praj-17/QA-MCQ-Open-ended huggingface dataset:
Title: Empiricism
Context: Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let the issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit. According to an extreme empiricist theory known as phenomenalism, anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences. Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist — hence the closely related term subjective idealism. By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences. This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part. As John Stuart Mill put it in the mid-19th century, matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation". Mill's empiricism went a significant step beyond Hume in still another respect: in maintaining that induction is necessary for all meaningful knowledge including mathematics. As summarized by D.W. Hamlin:

question: What conclusion do most of Hume's followers disagree with? 

answer: that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable

question: What did Hume say can't be rationally justified? 

answer: belief in an external world

question: What is phenomenalism? 

answer: physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events

question: What is subjective idealism closely related to? 

answer: Phenomenalism

question: What did John Stuart Mill say matter is? 

answer: the "permanent possibility of sensation"
Title: Empiricism
Context: Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind is not from direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience. The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position center around the following issues: Firstly, Mill's formulation encounters difficulty when it describes what direct experience is by differentiating only between actual and possible sensations. This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in the first place. Berkeley put God in that gap; the phenomenalists, including Mill, essentially left the question unanswered. In the end, lacking an acknowledgement of an aspect of "reality" that goes beyond mere "possibilities of sensation", such a position leads to a version of subjective idealism. Questions of how floor beams continue to support a floor while unobserved, how trees continue to grow while unobserved and untouched by human hands, etc., remain unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable in these terms. Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves open the unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all". Thirdly, Mill's position, by calling mathematics merely another species of inductive inference, misapprehends mathematics. It fails to fully consider the structure and method of mathematical science, the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures which do not, either today or at the time Mill wrote, fall under the agreed meaning of induction.

question: What did Mill say knowledge comes from? 

answer: an inductive inference from direct experience

question: What sensations did Mill differentiate? 

answer: actual and possible sensations

question: When Mill left a question of sensations unanswered, how did Berkeley answer it? 

answer: God

question: What did Mill say might not actually exist? 

answer: gap-filling entities

question: What did Mill misrepresent about math? 

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

question: What phase of empiricism ended in the 1940s? 

answer: phenomenalist

question: How can't a finite set of statements be described? 

answer: in purely sensory terms

question: What is necessary to explain a doctor's normality in sensory terms? 

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

question: What are other terms for logical empiricism? 

answer: logical positivism or neopositivism

question: When was logical empricism formulated? 

answer: early 20th-century

question: What did logical empiricism try to combine with mathematical logic? 

answer: British empiricism

question: What was Otto Neurath an important member of? 

answer: Logical empiricism

question: What was AJ Ayer an important member of? 

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

question: When was Bertrand Russell born? 

answer: 1872

question: When did Bertrand Russell die? 

answer: 1970

question: What did Frege say about math? 

answer: all mathematical truths are logical

question: What did Wittgenstein say about logic? 

answer: all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies

question: What are pseudoproblems? 

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

question: Who were extreme empiricists? 

answer: neopositivists

question: Who attacked logical positivism? 

answer: Nelson Goodman, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, and Richard Rorty

question: What position does Dummett take? 

answer: anti-realists

question: Who abandoned phenomenalism? 

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

question: When did pragmatism arise? 

answer: In the late 19th and early 20th century

question: Who developed pragmatism? 

answer: Charles Sanders Peirce and William James

question: Where did Peirce and James meet? 

answer: Harvard

question: When did Peirce and James meet? 

answer: in the 1870s

question: What did Peirce later call his ideas instead of pragmatism? 

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

question: When was Peirce born? 

answer: 1839

question: When did Peirce die? 

answer: 1914

question: What view did Peirce think had been driven to excess? 

answer: the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view

question: Who formed the basis for modern scientific method? 

answer: Charles Peirce

question: Whose rationalism did Peirce criticize? 

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

question: How long before Peirce did Hume write? 

answer: a century

question: How did Peirce view inductive vs deductive reasoning? 

answer: complementary

question: How did Hume view inductive vs deductive reasoning? 

answer: competitive

question: What did fallibilism say? 

answer: the conclusions of science are always tentative

question: What does the scientific method's rationality depend on? 

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

question: Who wrote 'Lectures on Pragmatism'? 

answer: Peirce

question: When was 'Lectures on Pragmatism' published? 

answer: 1903

question: What is 'haecceity'? 

answer: unique individuality or "thisness"

question: What did Irvin Rock write about? 

answer: indirect perception

question: Where has 'perception as abduction' come up repeatedly? 

