Epistemology

On Folk Epistemology explores how we ascribe knowledge to ourselves and others. Empirical evidence suggests that we do so early and often in thought as well as in talk. Since knowledge ascriptions are central to how we navigate social life, it is...

Socially Extended Epistemology explores the epistemological ramifications of one of the most important research programmes in contemporary cognitive science: distributed cognition. In certain conditions, according to this programme, groups of people can...

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their...

Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Social, cultural, and technological...

Perception is our main source of epistemic access to the outside world. Perception and Basic Beliefs addresses two central questions in epistemology: which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified) and where does perception...

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience,...

Education's Epistemology extends and further defends Harvey Siegel's "reasons conception" of critical thinking. It analyzes and emphasizes both the epistemic quality, and the dispositions and character traits that constitute the "critical spirit," that...

David Hume launched a historic revolution in epistemology when he showed that our theories about the world have no probability relative to what we think of as our evidence for them, hence that the distinction between justified and unjustified theories...

Georges Dicker here provides a commentary on John Locke's masterwork, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding-the foundational work of classical Empiricism. Dicker's commentary is an accessible guide for students who are reading Locke for the first time;...

The Mahayana tradition in Buddhist philosophy is defined by its ethical orientation--the adoption of bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. And indeed, this tradition is known for its literature on ethics,...

This is a work in Kantian conceptual geography. It explores issues in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics in particular by appealing to theses drawn from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Those issues include the nature...

Good decisions account for risks. For example, the risk of an accident while driving in the rain makes a reasonable driver decide to slow down. While risk is a large topic in theoretical disciplines such as economics and psychology, as well as in...

The leading idea of epistemology in the Enlightenment tradition was foundation-theoretic: to reach knowledge, we must not legitimize our beliefs by external authorities, but instead justify them by rational arguments. Recently, the foundation-theoretic...

Causation is one of the most controversial topics in philosophy. There is a wide range of philosophical accounts of causation, for example, the regularity account, the probabilistic account, the counterfactual account, the interventionist account, which...

The striking extent of religious disagreement suggests that religious conviction is very often the result of processes that do not reliably produce true beliefs. For this reason, many have argued that the only rational response to religious disagreement...

New and thoroughly updated, Epistemology: An Anthology continues to represent the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings in the theory of knowledge. Concentrates on the central topics of the field, such as skepticism and...

Ever since climate change has been identified as one of the most significant challenges of humanity, climate change deniers have widely tried to discredit the work of scientists. To show how these processes work, Maria M. Sojka examines three ideals...

What is free will? Can it exist in a determined universe? How can we determine who, if anyone, possesses it? Philosophers have debated the extent of human free will for millennia. In recent decades neuroscientists have joined the fray with questions of...

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve three connected problems. First, we need an undogmatic pluralist standpoint in political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology. But genuine pluralism suffers from the contradiction that making room for fundamental...

Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readers A companion volume to On Understanding Understanding, this second edition incorporates corrections to the previous text and includes new readings. The works collected in this...

In Error, Nicholas Rescher presents a fresh analysis of the occurrence, causality, and consequences of error in human thought, action, and evaluation. Rescher maintains that error-avoidance and truth-achievement are distinct but equally important factors...

This basic introduction to the philosophical inquiry into the fundamental questions of human knowing features a range of carefully designed study questions.Book InformationISBN 9780823214860Author Vincent G. PotterFormat PaperbackPage Count 180Imprint...

"Real" knowing always involves a political dimension, Linda Martin Alcoff suggests. But this does not mean we need to give up realism or the possibility of truth. Recent work in continental philosophy insists on the influence that power and desire exert...

Foundationalism, as a theory of justification and knowledge, is often associated with Enlightenment rationality, the Cartesian thirst for certainty, and the modern assumption of the objectivity and universality of reason. Because of these associations,...

Descartes thought that we could achieve absolute certainty by starting with radical doubt. He adopts this strategy in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where he raises sweeping doubts with the famous dream argument and the hypothesis of an evil demon...

Should the democratic exercise of authority that we take for granted in the realm of government be extended to the managerial sphere? Exploring this question, Christopher McMahon develops a theory of government and management as two components of an...

Each of the fourteen essays in this volume is directed to some aspect of these two questions: What are the peculiarities of the concepts that we use to describe and to criticize the mental states and performances of human beings? What are the...

Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? This book is about these two questions. The essays in its pages variously defend and critique answers to each, grapple over the proper methodology for addressing them, and wonder...

How might epistemology build upon its past and present, so_ as to be better in the future? Epistemology Futures _ takes bold steps towards answering that question. What _ methods will best serve epistemology? Which phenomena and _ concepts deserve more...

Jonathan Ichikawa develops a contextualist semantics for knowledge ascriptions, and shows how it can illuminate foundational questions in epistemology. He argues that in thinking clearly about knowledge, epistemologists must also think about the dynamic...

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of a leading contemporary philosopher on a set of central topics in the subject. Barry Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the...

Mark Sacks presents an innovative study of the nature and scope of objectivity. He argues for a conception of objectivity that draws on the central insight of transcendental idealism, while preserving a non-metaphysical orientation. The first two parts...

In this incisive new monograph one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be...

Oxford Cognitive Science Series General Editors: Martin Davies, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK, James Higginbotham , Professor of General Linguistics, University of Oxford, UK, John O'Keefe, Professor of Cognitive...

Georges Dicker here provides a commentary on John Locke's masterwork, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding-the foundational work of classical Empiricism. Dicker's commentary is an accessible guide for students who are reading Locke for the first time;...

Most of the research on the epistemology of perception has focused on visual perception. This is hardly surprising given that most of our knowledge about the world is largely attributable to our visual experiences. The present volume is the first to...

The result of the author's extensive practical experience: a decade in computer process control using large scale systems, another decade in machine pattern-recognition for vision systems, and nearly a decade dealing with artificial intelligence and...

One goal of epistemology is to refute the skeptic. Another, with an equally dist- guished if briefer pedigree, is to make sense of science as a knowledge-acquiring enterprise. The goals are incompatible, in that the latter presupposes that the skeptic is...

How has technology changed what it means to be human and to be a member of a human society? How has technology changed the way we acquire knowledge of the world we inhabit? In light of these changes and the direction we are moving, how should the...

In Using Knowledge: On the Rationality of Science, Technology, and Medicine Ingemar Nordin analyses the philosophical problems and nature of science, technology, and medicine. The main focus of the book is on the structure and dynamics of technological...