bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sport, philosophy of
Authors: Hyland Drew A.
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of sport as a separate area of philosophy is largely a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, although previous philosophers, back to the ancient Greeks, occasionally made reference to sport or used it as an example in a larger point. Within the philosophy of sport, a number of sub-areas have emerged as important: sport and ethics, questions concerning sport and society, the issue of self-knowledge in sport, the mind–body problem as it relates to sport, sport and art, and the controversy over the possibility of defining certain key terms within sport, such as sport, game, play and athletics.

Within the area of sport and society, several major debates have arisen. The first is about whether sport teaches values and, if so, whether the values taught are desirable or not. Second, considerable attention has been paid to how certain societal problems, such as sexism and racism, have manifested themselves in sport, and how they might be addressed within sport. Third, attention has been directed to the phenomenon of the athlete as cultural hero.

The relevance to sport of the age-old philosophical issue of self-knowledge is manifest, with a number of different construals of what counts as self-knowledge emerging as important. Attention has been paid to self-knowledge in the psychological sense, self-knowledge as manifested in Zen thought and self-knowledge in the Socratic sense, among others. The mind–body problem, also an old philosophic issue, has clear relevance within the domain of sport. Dualism, physicalism and phenomenological accounts have all been represented, the latter being the most dominant and persuasive so far.
Substance
Authors: Ayers Michael
Published: September 2018

For Aristotle, ‘substances’ are the things which exist in their own right, both the logically ultimate subjects of predication and the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry. They are the unified material objects, as well as the natural stuffs, identifiable in sense-experience, each taken to be a member of a natural species with its ‘form’ and functional essence. Entities in other categories – qualities, actions, relations and so forth – are treated as dependent on, if not just abstracted aspects of, these independent realities.

With the rise of mechanistic physics in the seventeenth century, the Aristotelian multiplicity of substances was reduced to universal matter mechanically differentiated. This move sharpened the issue of the relation of mind to the physical world. The consequent variety of ways in which the notion of substance was manipulated by materialists, dualists, immaterialists and anti-dogmatists encouraged later scepticism about the distinction between independent realities and human abstractions, and so idealism.

Twentieth-century conceptualism, like some earlier versions of idealism, rejects the distinction altogether, commonly ascribing the logical priority of material things in natural language to the utility of a folk physics, as if they were the theoretical entities of everyday life. As such, their identity and existence are determined only through applications of a theory outdated by modern science. Yet this ‘top-down’, holistic philosophy of language is belied by the detailed insights of traditional logic, which point clearly to a ‘bottom-up’ account of classification and identity, that is an account which recognizes the possibility of perceptually picking out material objects prior to knowledge of their kind or nature, and of subsequently classifying them. The idea that material things are theoretical entities, and that their individuation is accordingly kind-dependent, is a hangover from an atomistic approach to perception which calls on theory to tie sensory information together. A more accurate understanding of sensation as the already integrated presentation of bodies in spatial relations to one another and to the perceiver is consonant with the possibility denied by the idealist– namely, that, with respect to its primitive referents, language and thought are shaped around reality itself, the independent objects given in active sense-experience. That the coherence or discrete unity of material objects has a physical explanation does not mean that physics explains it away.
Tel Quel School
Authors: Heath Stephen
Published: September 2018

Tel Quel was a review published in Paris from 1960 to 1982. Under the direction of Philippe Sollers, it became a key source of avant-garde work in literature and critical theory. Concerned with the relations between art and politics, the Tel Quel group drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism as the bases for an overall theory that would establish writing – écriture – as having its own specific and necessary revolutionary force. Influential in its emphasis on literary practices seen as breaking with the given social ordering of ‘reality’ and ‘subject’ (the ‘limit-texts’ of writers such as Sade or Artaud), the review emphasized textuality, the condition of all fields of knowledge as textual productions. Less a coherent school of thought than a site of shifting theoretical-political interventions and new explorations in writing, Tel Quel was at its most powerful in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Truth, deflationary theories of
Authors: Kirkham Richard L.
Published: September 2018

So-called deflationary theories of truth, of which the best known are the redundancy, performative and prosentential theories, are really theories of truth ascriptions. This is because they are not theories of what truth is; rather, they are theories of what we are saying when we make utterances like ‘"Routledge editors are fine folks" is true’. The surface grammar of such utterances suggests that we use them to predicate a property, truth, of sentences or propositions; but the several deflationary theories all deny this. Indeed, they all endorse the Deflationary Thesis that there is no such property as truth and thus there is no need for, or sense to, a theory of truth distinct from a theory of truth ascriptions. Thus, for deflationists, the classical theories of truth, such as correspondence, coherence and pragmatic, are not wrong. They are something worse: they are wrong-headed from the start, for they are attempting to analyse something which simply is not there.
Primary–secondary distinction
Authors: Smith A.D.
Published: September 2018

