Innate knowledge

By Sober, Elliott

If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides ...

Wang Yangming (1472–1529)

By Kwong-Loi, Shun

Wang Yangming was an influential Confucian thinker in sixteenth-century China who, like other Confucian thinkers, emphasized social and political responsibilities and regarded cultivation of the self as the ...

Mind, philosophy of

By Jackson, Frank; Rey, Georges

‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour ...

Bayesian cognitive science

Bayesian cognitive science is a research programme that relies on modelling resources from Bayesian statistics for studying and understanding mind, brain, and behaviour. Conceiving of mental capacities as ...

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 ...

Language, innateness of

By Cowie, Fiona

Is there any innate knowledge? What is it to speak and understand a language? These are old questions, but it was the twentieth-century linguist, Noam Chomsky, who forged ...

Biology, philosophy of

By Lewens, Tim

Biologists sometimes look perplexed when they are told of the existence of a subject called ‘The Philosophy of Biology’. What, they ask, is there to philosophise about in ...

Cognition, infant

By Gopnik, Alison; Meltzoff, Andrew N.

In the past thirty years developmental psychologists have developed techniques for investigating the cognitive resources of infants. These techniques show that an infant’s initial representation of the world ...

Buffier, Claude (1661–1737)

By Manns, James W.

A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of ...

Ideals

By Rosati, Connie S.

Ideals are models of excellence. They can be moral or nonmoral, and either ‘substantive’ or ‘deliberative’. Substantive ideals present models of excellence against which things in a relevant ...

Rationalism

By Markie, Peter J.

Rationalism is the view that reason, as opposed to, say, sense experience, divine revelation or reliance on institutional authority, plays a dominant role in our attempt to gain ...

Glanvill, Joseph (1636–80)

By Rogers, G.A.J.

Joseph Glanvill was an opponent of the scholastic philosophy which he had been taught in England, supporting instead the new learning associated with Francis Bacon and the Royal ...

Locke, John (1632–1704)

John Locke was the leading English philosopher of the late seventeenth century. His two major works, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of ...

Memory, epistemology of

By Conee, Earl

Memory appears to preserve knowledge, but there are epistemic questions about how this could be. Memory is fallible, and empirical research has identified various ways in which people ...

Knowledge, tacit

By Delaney, C.F.

Tacit knowledge is a form of implicit knowledge we rely on for both learning and acting. The term derives from the work of Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) whose critique ...

Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630–1721)

By Floridi, Luciano

Huet was a French Catholic bishop who wrote important works in theology, philology and literary criticism. In philosophy, he defended an apologetic interpretation of scepticism and opposed Cartesianism, ...

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 ...

Reliabilism

By Goldman, Alvin I.

Reliabilism is an approach to the nature of knowledge and of justified belief. Reliabilism about justification, in its simplest form, says that a belief is justified if and ...

Behaviourism, methodological and scientific

By Gallistel, C.R.

Methodological behaviourism is the doctrine that the data on which a psychological science must rest are behavioural data – or, at the very least, publicly observable data – ...

Innateness in ancient philosophy

By Scott, Dominic

The idea that knowledge exists latently in the mind, independently of sense experience, is put forward in three of Plato’s dialogues: the Meno, the Phaedo and the Phaedrus. ...

Vision

By Egan, Frances

Vision is the most studied sense. It is our richest source of information about the external world, providing us with knowledge of the shape, size, distance, colour and ...

Vision

Vision is the most studied sense. It is our richest source of information about the external world, providing us with knowledge of the shape, size, distance, colour and ...

Linguistics, philosophy of

By Rey, Georges; Blair, Dan

Although related to issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of linguistics is a largely distinct topic, being concerned not so much with language itself but with ...

Plato (427–347 BC)

By Schofield, Malcolm

Plato was an Athenian Greek of aristocratic family, active as a philosopher in the first half of the fourth century bc. He was a devoted follower of ...