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

question: Who came up with 'radical empiricism'? 

answer: William James

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

answer: in James's published lectures

question: When was William James born? 

answer: 1842

question: When did William James die? 

answer: 1910

question: When did James come up with 'radical empiricism'? 

answer: Around the beginning of the 20th century
Title: Empiricism
Context: John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form a theory known as instrumentalism. The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test the pragmatic values of such experience. The value of such experience is measured experientially and scientifically, and the results of such tests generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation, in physical sciences as in ethics. Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori.

question: Who came up with 'instrumentalism'? 

answer: John Dewey

question: What did Dewey think about reality? 

answer: reality is determined by past experience

question: When was Dewey born? 

answer: 1859

question: When did Dewey die? 

answer: 1952

question: What was instrumentalism a modification of? 

answer: James' pragmatism
Title: Idealism
Context: In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society. As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind.

question: What do idealist philosophies say is constructed in our minds? 

answer: reality

question: What types of things are idealist philosophies skeptical about? 

answer: mind-independent

question: Along with physicalist theories, what theories is idealism in conflict with? 

answer: dualist

question: In sociology, what sorts of ideas does idealism focus on? 

answer: beliefs and values
Title: Idealism
Context: The earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece. The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonists gave panentheistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality. In contrast, the Yogācāra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century CE, based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism.

question: What Indian thinkers were early idealists? 

answer: Hindu

question: What Greek philosophers had idealistic views? 

answer: Neoplatonists

question: With what sect of Buddhism was the Yogācāra school affiliated? 

answer: Mahayana

question: In what century did the Yogācāra school arise? 

answer: 4th

question: What century did George Berkeley live in? 

answer: 18th
Title: Idealism
Context: Beginning with Immanuel Kant, German idealists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy. This tradition, which emphasized the mental or "ideal" character of all phenomena, gave birth to idealistic and subjectivist schools ranging from British idealism to phenomenalism to existentialism. The historical influence of this branch of idealism remains central even to the schools that rejected its metaphysical assumptions, such as Marxism, pragmatism and positivism.

question: What was the ethnicity of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling? 

answer: German

question: In what century did Hegel write? 

answer: 19th

question: Along with British idealism and existentialism, what philosophy was influenced by the German idealistic tradition? 

answer: phenomenalism

question: Along with positivism and pragmatism, what philosophy rejected idealism's metaphysical views but what nevertheless influenced by it? 

answer: Marxism
Title: Idealism
Context: Idealism is a term with several related meanings. It comes via idea from the Greek idein (ἰδεῖν), meaning "to see". The term entered the English language by 1743. In ordinary use, as when speaking of Woodrow Wilson's political idealism, it generally suggests the priority of ideals, principles, values, and goals over concrete realities. Idealists are understood to represent the world as it might or should be, unlike pragmatists, who focus on the world as it presently is. In the arts, similarly, idealism affirms imagination and attempts to realize a mental conception of beauty, a standard of perfection, juxtaposed to aesthetic naturalism and realism.

question: What does ἰδεῖν mean in English? 

answer: to see

question: By what year was "idealism" a word in English? 

answer: 1743

question: Whose worldview contrasts with that of idealists in the ordinary sense of the word? 

answer: pragmatists

question: What language is ἰδεῖν? 

answer: Greek
Title: Idealism
Context: Any philosophy that assigns crucial importance to the ideal or spiritual realm in its account of human existence may be termed "idealist". Metaphysical idealism is an ontological doctrine that holds that reality itself is incorporeal or experiential at its core. Beyond this, idealists disagree on which aspects of the mental are more basic. Platonic idealism affirms that abstractions are more basic to reality than the things we perceive, while subjective idealists and phenomenalists tend to privilege sensory experience over abstract reasoning. Epistemological idealism is the view that reality can only be known through ideas, that only psychological experience can be apprehended by the mind.

question: What is the term used for philosophies that consider the spiritual to be of paramount importance? 

answer: idealist

question: What branch of idealism believes that reality is fundamentally nonphysical? 

answer: Metaphysical

question: What branch of idealism sees abstracts as more real than perceived objects? 

answer: Platonic

question: Along with phenomenalists, what idealists believe the senses are more important than reason? 

answer: subjective

question: What branch of idealism believes that we can only know the real world via ideas? 

answer: Epistemological