The terminology of ‘primary and secondary qualities’ is taken from the writings of John Locke. It has come to express a position on the nature of sensory qualities – those which we attribute to physical objects as a result of the sensuous character of sensations they produce when they are perceived correctly by us. Since our senses can be differentiated from each other by the type of sensations they produce, sensory qualities are what Aristotle called ‘proper sensibles’ – those perceptible by one sense only. Colours, sounds, scents and tastes are always regarded as proper to their respective senses. What are the proper sensibles of touch, and whether there is similarly a single family of them, is a matter of controversy; but temperature at least is standardly regarded as proper to this sense. It is such sensory qualities that are candidates for being given the status of secondary qualities.

To regard sensory qualities as secondary is to hold that an object’s possession of one is simply a matter of its being disposed to occasion a certain type of sensation when perceived; the object in itself possesses no sensuous character. Primary qualities, by contrast, are those which characterize the fundamental nature of the physical world as it is in itself. They are always taken to include geometrical attributes, and often some space-occupying feature; Locke’s candidate for this latter was solidity. Although the terminology dates from the seventeenth century, this general doctrine goes back to the Greek atomists.
Panpsychism
Authors: Sprigge T.L.S.
Published: September 2018

Panpsychism is the thesis that physical nature is composed of individuals each of which is to some degree sentient. It is somewhat akin to hylozoism, but in place of the thesis of the pervasiveness of life in nature substitutes the pervasiveness of sentience, experience or, in a broad sense, consciousness. There are two distinct grounds on which panpsychism has been based. Some see it as the best explanation of the emergence of consciousness in the universe to say that it is, in fact, universally present, and that the high-level consciousness of humans and animals is the product of special patterns of that low-level consciousness or feeling which is universally present. The other ground on which panpsychism is argued for is that ordinary knowledge of the physical world is only of its structure and sensory effects on us, and that the most likely inner content which fills out this structure and produces these experiences is a system of patterns of sentient experience of a low level.
Abstract objects
Authors: Hale Bob
Published: September 2018

The central philosophical question about abstract objects is: Are there any? An affirmative answer – given by Platonists or Realists – draws support from the fact that while much of our talk and thought concerns concrete (roughly, spatiotemporally extended) objects, significant parts of it appear to be about objects which lie outside space and time, and are therefore incapable of figuring in causal relationships. The suggestion that there really are such further non-spatial, atemporal and acausal objects as numbers and sets often strikes Nominalist opponents as contrary to common sense. But precisely because our apparent talk and thought of abstracta encompasses much – including virtually the whole of mathematics – that seems indispensable to our best attempts to make scientific sense of the world, it cannot be simply dismissed as confused gibberish. For this reason Nominalists have commonly adopted a programme of reductive paraphrase, aimed at eliminating all apparent reference to and quantification over abstract objects. In spite of impressively ingenious efforts, the programme appears to run into insuperable obstacles.

The simplicity of our initial question is deceptive. Understanding and progress are unlikely without further clarification of the relations between ontological questions and questions about the logical analysis of language, and of the key distinction between abstract and concrete objects. There are both affinities and, more importantly, contrasts between traditional approaches to ontological questions and more recent discussions shaped by ground-breaking work in the philosophy of language initiated by Frege. The importance of Frege’s work lies principally in two insights: first, that questions about what kinds of entity there are cannot sensibly be tackled independently of the logical analysis of language; and second, that the question whether or not certain expressions should be taken to have reference cannot properly be separated from the question whether complete sentences in which those expressions occur are true or false.
Slovakia, philosophy in
Authors: Zumr Josef
Published: September 2018

Until as late as 1918, social and national circumstances were not favourable to the development of philosophy in Slovakia. The enforced retardation of the country had an obviously negative impact on intellectual and cultural life, and stood in the way of the possibility of diversity. That is why the first important Slovak philosophers such as Bayer and Caban emerged only as recently as the seventeenth century. Following this, philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Karlovský, Laurentzy, Steigel and Feješ started to criticize the anti-scientific ideas which still survived. In the first phase of the National Revival Movement, Jan Kollár created a new philosophy of history by postulating the cultural unity of the Slavs. A specific contribution to this theory came from L. Štúr and his followers (Hurban, Hodža, Kellner) who applied it to practical conditions and stressed the necessity of national emancipation for the Slovak nation. Their influence is evident in all further developments of the national movement and its philosophy.

