labor), metaphysics (the nature of future contingents, modality), ethics (the ethics of assertion; what we owe to each other as information-sharing creatures) and social and political philosophy (various forms of epistemic injustice, silencing).
Bell’s theorem
Authors: Fine Arthur
Published: September 2018

Bell’s theorem is concerned with the outcomes of a special type of ‘correlation experiment’ in quantum mechanics. It shows that under certain conditions these outcomes would be restricted by a system of inequalities (the ‘Bell inequalities’) that contradict the predictions of quantum mechanics. Various experimental tests confirm the quantum predictions to a high degree and hence violate the Bell inequalities. Although these tests contain loopholes due to experimental inefficiencies, they do suggest that the assumptions behind the Bell inequalities are incompatible not only with quantum theory but also with nature.

A central assumption used to derive the Bell inequalities is a species of no-action-at-a-distance, called ‘locality’: roughly, that the outcomes in one wing of the experiment cannot immediately be affected by measurements performed in another wing (spatially distant from the first). For this reason the Bell theorem is sometimes cited as showing that locality is incompatible with the quantum theory, and the experimental tests as demonstrating that nature is nonlocal. These claims have been contested.
Bohr, Niels (1885–1962)
Authors: Beller Mara
Published: September 2018

One of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr founded atomic quantum theory and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. This radical interpretation renounced the possibility of a unified, observer-independent, deterministic description in the microdomain. Bohr’s principle of complementarity – the heart of the Copenhagen philosophy – implies that quantum phenomena can only be described by pairs of partial, mutually exclusive, or ‘complementary’ perspectives. Though simultaneously inapplicable, both perspectives are necessary for the exhaustive description of phenomena. Bohr aspired to generalize complementarity into all fields of knowledge, maintaining that new epistemological insights are obtained by adjoining contrary, seemingly incompatible, viewpoints.
Boyle, Robert (1627–91)
Authors: Sargent Rose-Mary
Published: September 2018

Boyle is often remembered for the contributions that he made to the sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. Like other natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, however, he was a synthetic thinker who sought to advance knowledge in all areas of human concern. An early advocate of experimental methods, he argued that experimentation would not only reveal the hidden processes operative in the world but would also advance the cause of religion. Through the study of nature, experimentalists would come to understand that the intricacy of design manifest in the world must be the result of an omniscient and omnipotent creator.

Boyle’s experimental investigations and theological beliefs led him to a conception of the world as a ’cosmic mechanism’ comprised of a harmonious set of interrelated processes. He agreed with the leading mechanical philosophers of his day that the corpuscular hypothesis, which explains the causal powers of bodies by reference to the motions of the least parts (corpuscles) of matter, provided the best means for understanding nature. He insisted, however, that these motions and powers could not be known by reasoning alone, but would have to be discovered experimentally.
Chaos theory
Authors: Kellert Stephen H.
Published: September 2018

Chaos theory is the name given to the scientific investigation of mathematically simple systems that exhibit complex and unpredictable behaviour. Since the 1970s these systems have been used to model experimental situations ranging from the early stages of fluid turbulence to the fluctuations of brain wave activity. This complex behaviour does not arise as a result of the interaction of numerous sub-systems or from intrinsically probabilistic equations. Instead, chaotic behaviour involves the rapid growth of any inaccuracy. The slightest vagueness in specifying the initial state of such a system makes long-term predictions impossible, yielding behaviour that is effectively random. The existence of such behaviour raises questions about the extent to which predictability and determinism apply in the physical world. Chaos theory addresses the questions of how such behaviour arises and how it changes as the system is modified. Its new analytical techniques invite a reconsideration of scientific methodology.
Chemistry, philosophical aspects of
Authors: Koertge Noretta
Published: September 2018

Chemistry, like all theoretical sciences, is deeply rooted in philosophical inquiry. Early Greek atomism was a response to Parmenides’ argument that the very concept of change is unintelligible. Aristotle in turn argued that a vacuum is impossible and proposed that qualitative change could be better understood in terms of four elements and an underlying prime matter.

During the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, philosophical commentaries on the nature of materials were brought into juxtaposition with the practical arts of the alchemist, miner and pharmacist. As chemical speculations became more closely connected to observations during the time of the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers became more and more interested in the methodological aspects of chemistry. Galileo and Locke tried to clarify the relationship between primary and secondary qualities. Boyle struggled to understand how the selective affinities so characteristic of chemical reagents could be explained within the framework of Descartes’ mechanical philosophy. Lavoisier’s textbook was organized around principles drawn from philosophes such as Condillac.

As chemistry became an autonomous science, chemists turned less often to philosophy as a source of theoretical inspiration. However, they frequently appealed to philosophies of science in order to defend their own theories or criticize those of their opponents. The so-called ’atomic debates’ amongst chemists in the British Association during the 1860s were primarily disputes about the epistemological legitimacy of appeals to unobservable entities. Many of the same issues were taken up at the end of the century by Ostwald, Mach and Duhem.

Logical empiricists in the twentieth century have often turned to chemistry as an example of the successful reduction of a secondary science to physics. Thus, it is claimed that the laws of classical thermodynamics, expressed using concepts such as enthalpy and entropy, can be derived from the laws of statistical mechanics describing the motions of particles. The details of this purported derivation have been questioned. Even more controversial is the attempt to derive accounts of the chemical bond and the shape of molecules from the first principles provided by quantum mechanics.