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 ...

Virtue epistemology

By Zagzebski, Linda

‘Virtue epistemology’ is the name of a class of theories that analyse fundamental epistemic concepts such as justification or knowledge in terms of properties of persons rather than ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Intellectual virtue

By Battaly, Heather

Intellectual virtues are qualities that make one an excellent thinker. The contemporary literature offers two different analyses of intellectual virtues: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Virtue reliabilism argues ...

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 ...

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 ...

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). ...

Internalism and externalism in epistemology

By Alston, William P.

The internalism–externalism distinction is usually applied to the epistemic justification of belief. The most common form of internalism (accessibility internalism) holds that only what the subject can easily ...

Social epistemology

Social epistemology encompasses the study of the social dimensions of knowledge acquisition and transmission (Palermos and Pritchard 2013), the evaluation of beliefs and belief-forming mechanisms in their social ...

Knowledge, causal theory of

By Swain, Marshall

Epistemologists have always recognized the importance of causal processes in accounting for our knowledge of things. In discussions of perception, memory and reasoning, for example, it is commonly ...

Epistemology, Indian schools of

By Phillips, Stephen H.

Each classical Indian philosophical school classifies and defines itself with reference to a foundational text or figure, through elaboration of inherited positions, and by disputing the views of ...

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 ...

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 ...

Internalism and externalism in epistemology

The internalism/externalism debate in epistemology is primarily concerned with the conditions or factors by virtue of which beliefs acquire the status of being epistemically justified. Internalism holds that ...

Metacognition

By Proust, Joëlle

It has often been claimed that metacognition should be defined as “cognition about one’s own cognition,” “knowledge about one’s own knowledge,” or “thinking about one’s own thinking” (Carruthers ...

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, ...

Abstract objects

By Hale, Bob

The central philosophical question about abstract objects is: Are there any? An affirmative answer – given by Platonists or Realists – draws support from the fact that while ...

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. ...

Induction, epistemic issues in

By Kaplan, Mark

Consider the following: ...

Private states and language

By Craig, Edward

Something is ’private’ if it can be known to one person only. Many have held that perceptions and bodily sensations are in this sense private, being knowable only ...

Wodeham, Adam (c.1298–1358)

By Wood, Rega

An English Franciscan theologian, Wodeham was preoccupied with logical and semantic questions. He lectured for about a decade on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, first at London, then at Norwich ...

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’, ...