The end of the nineteenth century saw the replacement of this idea by the philosophy of Thomas Masaryk. Slovak cultural life and philosophy, however, only began to develop fully in the context of an independent Czechoslovak Republic after 1918. The mainstream philosophy of the time was rationalistic, evident in the thought of such thinkers as Sv. Štúr, Koreň and Osuský. Philosophy after 1945 was marked by the achievements of Hrušovský, his students and colleagues, whose initial form of neopositivism took on a Marxist dialectical structurology. The importance of Marxism has recently been gradually declining and the Slovak philosophic scene is independently evolving in an atmosphere more in line with other European countries, particularly since the formation of the Slovak Republic in 1993.
Hartmann, Nicolai (1882–1950)
Authors: Inwood Michael
Published: September 2018

Nicolai Hartmann’s intellectual trajectory was similar to that of his contemporary, Heidegger. He abandoned his early Neo-Kantian concern with knowledge and its foundations in favour of ‘ontology’, a study of the being of entities. Unlike Heidegger he assigned no ontological priority to human beings. Human beings are the highest level of entities, perched precariously above the physical, organic and animal levels, but conferring meaning and value on an otherwise meaningless and Godless universe.
Lefebvre, Henri (1901–91)
Authors: Shields Rob
Published: September 2018

Henri Lefebvre was a Marxist and existential philosopher, a sociologist and a theorist of the state. His humanistic neo-Marxism has been influential throughout Europe. In the English-speaking world he is best known for his analyses of ‘everyday life’, his work in the sociology of urban and rural life, and his theory of social space. Lefebvre was one of the most prominent early critics of structuralism, and is considered by some to be the first post-structuralist. He was a relentless critic of academic philosophy’s metaphysical tendencies.
Chicherin, Boris Nikolaevich (1828–1904)
Authors: Hamburg Gary
Published: September 2018

Chicherin was a Russian liberal historian of law, a political and religious philosopher and a public figure, who briefly served as Moscow’s elected mayor (1882–3). Before the mid-1860s he advocated ‘conservative-liberalism’, his term for a partnership between strong central government and the educated public designed to promote civil rights and the rule of law. After 1866, he championed constitutional guarantees of individual liberty against state and societal interference, fashioning in the process a Russian version of ‘classical liberalism’. Chicherin was modern Russia’s most significant liberal thinker and one of its most influential philosophers in the Idealist tradition. He is still read today by Russian philosophers and historians of social thought. Moreover, his political ideas gained wide currency among the political elites in the late Soviet period and especially in post-Soviet Russia.
Cioran, Emil (1911–95)
Authors: Partenie Catalin D.
Published: September 2018

Emil Cioran published during his lifetime sixteen books, the first six in his native Romanian, the other ten in French. He was awarded many literary prizes (including Rivarol, Saint-Beuve, Combat and Nimier); he accepted only one, the Rivarol Prize, for the first book he wrote in French, Précis de décomposition. Self-proclaimed ‘the sceptic on duty in a world in decline’, Cioran wrote mostly about his obsessions: despair, solitude, suicide, decay, death, history, utopia, God, music, the decline of the Western world, literature, boredom, freedom, exile, alienation, lucidity, and the absurdity and futility of human existence. In most of his writings one can detect the same tragic vision of human being – a ‘heresy of nature’ whose history is devoid of any sense. Cioran’s works in French were praised by many French critics and writers, and in 1986 L’Express magazine declared him ‘the greatest French prosateur of today’.
Noica, Constantin (1909–1987)
Authors: Pamfil Laura , Sorin Lavric
Published: September 2018

Although Constantin Noica is one of the most representative Romanian philosophers, he is little known in the West. His most important writings have not yet been translated. In the early part of his life he wrote studies in the history of philosophy with particular focus on Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. He went on to contribute to the philosophy of culture, ontology and logic. All his works in these areas can be seen as steps towards the full articulation of his ontological vision. Noica was particularly interested in conceiving an ontology of his own, starting from an analysis of the resources of the Romanian language, in a manner reminiscent of Heidegger. At the same time, he provided Romanian culture with its first pædeutic model in philosophy.
Vianu, Tudor (1897–1964)
Authors: Alexandrescu Vlad
Published: September 2018

