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 ...

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 ...

Categories

By Westerhoff, Jan

Even though categories play an important role in philosophy (especially in ontology and metaphysics), it is clear that not all categories play such a role. Philosophers are ...

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 ...

Inductive inference

By Maher, Patrick

According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form ‘all observed A are B’ to a conclusion of ...

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). ...

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, ...

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 ...

Fallibilism

By Rescher, Nicholas

Fallibilism is a philosophical doctrine regarding natural science, most closely associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, which maintains that our scientific knowledge claims are invariably vulnerable and may turn ...

Knowledge and justification, coherence theory of

By Bonjour, Laurence

Coherence theories of justification represent one main alternative to foundationalist theories of justification. If, as has usually been thought, possessing epistemic justification is one necessary condition (along ...

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 ...

Probability theory and epistemology

By Loewer, Barry

The primary uses of probability in epistemology are to measure degrees of belief and to formulate conditions for rational belief and rational change of belief. The degree of ...

Logic in the second half of the twentieth century

By Cook, Roy T.; Logan, Shay Allen

By the end of the first half of the twentieth century, logic had become a mature philosophical and mathematical discipline. As happens in mature disciplines, in the second ...