An epistemological problem for minimalist views about composition

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Da Vee
Keyword(s):  
Epistemological Problem

Explaining Perceptual Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
External World ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
The Way

This chapter offers a response to Quassim Cassam’s ‘Seeing and Knowing’, which challenges some of the conditions Cassam thinks the author has imposed on a satisfactory explanation of our knowledge of the external world. According to Cassam, the conditions he specifies can be fulfilled in ways that explain how the knowledge is possible. What is at stake in this argument between Cassam and the author is the conception of what is perceived to be so that is needed to account for the kind of perceptual knowledge we all know we have. That is what must be in question in any promising move away from the overly restrictive conception of perceptual experience that gives rise to the hopelessness of the traditional epistemological problem. The author suggests that we should explore the conditions of successful ‘propositional’ perception of the way things are and emphasizes the promise of such a strategy.

scholarly journals Problems of empirical solutions to the theory-ladenness of observation

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Themistoklis Pantazakos
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
Choice Testing ◽  
Empirical Approaches ◽  
Theory Ladenness

AbstractRecent years have seen enticing empirical approaches to solving the epistemological problem of the theory-ladenness of observation. I group these approaches in two categories according to their method of choice: testing and refereeing. I argue that none deliver what friends of theory-neutrality want them to. Testing does not work because both evidence from cognitive neuroscience and perceptual pluralism independently invalidate the existence of a common observation core. Refereeing does not work because it treats theory-ladenness as a kind of superficial, removable bias. Even if such treatment is plausible, there is likely no method to ascertain that effects of this bias are not present. More importantly, evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that a deeper, likely irremovable kind of theory-ladenness lies within the perceptual modules.

The Puzzle of the Sophist

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Vlasits
Keyword(s):  
Traditional View ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Metaphysical Problem ◽  
The Many ◽  
Exclusive Or

Abstract The many definitions of sophistry at the beginning of Plato’s Sophist have puzzled scholars just as much as they puzzled the dialogue’s main speakers: the Visitor from Elea and Theaetetus. The aim of this paper is to give an account of that puzzlement. This puzzlement, it is argued, stems not from a logical or epistemological problem, but from the metaphysical problem that, given the multiplicity of accounts, the interlocutors do not know what the sophist essentially is. It transpires that, in order to properly account for this puzzle, one must jettison the traditional view of Plato’s method of division, on which divisions must be exclusive and mark out relations of essential predication. It is then shown on independent grounds that, although Platonic division in the Sophist must express predication relations and be transitive, it need not be dichotomous, exclusive, or express relations of essential predication. Once the requirements of exclusivity and essential predication are dropped, it is possible to make sense of the reasons that the Visitor from Elea and Theaetetus are puzzled. Moreover, with this in hand, it is possible to see Plato making an important methodological point in the dialogue: division on its own without any norms does not necessarily lead to the discovery of essences.

Prophecy

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-212
Author(s):  
Yaacob Dweck
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Rapid Spread

This chapter discusses Sabbatian messianism as an epistemological problem. How does one know whether or not someone is the Messiah? In the middle of the seventeenth century, prophecy was one way of obtaining such knowledge. Prophecy played a decisive role in the success of Sabbatianism. Adherents to the new movement emphasized the renewal of revelation both in the period of its rapid spread prior to Sabbetai Zevi's conversion as well as in the years that followed. Beginning with the leading Sabbatian propagandist, Nathan of Gaza, and continuing well into the eighteenth century, Sabbatians spoke and wrote about their activities as prophecy. Repeatedly they invoked their own capacity to communicate with the divine as a source for their own authority. Indeed, prophecy often served as the legitimating grounds for their suspension of legal norms and invention of new rituals. The chapter then looks at Jacob Sasportas's response to the Sabbatian renewal of prophecy as well as to other modes of knowing, such as dreams and astrology. For all of Sasportas's profound skepticism about the Sabbatian revival of prophecy, he refused to condemn the category outright. Just as he had continued to insist on his belief in the messianic idea but rejected Sabbetai Zevi as its fulfillment, he continued to hold open the possibility of prophecy while denying the legitimacy of Nathan of Gaza.

The Epistemic Advantage of Lost Autographic Tokens of the Bible

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-193
Author(s):  
J. P. Moreland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Original Writings ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Biblical Inerrancy ◽  
Ontological Problem

I address an epistemic and related ontological dificulty with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The ontological problem: If biblical inerrancy applies to the original autographs, why would God allow these to disappear from the scene? The epistemological problem: Given that the original autographs are gone, we lack a way to know exactly what the original writings were. The first problem is solved by distinguishing text types and tokens, and claiming that semantic meaning and inerrancy are underivative features types. The second is resolved by claiming that in the actual world, we are epistemically better off with the original tokens gone.

Propositions I: The Ceremonial Gift—Alliance and Recognition

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-51
Author(s):  
Marcel Hénaff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Northwest Coast ◽  
The Public ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Native Populations ◽  
Gift Exchanges

This chapter examines the fundamental features of the ceremonial gift as well as its purpose. Marcel Mauss deserves credit for constituting the epistemological problem of the ritual gift based on the ethnographic documents available at the beginning of the twentieth century, and connecting them to the testimonies of ancient Indian, Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic literatures. While he was not the first to consider this phenomenon, he was the first to systematically gather the relevant data and propose a model according to which gift exchanges appear as a major social fact. He even called it a “total social fact.” Among the mass of data he collected through his readings, three sets emerge, each characterized by a term used by a population involved. These include the great cycles of gift exchanges (kula) in the Trobriand Islands, a Melanesian archipelago; potlach, the agonistic exchange among the native populations of the northwest coast of America; and the hau, which comes from an inquiry conducted among the Maori of New Zealand. What is at stake in the facts discussed by Mauss is an intense bond between parties, public prestige granted and gained, and the conclusion of an alliance. The alliance established or renewed in ritual exchanges involves the public life of the group; as such, it is a political alliance. The ceremonial gift is thus meant to be reciprocated, since an alliance is necessarily reciprocal.

Insignificant residues: trauma, face and figure in Samuel Beckett

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-93
Author(s):  
David Houston Jones
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
The Face

Building on his detailed discussion of the impossibility of speech in Beckett’s work in relation to Agamben’s account of testimony in his book Samuel Beckett and Testimony, David Houston Jones turns in this chapter to the question of the face, which Agamben himself left undeveloped after his article ‘The Face’. Jones considers the face as a vector of the expressive capabilities of testimony. He discusses a range of dramatic and narrative situations in which the expressive capabilities of the face are pitted against the epistemological problem of testimony, from the deterritorialised face of Not I to the inexpressive face in Watt and the later prose. This analysis of the face in Beckett constitutes a unique critique of Agamben’s idea of testimony and contributes to a rethinking of trauma theory with reference to the realm of the visual.

Believing the Incomprehensible God

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
James Dominic Rooney ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Related Area ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
Epistemology Of Testimony ◽  
Do So

There has been recent epistemological interest as to whether knowledge is “transmitted” by testimony from the testifier to the hearer, where a hearer acquires knowledge “second-hand.” Yet there is a related area in epistemology of testimony which raises a distinct epistemological problem: the relation of understanding to testimony. In what follows, I am interested in one facet of this relation: whether/how a hearer can receive testimonial knowledge without fully understanding the content of the testimony? I use Thomas Aquinas to motivate a case where, in principle, the content of received testimony cannot be understood but nevertheless constitutes knowledge. Aquinas not only argues that we can receive testimonial knowledge without understanding the content of that testimony, but that we have duties to do so in certain cases.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document