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Robert Stalnaker - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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on logics of knowledge and belief
Philosophical Studies, 2006Co-Authors: Robert StalnakerAbstract:Formal Epistemology, or at least the approach to formal Epistemology that develops a logic and formal semantics of knowledge and belief in the possible worlds framework, began with Jaakko Hintikka’s book Knowledge and Belief, published in 1962. It was later developed and applied to problems in theoretical computer science and game theory, as well as within Epistemology. This paper surveys some of these developments, focusing on the formal relations between knowledge and belief, and on the way that the logics of knowledge and belief connect with some traditional problems in Epistemology.
James Maffie - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Naturalism, scientism and the independence of Epistemology
Erkenntnis, 1995Co-Authors: James MaffieAbstract:Naturalists seek continuity between Epistemology and science. Critics argue this illegitimately expands science into Epistemology and commits the ‘fallacy’ of scientism. Must naturalists commit this ‘fallacy’? I defend a conception of naturalized Epistemology which upholds the non-identity of epistemic ends, norms, and concepts with scientific evidential ends, norms, and concepts. I argue it enables naturalists to avoid three leading scientistic ‘fallacies’: dogmatism, one dimensionalism, and granting science an epistemic monopoly.
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NATURALISM AND THE NORMATIVITY OF Epistemology
Philosophical Studies, 1990Co-Authors: James MaffieAbstract:Epistemology plays a central and indisputably normative role in our lives. Like ethics, it is concerned with evaluating the rightness or wrongness of human activity. We turn to it for advice concerning how we ought to regulate belief. We appeal to it when appraising the worth of belief, evidential norms, or cognitive practices. We enlist its help when criticising our own or other's cognitive performances. It would seem then that a plausible account of Epistemology should both preserve and explain the normative character of our epistemic practices. It is precisely the normative character of Epistemology that is commonly said to prevent its naturalization. After all, if epistemic concepts are essentially descriptive, if epistemic judgments are primarily factual, or if epistemic properties are reducible to or identical with descriptive ones, then how can they play a normative role in our cognitive affairs? If epistemic value is a species of descriptive fact, how can it motivate or direct cognitive conduct? Naturalism needs to explain how normativity can be preserved within an Epistemology that is continuous with natural science if it is to provide us with a plausible alternative to nonnaturalism and non-cognitivism. 1 In this essay I put forward a definitional form of naturalized Epistemology (which I call naturalist epistemological realism) and show how the normative office of Epistemology is preserved and made intelligible on this view. Section I reviews two central claims of non-naturalist views of Epistemology. Section II sketches the broad outlines of naturalist epistemological realism. Section III argues that Epistemology is normative only within the framework of instrumental reason and that its normativity is parasitic upon that of the latter. Epistemology is intimately connected with human conduct and motivation -- and hence normative -- by virtue of its central and enduring importance to the satisfaction of our various contingent ends. Yet this intimacy and hence
Jeremy Peter Aarons - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Encyclopedia of Knowledge Management - Epistemology and Knowledge Management
Encyclopedia of Knowledge Management Second Edition, 2020Co-Authors: Jeremy Peter AaronsAbstract:This article surveys and explores the relationship between Epistemology and knowledge management (KM). Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge (Klein, 1998b). Knowledge management is clearly deeply indebted to many ideas derived from Epistemology. Much of the seminal work in KM discusses Epistemology in a fair amount of detail, and explicitly appeals to insights from Epistemology in developing a theoretical account of KM. In particular, the groundbreaking works by Sveiby (1994, 1997, 2001), Nonaka (1994), and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) make explicit appeal to the philosophical insights in Epistemology, which has provided the groundwork for much of their pioneering work in knowledge management. One would thus expect there to be a fairly intimate connection between Epistemology and knowledge management. The relationship between these two fields, however, is far from straightforward.
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Epistemology and Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management, 1Co-Authors: Jeremy Peter AaronsAbstract:This article surveys and explores the relationship between Epistemology and knowledge management (KM). Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge (Klein, 1998b). Knowledge management is clearly deeply indebted to many ideas derived from Epistemology. Much of the seminal work in KM discusses Epistemology in a fair amount of detail, and explicitly appeals to insights from Epistemology in developing a theoretical account of KM. In particular, the groundbreaking works by Sveiby (1994, 1997, 2001), Nonaka (1994), and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) make explicit appeal to the philosophical insights in Epistemology, which has provided the groundwork for much of their pioneering work in knowledge management. One would thus expect there to be a fairly intimate connection between Epistemology and knowledge management. The relationship between these two fields, however, is far from straightforward.
Cassandra L Pinnick - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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scrutinizing feminist Epistemology an examination of gender in science
2003Co-Authors: Cassandra L Pinnick, Noretta Koertge, Robert F AlmederAbstract:This volume presents the first systematic evaluation of a feminist Epistemology of science's power to transform both the practice of science and our society. Unlike existing critiques, this book questions the fundamental feminist suggestion that purging science of alleged male biases will advance the cause of both science and by extension, social justice. The book is divided into four sections: the strange status of feminist Epistemology, testing feminist claims about scientific practice, philosophical and political critiques of feminist Epistemology, and future prospects of feminist Epistemology. Each of the essays-most of which are original to this text-directly confronts the very idea that there could be a feminist Epistemology or philosophy of science. Rather than attempting to deal in detail with all of the philosophical views that fall under the general rubric of feminist Epistemology, the contributors focus on positions that provide the most influential perspectives on science. Not all of the authors agree amongst themselves, of course, but each submits feminist theories to careful scrutiny.
