Deductive closure principle

By Brueckner, Anthony

It seems that one can expand one’s body of knowledge by making deductive inferences from propositions one knows. The ‘deductive closure principle’ captures this idea: if S knows ...

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 ...

Scepticism

By Cohen, Stewart

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 ...

Gettier problem

By Shope, Robert K.

The expression ‘the Gettier problem’ refers to one or another problem exposed by Edmund Gettier when discussing the relation between several examples that he constructed and analyses of ...

Knowledge, concept of

By Hannon, Michael

The word ‘know’ is exceptional for a number of reasons. It is one of the ten most commonly used verbs in English, alongside basic verbs like ‘be’, ‘do’, ...

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, ...

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 ...

Paradoxes, epistemic

By Kvanvig, Jonathan L.

The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in ...

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: ...

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. ...

Scepticism

By Schönbaumsfeld, Genia

Radical scepticism is the contention that little or no knowledge of one’s ‘external’ surroundings might be possible. Most modern forms of scepticism have their roots in René Descartes’ ...