In his fertile activity in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of culture, theory of values, stylistics, literary history and criticism, Vianu integrated the academic philosophical style with the exigencies of independent research. His philosophical works, covering aesthetics, philosophy of culture and the theory of values, designed to serve as a basis for the lectures he delivered at the University of Bucharest, stand out as a series of rich and personal syntheses that speak of a multi-faceted philosophical attitude. Central to this attitude is the image of man as creative being par excellence - man as author of a work in which he comes fully to manifest his freedom by galvanizing his conscious and rational resources, and thus enriches reality with new spiritual meanings. Championing a distinctly personal position within the pre-war Romanian cultural debate, advocating faith in the individual’s creative energies and in his willingness freely to share life with his fellow beings, Vianu ran counter to contemporary Romanian trends such as the ‘ethnic soul’ theory (N. Crainic) or the ‘state mystique’ theory (P. Marcu-Balş): to him, the state was simply a regulator of social mechanisms and had a representative role in international law. Thus, apart from his specialized intellectual expertise, Vianu was acknowledged as a true man of the polis, fighting for a liberal society built on justice, order and the power of reason.
Causation, further themes
Authors: Menzies Peter
Published: September 2018

The traditional focus of philosophical interest in causation has been token causation: the kind of causation that relates particular dated events. There has been controversy in recent times over the nature of such events. Donald Davidson proposed that events are concrete particulars: like objects, they have spatio-temporal locations, identity conditions, and can be described in many different ways. However, most philosophers espouse one or other property-based conception of events in order to capture the idea that causation relates events in virtue of properties associated with those events.

More generally, philosophers have usually been concerned to provide a priori analyses of the concept of causation, though recently some have attempted to provide empirical analyses by investigating what physics says about the processes underlying causal relations. A recent much-discussed conceptual analysis of causation is David Lewis’s counterfactual theory. This theory ingeniously elaborates the idea that an event c causes an event e just when it is true that if c had not occurred e would not have occurred. However, the theory encounters difficulty explaining examples of pre-emption in which there are several possible causal pathways leading to some effect, only one of which goes through to completion.

Such examples highlight the centrality of the idea of a process to the concept of causation. A recent functionalist theory attempts to capture this fact by defining causation as the intrinsic relation that typically accompanies a counterfactual dependence of one event on a distinct event. Such a theory takes the existence of a counterfactual dependence to be a defeasible marker of the presence of the structural feature of reality that is the causal relation. While it has some success explaining examples of pre-emption, this functionalist theory has been criticised on the grounds that causation is not a relation at all, as evidenced by causal statements involving absences and omissions as causes or effects. The question whether it is possible to give a full conceptual analysis of causation is the subject of a currently vigorous philosophical debate.
Negative facts
Authors: Oaklander L. Nathan
Published: September 2018

If propositions are made true in virtue of corresponding to facts, then what are the truth-makers of true negative propositions such as ‘The apple is not red’? Russell argued that there must be negative facts to account for what makes true negative propositions true and false positive propositions false. Others, more parsimonious in their ontological commitments, have attempted to avoid them. Wittgenstein rejected them since he was loath to think that the sign for negation referred to a negative element in a fact. A contemporary of Russell’s, Raphael Demos, attempted to eliminate them by appealing to ‘incompatibility’ facts. More recently, Armstrong has appealed to the totality of positive facts as the ground of the truth of true negative propositions. Oaklander and Miracchi have suggested that the absence or non-existence of the positive fact (which is not itself a further fact) is the basis of a positive proposition being false and therefore of the truth of its negation.
A posteriori
Authors: Moser Paul K.
Published: September 2018

A prominent term in theory of knowledge since the seventeenth century, ‘a posteriori’ signifies a kind of knowledge or justification that depends on evidence, or justification, from sensory experience. A posteriori truth is truth that cannot be known or justified independently of evidence from sensory experience, and a posteriori concepts are concepts that cannot be understood independently of reference to sensory experience. A posteriori knowledge contrasts with a priori knowledge, knowledge that does not require evidence from sensory experience. A posteriori knowledge is empirical, experience-based knowledge, whereas a priori knowledge is nonempirical knowledge. Standard examples of a posteriori truths are the truths of ordinary perceptual experience and the natural sciences; standard examples of a priori truths are the truths of logic and mathematics. The common understanding of the distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge as the distinction between empirical and nonempirical knowledge comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason1781/1787.
Knowledge by acquaintance and description
Authors: Fumerton Richard
Published: September 2018