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feminist Epistemology implications for philosophy of science
Philosophy of Science, 1994Co-Authors: Cassandra L PinnickAbstract:This article examines the best contemporary arguments for a feminist Epistemology of scientific knowledge as found in recent works by S. Harding. I argue that no feminist Epistemology of science is worthy of the name, because such an Epistemology fails to escape well-known vicissitudes of epistemic relativism. But feminist Epistemology merits attention from philosophers of science because it is part of a larger relativist turn in the social sciences and humanities that now aims to extend its critique to science, and Harding's "standpoint feminism" is the best-developed case. She attempts to make new use of discredited philosophical ideas concerning underdetermination, Planck's Hypothesis, and the role of counterfactuals in historical studies of science.
Steven Luper - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Naturalized Epistemology
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1Co-Authors: Steven LuperAbstract: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?
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Naturalized Epistemology
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1Co-Authors: Curtis Brown, Steven LuperAbstract:Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is one of the central areas of philosophy. The questions addressed by Epistemology have historically included what knowledge is, how we can or should achieve it, and how much, if anything, we can know. Naturalism is the view that the world contains only natural phenomena, and that the appropriate methods for acquiring knowledge of the world are those of the sciences. The term ‘naturalized Epistemology’ was introduced by W. V. Quine in his 1969 essay ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, in which he argues that Epistemology should be regarded as continuous with, or even part of, natural science. Epistemological naturalists often contrast their approach with that taken by René Descartes. Descartes held that knowledge has a foundational structure. At the foundation are beliefs which we ‘clearly and distinctly perceive’, and about which we are therefore completely certain. For Descartes, these include beliefs about the contents and operations of our own minds. Other beliefs must be inferred from these foundational beliefs in order for us to be justified in holding them. Until we can show, on the basis of foundational beliefs, that there is a world outside our own minds, and that proper scientific methods will reliably give us information about it, we can have no confidence in the results of the sciences. Advocates of a naturalized Epistemology see the role of Epistemology very differently. For them, philosophy does not come prior to science. The starting point of Epistemology should not be our introspective awareness of our own conscious experience, but rather the conception of the larger world that we get from common sense and science. Most naturalists would also reject many other features of Descartes’ Epistemology, including the view that knowledge requires certainty, the view that all our knowledge must be inferred from foundational beliefs, and the view that it is possible to know substantive facts about the world a priori, that is, without needing experience to provide evidence of their truth. Of the three main epistemological issues, i.e. the nature of knowledge, the means of acquiring it, and its extent, Quine’s naturalized Epistemology focuses on the second, the issue of how knowledge is acquired. In a famous passage, Quine describes what he sees as the proper subject of naturalized Epistemology: It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input – certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance – and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meagre input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted Epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one’s theory of nature transcends any available evidence. (Quine 1969: 82–3) For Quine, then, naturalized Epistemology is the empirical study of how human beings develop a theory of the natural world on the basis of their sensory inputs. Given this understanding of Epistemology, it is clear why Quine thinks that ‘Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology’. However, much of Epistemology as traditionally conceived seems to be left out of Quine’s picture, and contemporary epistemological naturalists differ in how they think these topics should be addressed. First, one of the main concerns of Epistemology has been to understand what knowledge is, in the sense of identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing something. This seems to require an analysis of the concept of knowledge rather than an empirical investigation of the natural world. Some naturalists believe that Epistemology should simply abandon conceptual analysis; some accept that conceptual analysis is a necessary and nonscientific part of Epistemology, and conclude that only parts of Epistemology can be naturalized; and some hold that conceptual analysis itself should become an experimental discipline. A second aspect of traditional Epistemology that Quine seems to neglect concerns the second epistemological question, that of how we do or should acquire knowledge. Many critics of Quine have noted that by focusing exclusively on the descriptive issue of how we in fact base a rich theory of the world on limited evidence, Quine appears to neglect normative issues about how we ought to modify our beliefs in light of new evidence. Some moderate epistemological naturalists concede that such issues cannot be regarded as part of science, while others have suggested that even normative issues can be naturalized. A final issue that Quine pays little attention to relates to the third epistemological issue, that of how much knowledge, if any, we can have. Quine recommends treating the issue of the extent of our knowledge as internal to science. However, a main focus of traditional Epistemology has been to address whether it is possible to convincingly refute radical scepticism, the idea that all or most of our beliefs could be seriously mistaken. To address this question by appealing to the results of science seems to beg the question. Can there be a naturalistic response to radical scepticism? Most contemporary naturalists would concede that they cannot refute scepticism, but would also hold that the only sceptical doubts worth taking seriously are those that arise from within science itself.
