Rational beliefs

By Cherniak, Christopher

To the extent that a belief is rational, it ought to be held, other things being equal; irrational beliefs should not be held. From traditional epistemological perspectives, the ...

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 ...

Charity, principle of

By Feldman, Richard

The principle of charity governs the interpretation of the beliefs and utterances of others. It urges charitable interpretation, meaning interpretation that maximizes the truth or rationality of what ...

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 of education

By Siegel, Harvey

Philosophical thinking about education has always been centrally concerned with epistemological matters, alongside metaphysical, moral and social/political concerns. The most basic question concerns the epistemic aims of education: ...

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 ...

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 ...

Epistemology and ethics

By Feldman, Richard

Epistemology and ethics are both concerned with evaluations: ethics with evaluations of conduct, epistemology with evaluations of beliefs and other cognitive acts. Of considerable interest to philosophers are ...

Underdetermination

By Laudan, Larry

The term underdetermination refers to a broad family of arguments about the relations between theory and evidence. All share the conclusion that evidence is more or less impotent ...

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, ...

Economics and ethics

By Hausman, Daniel; McPherson, Michael S.

Unlike many other sciences, economics is linked both to ethics and to the theory of rationality. Although many economists regard economics as a ‘positive’ science of one sort ...

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, ...

Action

Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning ...

Religion and epistemology

By Plantinga, Alvin

Epistemology is theory of knowledge; one would therefore expect epistemological discussions of religion to concentrate on the question as to whether one could have knowledge of religious beliefs. ...

Carneades (214–129 BC)

By Barnes, Jonathan

The Greek philosopher Carneades was head of the Academy from 167 to 137 bc. Born in North Africa he migrated to Athens, where he studied logic with ...

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 ...

Chaadaev, Pëtr Iakovlevich (1794–1856)

By Walicki, Andrzej

Pëtr Chaadaev was the first Russian thinker for whom his own country became a philosophical problem. His works initiated the powerful Russian tradition of reflecting on Russia’s whence ...

Epistemic relativism

Broadly speaking, relativism is the view that, at least in some domains, everything or every truth is relative to some standards so that, when two or more people ...

Naturalized epistemology

By Luper, Steven

The term ‘naturalized epistemology’ was coined by W.V. Quine to refer to an approach to epistemology which he introduced in his 1969 essay ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Many of the ...

Naturalized epistemology

Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is one of the central areas of philosophy. The questions addressed by epistemology have historically included what knowledge is, how we can or ...

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 ...

Virtue epistemology

‘Virtue epistemology’ is the name of a class of theories that focus epistemic evaluation on good epistemic properties of persons rather than on properties of beliefs. The former ...

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 ...

Epistemic relativism

By Stich, Stephen P.

An account of what makes a system of reasoning or belief revision a good one is relativistic if it is sensitive to facts about the person or group ...

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 ...