The attempt to distinguish knowledge by acquaintance from knowledge by description is most closely associated with Bertrand Russell. The distinction is also crucial to one way of trying to develop a plausible foundationalist theory of justification and knowledge. According to Russell one can distinguish the two kinds of knowledge in terms of their respective objects. Put crudely, one has knowledge by acquaintance of things, and one has knowledge by description of propositions (representations of reality that are either true or false). But this crude characterization of the two kinds of knowledge is misleading. Russell also seemed to believe that one can have knowledge by acquaintance of properties and even facts (where a fact is a complex consisting of a thing’s exemplifying a quality or standing in a relation to another thing). The distinction, then, might be better put in terms of a kind of knowledge which has as its object something that is neither true nor false (knowledge by acquaintance) and a kind of knowledge which has as its object a bearer of truth value (knowledge by description).

According to Russell, all knowledge of truths ultimately rests on knowledge by acquaintance. The traditional foundationalist in epistemology holds that although I can know one truth by inferring it from something else I know, not everything I know can be inferred in this way. We can avoid a regress of knowledge by holding that at least some truths are known as a result of direct awareness of or acquaintance with those aspects of the world that make the corresponding propositions true.
Certainty
Authors: Klein Peter D.
Published: September 2018

‘Certainty’ is not a univocal term. It is predicated of people, and it is predicated of propositions. When certainty is predicated of a person, as in ‘Sally is certain that she parked her car in lot 359’, we are ascribing an attitude to Sally. We can say that a person, S, is psychologically certain of a proposition, p, just in case S believes p without any doubts. In general, psychological certainty has not been a topic which philosophers have found problematic.

On the other hand, certainty as a property of propositions, as in ‘The proposition that Sally parked her car in lot 359 is certain for Sally’, has been discussed widely by philosophers. Roughly, we can say that a proposition, p, is propositionally certain for a person, S, just in case S is fully warranted in believing that p and there are no legitimate grounds whatsoever to doubt that p. The philosophical issue, of course, is whether there are any such propositions and, if so, what makes them certain.
Knowledge, defeasibility theory of
Authors: Swain Marshall
Published: September 2018

Based upon an analogy with the legal and ethical concept of a defeasible, or prima facie, obligation, epistemic defeasibility was introduced into epistemology as an ingredient in one of the main strategies for dealing with Gettier cases. In these cases, an individual’s justified true belief fails to count as knowledge because the justification is defective as a source of knowledge. According to the defeasibility theory of knowledge, the defect involved can be characterized in terms of evidence that the subject does not possess which overrides, or defeats, the subject’s prima facie justification for belief. This account holds that knowledge is indefeasibly justified true belief. It has significant advantages over other attempts to modify the traditional analysis of knowledge in response to the Gettier examples. Care must be taken, however, in the definition of defeasibility.
Epistemology, history of
Authors: Pappas George S.
Published: September 2018

Epistemology has always been concerned with issues such as the nature, extent, sources and legitimacy of knowledge. Over the course of western philosophy, philosophers have concentrated sometimes on one or two of these issues to the exclusion of the others; rarely has a philosopher addressed all of them. Some central questions are: What is knowledge – what is the correct analysis or definition of the concept of knowledge? What is the extent of our knowledge – about what sorts of things is knowledge actually held? What are the sources of knowledge – how is knowledge acquired? Is there any genuine knowledge?

Concern with the first question has predominated in philosophy since the mid-twentieth century, but it was also discussed at some length in antiquity. Attention to the second question seems to have begun with Plato, and it has continued with few interruptions to the present day. The third question was also important in antiquity, but has also been a central focus of epistemological discussion through the medieval and early modern periods. The fourth question raises the issue of scepticism, a topic which has generated interest and discussion from antiquity to the present day, though there were some periods in which sceptical worries were largely ignored.

Various attempts to answer these questions throughout the history of philosophy have invariably served to raise additional questions which are more narrow in focus. The principal one which will be treated below can be stated as: (5) What is a justified belief – under which conditions is a belief justified?

