Philosophy Word of the Day – Fallibilism

Image via Wikipedia

“Fallibilism is the view that human knowledge lacks a secure and an infallible foundation. Fallibilism is associated in particular with American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994). In its most comprehensive form the fallibilist maintains that people cannot know anything with certainty. In its more restricted forms uncertainty is attributed to a particular domain of beliefs, such as empirical or religious beliefs. What separates fallibilists from others is the confidence each gives to epistemological success in general or within a particular domain. Participants within the science/religion discussion quite frequently affirm fallibilism. Its merit seems to be that it opens up possibilities for a dialogue on more even terms than foundationalism does.”

Mikael Stenmark in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

Philosophy Word of the Day – Belief

“Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn’t involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time.

“Nor does the term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it’s the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk.

“Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology. The “mind-body problem”, for example, so central to philosophy of mind, is in part the question of whether and how a purely physical organism can have beliefs. Much of epistemology revolves around questions about when and how our beliefs are justified or qualify as knowledge.” (continue article)

— Eric Schwizgebel in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Dallas Willard on Worldviews

Image via Wikipedia

“You cannot ‘opt out’ of having a worldview.  You can only try to have one that most accords with reality, including the whole realm of facts concerning what is genuinely good.  What is true of individuals in this respect is also true of social groups and even whole societies or nations.

“One’s worldview need not be recognized as such to have its effects.  Much of it lies outside our consciousness in the moment of action, embedded in our body and its social environment, including our history, language, and culture.  It radiates throughout our life as background assumptions, in thoughts too deep for words.  But any thoughtful observer can discern the essential outlines of what it is.

“What we assume to be real and what we assume to be valuable will govern our attitudes and our actions.  Period.  And usually without thinking.  But most people do not recognize that they have a worldview, and usually it is one that is borrowed, in bits and pieces, from the social environment in which we are reared.  It may not even be self-consistent.

“. . . [B]ecause worldview is so influential, it is also dangerous.  Worldview is where we most need to have knowledge, that is, secured truth.  Perhaps we cannot have knowledge of our worldview as a whole, and some parts of it will then always consist of mere belief or commitment.  But for some parts we can have knowledge if we put forth appropriate efforts, and some parts of some worldviews can certainly be known to be false.”

— from Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009), 44, 45.

* For numerous resources by Dallas Willard, see his website.

Philosophy Word of the Day — Foundationalism

Epistemic foundationalism is a view about the proper architecture of one’s knowledge or justified beliefs.  Some beliefs are known or justifiedly believed only because some other beliefs are known or justifiedly believed.  The claim that one has heart disease is known only if some other beliefs are known—for example, that doctors have reported this and that the doctors are reliable.

This dependence among our beliefs naturally raises the question about the proper epistemic structure for our beliefs.  Should all beliefs be supported by other beliefs?  Are some beliefs rightly believed apart from receiving support from other beliefs?  What is the nature of the proper support between beliefs?  Epistemic foundationalism is one view about how to answer these questions.  Foundationalists maintain that some beliefs are properly basic and that the rest of one’s beliefs inherit their epistemic status (knowledge or justification) in virtue of receiving proper support from the basic beliefs.  Foundationalists have two main projects: a theory of proper basicality (that is, a theory of noninferential justification) and a theory of appropriate support (that is, a theory of inferential justification).

Foundationalism has a long history.  Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics argues for foundationalism on the basis of the regress argument.  Aristotle assumes that the alternatives to foundationalism must either endorse circular reasoning or land in an infinite regress of reasons.  Because neither of these views is plausible, foundationalism comes out as the clear winner in an argument by elimination.  Arguably, the most well known foundationalist is Descartes, who takes as the foundation the allegedly indubitable knowledge of his own existence and the content of his ideas.  Every other justified belief must be grounded ultimately in this knowledge.

. . . [Debates over foundationalism] touched off a burst of activity on foundationalism in the late 1970s to early 1980s.  One of the significant developments from this period is the formulation and defense of reformed epistemology, a foundationalist view that took as the foundations beliefs such as there is a God (see Plantinga (1983)). While the debate over foundationalism has abated in recent decades, new work has picked up on neglected topics about the architecture of knowledge and justification. (Continue article)

— Ted Poston, “Foundationalism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

* Hyperlinks are mine

[tweetmeme only_single=”false”]

The Making of an Atheist Blog Tour

Cloud of Witnesses is pleased to be one of the stops for the newly launched Making of an Atheist blog tour.

