Justification, epistemic

By Foley, Richard

The term ‘justification’ belongs to a cluster of normative terms that also includes ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘warranted’. All these are commonly used in epistemology, but there is no ...

Pascal’s wager

By Jordan, Jeff

Pascal’s wager is a type of theistic argument developed by Blaisé Pascal, a French mathematician of the seventeenth century. There are at least four versions of the wager ...

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 ...

Gettier problem

By Hetherington, Stephen

Edmund Gettier, in 1963, introduced into philosophy what soon became known as the Gettier problem. It is still with us – frustratingly so for some, intriguingly so for ...

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 ...

Knowledge, defeasibility theory of

By Swain, Marshall

Based upon an analogy with the legal and ethical concept of a defeasible, or prima facie, obligation, epistemic defeasibility was introduced into epistemology as an ingredient in ...

Epistemic defeaters

By Piazza, Tommaso

You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad taste of your coffee, that it contained salt. Mundane experiences like these ...

Epistemic basing relation

By Bondy, Patrick

The epistemic basing relation is the relation that holds between beliefs and the reasons for which they are held. It is important to understand this relation if we ...

Epistemic infinitism

By Aikin, Scott

If you believe something rationally, you believe it for a reason. And that reason can’t just be any old reason. You’ve got to rationally hold it as a ...

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 ...

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: ...

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 ...

Intuitions, philosophical appeals to

By Pust, Joel

Intuitions are, according to many philosophers, treated as a primary source of evidence in much distinctively philosophical inquiry. While some contest this claim, if it is true, then ...

Modal Epistemology

By Black, Tim

Modal epistemologies maintain that a belief counts as knowledge only if there is an appropriate modal connection between that belief and the facts of the matter that make ...

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 ...

Reasons for belief

By Audi, Robert

Reasons for believing something are one or another kind of ground for believing it. Some grounds provide evidence for a belief; others explain it; some are consciously known, ...

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 ...

A priori knowledge and justification, recent work on

By Bonjour, Laurence

The recent discussion of the a priori has involved some controversies about the concept of a priori justification or warrant, but has focused mainly on the central issue ...

Testimony

By Gelfert, Axel

In contemporary epistemology, ‘testimony’ is used as an umbrella term to refer to all those instances where we form a belief, or acquire knowledge, on the basis of ...

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 ...

Epistemic value

By Greco, John; Pinto de Sa, Luis

Epistemic value is a kind of value possessed by knowledge, and perhaps other epistemic goods such as justification and understanding. The problem of explaining the value of knowledge ...

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, ...

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 ...

Normativity

By Darwall, Stephen

Something is said by philosophers to have ‘normativity’ when it entails that some action, attitude or mental state of some other kind is justified, an action one ought ...

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 ...