There has been but occasional interest in this last question in the history of philosophy; however, it has been a crucial question for many philosophers in the twentieth century.
Fallibilism
Authors: Rescher Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Fallibilism is a philosophical doctrine regarding natural science, most closely associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, which maintains that our scientific knowledge claims are invariably vulnerable and may turn out to be false. Scientific theories cannot be asserted as true categorically, but only as having some probability of being true. Fallibilists insist on our inability to attain the final and definitive truth regarding the theoretical concerns of natural science – in particular at the level of theoretical physics. At any rate, at this level of generality and precision each of our accepted beliefs may turn out to be false, and many of them will. Fallibilism does not insist on the falsity of our scientific claims but rather on their tentativity as inevitable estimates: it does not hold that knowledge is unavailable here, but rather that it is always provisional.
Inference to the best explanation
Authors: Vogel Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than another may include depth, comprehensiveness, simplicity and unifying power. According to Harman (1965), explanatory inference plays a central role in both everyday and scientific thinking. In ordinary life, a person might make the inference that a fuse has blown to explain why several kitchen appliances stopped working all at once. Scientists also seem to engage in inference to the best explanation; for example, astronomers concluded that another planet must exist in order to account for aberrations in the orbit of Uranus. However, despite the suggestiveness of cases like these, the extent to which we do and should rely on inference to the best explanation is highly controversial.
Innate knowledge
Authors: Sober Elliott
Published: September 2018

If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides in two: to explain what it is for a belief to be innate and then to connect that account with a characterization of what knowledge is. Modern biology requires changes in traditional philosophical conceptions of innateness; and two quite different theories of knowledge entail that innate beliefs will often fail to count as knowledge.
Internalism and externalism in epistemology
Authors: Alston William P.
Published: September 2018

The internalism–externalism distinction is usually applied to the epistemic justification of belief. The most common form of internalism (accessibility internalism) holds that only what the subject can easily become aware of (by reflection, for example) can have a bearing on justification. We may think of externalism as simply the denial of this constraint.

The strong intuitive appeal of internalism is due to the sense that we should be able to determine whether we are justified in believing something just by carefully considering the question, without the need for any further investigation. Then there is the idea that we can successfully reply to sceptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge or justified beliefs only if we can determine the epistemic status of our beliefs without presupposing anything about which sceptical doubts could be raised – the external world for example.

The main objections to internalism are: (1) It assumes an unrealistic confidence in the efficacy of armchair reflection, which is often not up to surveying our entire repertoire of beliefs and other possible grounds of belief and determining the extent to which they support a given belief. (2) If we confine ourselves to what we can ascertain on reflection, there is no guarantee that the beliefs that are thus approved as justified are likely to be true. And the truth-promoting character of justification is the main source of its value.

Externalism lifts this accessibility constraint, but in its most general sense it embodies no particular positive view. The most common way of further specifying externalism is reliabilism, the view that a belief is justified if and only if it was produced and/or sustained by a reliable process, one that would produce mostly true beliefs in the long run. This is a form of externalism because whether a particular belief-forming process is reliable is not something we can ascertain just on reflection. The main objections to externalism draw on internalist intuitions: (1) If the world were governed by an evil demon who sees to it that our beliefs are generally false, even though we have the kind of bases for them we do in fact have, then our beliefs would still be justified, even though formed unreliably. (2) If a reliable clairvoyant (ones who ‘sees’ things at a great distance) forms beliefs on this basis without having any reason for thinking that they are reliably formed, those beliefs would not be justified, even though they pass the reliability test.
Perception, epistemic issues in
Authors: McLaughlin Brian P.
Published: September 2018

We learn about the world through our five senses: by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. Sense perception is a primary means by which we acquire knowledge of contingent matters of fact. We can also acquire such knowledge by, for instance, conscious reasoning and through the written and spoken testimony of others; but knowledge so acquired is derivative, in that it must be based, ultimately, on knowledge arrived at in more primary ways, such as by sense perception.

We can perceive something without acquiring any knowledge about it; for knowledge requires belief, and we can perceive something without having any beliefs about it. Viewing any but the most simple visual scenes we see many things we form no beliefs about. However, when we perceive something, we are acquainted with it by its sensorially appearing (looking, sounding, smelling and so on) some way to us. For we see something if and only if it looks some way to us, hear something if and only if it sounds some way to us, and so on. When, based on how they appear, we form true beliefs about things we perceive, the beliefs sometimes count as knowledge.

Often the way something appears is the way it is. The red, round tomato looks red and round; the sour milk tastes sour. But the senses are fallible. Sometimes the way something appears is different from the way it is. Appearances can fail to match reality, as happens to various extents in cases of illusion. There are, for instance, optical illusions (straight sticks look bent at the water line) and psychological ones (despite being exactly the same length, the Müller-Lyer arrows drawings look different in length). In such cases, looks are misleading.