I’ll be posting a two-part interview with Jim Spiegel beginning next Monday (2/15), and I welcome your questions and comments in response.  I’ll collect three or four of the most interesting follow-up questions, and ask Jim to respond to them.

In addition, everyone who posts a question (and supplies their email address to be contacted) will be entered into a drawing for a free copy of The Making of an Atheist.  I’ll look forward to hearing from you!

You can learn more about Jim by visiting his blog, Wisdom and Folly, or his website.

Other blog stops on the tour include:

Apologetics.com

Truthbomb Apologetics

Triablogue

Mike Austin’s blog

The Seventh Sola

EPS Blog (Up now here)

Doug Geivett’s Blog

Apologetics 315

Just thinking…

Oversight of Souls

Constructive Curmudgeon

A-TeamBlog

Philosophy Word of the Day – Introspection

Image via Wikipedia

Introspection, as the term is used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a means of learning about one’s own currently ongoing, or perhaps very recently past, mental states or processes. You can, of course, learn about your own mind in the same way you learn about others’ minds—by reading psychology texts, by observing facial expressions (in a mirror), by examining readouts of brain activity, by noting patterns of past behavior—but it’s generally thought that you can also learn about your mind introspectively, in a way that no one else can. But what exactly is introspection? No simple characterization is widely accepted. Although introspection must be a process that yields knowledge only of one’s own current mental states, more than one type of process fits this characterization.

Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical doubt. Introspective knowledge is also often held to be more immediate or direct than sensory knowledge. Both of these putative features of introspection have been cited in support of the idea that introspective knowledge can serve as a ground or foundation for other sorts of knowledge.

Introspection is also central to philosophy of mind, both as a process worth study in its own right and as a court of appeal for other claims about the mind. Philosophers of mind offer a variety of theories of the nature of introspection; and philosophical claims about consciousness, emotion, free will, personal identity, thought, belief, imagery, perception, and other mental phenomena are often thought to have introspective consequences or to be susceptible to introspective verification. For similar reasons, empirical psychologists too have discussed the accuracy of introspective judgments and the role of introspection in the science of the mind. (Continue article)

(Via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Philosophy Word of the Day – Edmund Gettier

American philosopher whose Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (1963) offers counter-examples to show that even justified true belief may not be genuine knowledge in cases where that which justifies one’s belief happens not to be related directly to the truth of what one believes.

Recommended Reading: Empirical Knowledge, ed. by Paul K. Moser (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996) {at Amazon.com}; A Companion to Epistemology, ed. by Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Blackwell, 1994) {at Amazon.com}; and Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (Routledge, 1998) {at Amazon.com}.

(Via Philosophical Dictionary)

Philosophy Word of the Day – Incorrigible

Directly and conclusively verified, not subject to any further tests.  A class of so-called basic statements or propositions that are descriptive of present contents of experience (for example, “I have a headache”) are generally regarded as incorrigible in so far as they express nothing about which one could be uncertain or mistaken.

Such statements may, however, be false, even when the claim is sincere, not because experience itself can be in any way fallible but because it might be misidentified or incorrectly formulated in words.

(from A Dictionary of Philosophy, Rev. 2nd ed., ed. Antony Flew, 166-167)

Another common example of an incorrigible belief is Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am.

Philosophy Word of the Day – William P. Alston (1921 – )

Although he has contributed to other areas of philosophy, his main interests lie in the areas of epistemology and philosophy of religion.  His work on epistemic justification has been particularly influential, and he has published extensive discussions of religious language.

In Perceiving God (1991), these two interests come together in a detailed account of the epistemology of religious experience.  Alston argues that religious experiences which are taken by their subjects to be direct non-sensory experiences of God are perceptual in their character because they involve a presentation or appearance to the subject of something that the subject identifies as God.

He defends the view that such mystical perception is a source of prima facie justified beliefs about divine manifestations by arguing for the practical rationality of engaging in a belief forming practice that involves reliance on mystical perception. (by Philip L. Quinn in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy [1995], 22.)

Together with other philosophers (Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Robert Adams) Alston was involved in setting up the philosophy journal Faith and philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers. Alston is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and was one of the core figures in the late 20th century revival of the philosophy of religion. (via Wikipedia)