Contextualism, epistemological

By Brower, Bruce W.

The idea that norms vary with social setting has long been recognized, but it is only in the late twentieth century that philosophers have developed precise versions of ...

Epistemology

Epistemology has been traditionally concerned with questions about the nature, value, and scope of knowledge, together with other questions that arise in relation to these. Hence, another name ...

Epistemology

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Epistemology has been primarily concerned with propositional knowledge, ...

Epistemic contrastivism

By Baumann, Peter

Contrastivism about knowledge is the view that one does not just know some proposition. It is more adequate to say that one knows something rather than something else: ...

Pragmatic Encroachment

By Ganson, Dorit

When Pascal entreats us to ‘Wager, then, without hesitation that He is’ upon consideration of the potential gains (all) and losses (nothing) of such a wager, we recognise ...

Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007)

By Rohr, Michael David; Voparil, Christopher

Richard Rorty is a leading US philosopher and public intellectual, and the best-known contemporary advocate of pragmatism. Trained in both analytic and traditional philosophy, he has followed Dewey ...

Deductive closure principle

The deductive closure principle is based on the thought that one straightforward way to extend one’s knowledge is to competently deduce some proposition from one or more propositions ...

Epistemology

By Klein, Peter D.

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see Knowledge, concept of). There is a vast ...

Social epistemology

By Schmitt, Frederick F.

Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the relevance to knowledge of social relations, interests and institutions. It is thus to be distinguished from the sociology ...

Commonsensism

By Chisholm, Roderick M.

‘Commonsensism’ refers to one of the principal approaches to traditional theory of knowledge where one asks oneself the following Socratic questions: (1) What can I know?; (2) How ...

Criteria

By McGinn, Marie

The concept of criteria has been interpreted as the central notion in the later Wittgenstein’s account of how language functions, in contrast to the realist semantics of the ...

Doubt

By Williams, Michael

Doubt is often defined as a state of indecision or hesitancy with respect to accepting or rejecting a given proposition. Thus, doubt is opposed to belief. But doubt ...

Experimental epistemology

By Beebe, James

Experimental epistemology is the branch of experimental philosophy devoted to the empirical study of our shared practices of reasoning and making judgments about knowledge, evidence, and justified belief. ...

Certainty

By Klein, Peter D.

‘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 ...

Contextualism, epistemic, recent work on

By Sosa, Ernest

What you know at a given time depends of course on features of your context. You can’t know you see a fire, for example, unless there is a ...

Knowledge, concept of

By Klein, Peter D.

The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge is called epistemology (from the Greek epistēmē meaning knowledge, and logos meaning theory). ...