The ever-present logical possibility of illusion makes beliefs acquired by perception fallible: there is no absolute guarantee that they are true. But that does not prevent them from sometimes counting as knowledge – albeit fallible knowledge. Recognitional abilities enable us to obtain knowledge about things from how they perceptually appear. Sense perception thus acquaints us with things in a way that contributes to positioning us to acquire knowledge about them. The central epistemic issues about sense perception concern its role in so positioning us.
Phenomenology, epistemic issues in
Authors: Howarth Jane
Published: September 2018

Phenomenology is not a unified doctrine. Its main proponents – Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – interpret it differently. However, it is possible to present a broad characterization of what they share. Phenomenology is a method of philosophical investigation which results in a radical ontological revision of Cartesian Dualism. It has implications for epistemology: the claim is that, when the foundations of empirical knowledge in perception and action are properly characterized, traditional forms of scepticism and standard attempts to justify knowledge are undermined.

Phenomenological method purports to be descriptive and presuppositionless. First one adopts a reflective attitude towards one’s experience of the world by putting aside assumptions about the world’s existence and character. Second, one seeks to describe particular, concrete phenomena. Phenomena are not contents of the mind; they all involve an experiencing subject and an experienced object. Phenomenological description aims to make explicit essential features implicit in the ‘lived-world’ – the world as we act in it prior to any theorizing about it. The phenomenological method reveals that practical knowledge is prior to propositional knowledge – knowing that arises from knowing how.

The key thesis of phenomenology, drawn from Brentano, is that consciousness is intentional, that is, directed onto objects. Phenomenologists interpret this to mean that subjects and objects are essentially interrelated, a fact which any adequate account of subjects and objects must preserve. Phenomenological accounts of subjects emphasize action and the body; accounts of objects emphasize the significance they have for us.

The aim to be presuppositionless involves scrutinizing scientific and philosophical theories (Galileo, Locke and Kant are especially challenged). Phenomenology launches a radical critique of modern philosophy as overinfluenced by the findings of the natural sciences. In particular, epistemology has adopted from science its characterization of the basic data of experience.

The influence of phenomenology on the analytic tradition has been negligible. The influence on the Continental tradition has been greater. The phenomenological critique of modern science and philosophy has influenced postmodern thought which interprets the modernist worldview as having the status of master narrative rather than truth. Postmodern thought also criticizes the positive phenomenological claim that there are essential features of the lived-world.
Rational beliefs
Authors: Cherniak Christopher
Published: September 2018

To the extent that a belief is rational, it ought to be held, other things being equal; irrational beliefs should not be held. From traditional epistemological perspectives, the obligation here is narrow, concerning only good reasons for acceptance that constitute sufficient justification or warrant. Recent epistemological trends broaden the viewpoint to include also practical considerations that enter into other rational decisions, such as best use of the agent’s limited resources.

A related but weaker conception of rationality appears in philosophy of mind as a necessary coherence requirement on personal identity – roughly, ‘No rationality, no agent’. Such agent-constitutive rationality standards are more lenient than normative epistemic standards, since agents’ belief sets can and often do fall short of epistemically uncriticizable rationality without the agents thereby ceasing to qualify as having minds.

Finally, at the widest perspective, long-standing sceptical lines of challenge to rationality of the entire structure of human belief-forming procedures conclude that we can never have the slightest good reason to accept even our most central beliefs. Recent approaches that ‘naturalize’ epistemology into a branch of science tend to exclude such general doubts as insignificant or meaningless; but if distinctively philosophical questions in fact do not fully reduce to regular scientific ones, sceptical-type rationality challenges may instead remain a permanent part of the human condition.
Reasons for belief
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: September 2018

Reasons for believing something are one or another kind of ground for believing it. Some grounds provide evidence for a belief; others explain it; some are consciously known, others not. Philosophers are concerned with these and other aspects of reason, including the questions of whether reasons are also causes, whether they yield beliefs only by inference, and whether, by suitable reflection, believers can always become aware of the reasons for a belief they hold.
Scepticism
Authors: Cohen Stewart
Published: September 2018

Simply put, scepticism is the view that we fail to know anything. More generally, the term ‘scepticism’ refers to a family of views, each of which denies that some term of positive epistemic appraisal applies to our beliefs. Thus, sceptical doctrines might hold that none of our beliefs is certain, that none of our beliefs is justified, that none of our beliefs is reasonable, that none of our beliefs is more reasonable than its denial, and so on. Sceptical doctrines can also vary with respect to the kind of belief they target. Scepticism can be restricted to beliefs produced in certain ways: for example, scepticism concerning beliefs based on memory, on inductive reasoning or even on any reasoning whatsoever. And sceptical views can be restricted to beliefs about certain subjects: for example, scepticism concerning beliefs about the external world, beliefs about other minds, beliefs about value and so on. Solipsism – the view that all that exists is the self and its states – can be seen as a form of scepticism based on the claim that there are no convincing arguments for the existence of anything beyond the self.

The philosophical problem of scepticism derives from what appear to be very strong arguments for sceptical conclusions. Since most philosophers are unwilling to accept those conclusions, there is a problem concerning how to respond to the arguments. For example, one kind of sceptical argument attempts to show that we have no knowledge of the world around us. The argument hinges on the claim that we are not in a position to rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-a-vat being artificially stimulated to have just the sensory experience we are actually having. We have no basis for ruling out this possibility since if it were actual, our experience would not change in any way. The sceptic then claims that if we cannot rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-a-vat, then we cannot know anything about the world around us.

Responses to this argument often fall into one of two categories. Some philosophers argue that we can rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-a-vat. Others argue that we do not need to be able to rule out this possibility in order to have knowledge of the world around us.
Knowledge, tacit
Authors: Delaney C.F.
Published: September 2018

Tacit knowledge is a form of implicit knowledge we rely on for both learning and acting. The term derives from the work of Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) whose critique of positivistic philosophy of science grew into a fully developed theory of knowledge. Polanyi believed that the ‘scientific’ account of knowledge as a fully explicit formalizable body of statements did not allow for an adequate account of discovery and growth. In his account of tacit knowledge, knowledge has an ineliminable subjective dimension: we know much more than we can tell. This notion of tacit knowing in science has been developed by Thomas Kuhn, has figured prominently in theoretical linguistics and has also been studied in psychology.
Belief and knowledge
Authors: Luper Steven
Published: September 2018

It is often said that for people to know that such and such is the case, they must have something like a belief that such and such is the case. Call this the ‘entailment thesis’. It is usually added that the converse (call it the ‘converse entailment thesis’) is false: it is false that my belief-like attitude that such and such is the case always counts as knowledge. This standard view, combining the entailment thesis with the denial of the converse thesis, has been challenged in a number of ways.

The ‘identity thesis’ would retain the entailment thesis but would also endorse the converse entailment thesis. Knowledge and belief entail each other. (While no one has defended precisely this claim, Donald Davidson has come close.) The ‘incompatibility thesis’ rejects the entailment thesis as well as the converse entailment thesis, and says that knowledge and belief are mutually incompatible. Similarly, the ‘separability thesis’ also rejects the entailment thesis and the converse entailment thesis, but adds that knowledge and belief are mutually compatible. Those who defend the ‘eliminativism thesis’ hold that belief, like other elements of ‘folk’ or popular psychology, is an outmoded notion, and what is ‘in our heads’ when we know about the world is something other than beliefs.
Chisholm, Roderick Milton (1916–1999)
Authors: Benfield David
Published: September 2018

Chisholm was an important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, the use of a few basic, undefined or primitive terms, and extraordinary clarity. One of the first Anglo-American philosophers to make fruitful use of Brentano and Meinong, Chisholm translated many of Brentano’s philosophical writings. As one of the great teachers, Chisholm is widely known for the three editions of Theory of Knowledge, a short book and the standard text in US graduate epistemology courses. An ontological Platonist, Chisholm defends human free will and a strict sense of personal identity.
Virtue epistemology
Authors: Zagzebski Linda
Published: September 2018

‘Virtue epistemology’ is the name of a class of theories that analyse fundamental epistemic concepts such as justification or knowledge in terms of properties of persons rather than properties of beliefs. Some of these theories make the basic concept constitutive of justification or knowledge that of a reliable belief-forming process, or a reliable belief-forming faculty or, alternatively, a properly functioning faculty. Others make the fundamental concept that of an epistemic or intellectual virtue in the sense of virtue used in ethics. In all these theories, epistemic evaluation rests on some virtuous quality of the person that enables them to act in a cognitively effective and commendable way, although not all use the term ‘virtue’. The early, simple forms of process reliabilism are best treated as precursors to virtue epistemology since the latter arose out of the former and has added requirements for knowledge intended to capture the idea of epistemic behaviour that is subjectively responsible as well as objectively reliable.

Proponents of virtue epistemology claim a number of advantages. It is said to bypass disputes between foundationalists and coherentists on proper cognitive structure, to avoid sceptical worries, to avoid the impasse between internalism and externalism, and to broaden the range of epistemological inquiry in a way that permits the recovering of such neglected epistemic values as understanding and wisdom.