Misleading Defeaters

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Foley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Peter Klein ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similar Vein

This chapter proposes a game in a similar vein to the Gettier game: when a subject has a true belief but seems not to have knowledge, it looks for some key aspect of the situation about which the subject lacks true beliefs. Defeasibility theorists make a strikingly similar recommendation. When confronted with cases in which a subject intuitively lacks knowledge despite having a justified true belief, they too recommend looking for a truth about the situation that the subject lacks, but because they are committed to the Gettier game, they link the subject's ignorance of this truth with the justification requirement. The chapter examines a story discussed by a leading proponent of the defeasibility theory, Peter Klein, before positing its own solution to the game.

scholarly journals (De)coloniality through Indigeneity:Deconstructing Calls to Decolonise in the South African and Canadian University Contexts

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shana Almeida ◽  
Siseko H. Kumalo
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The South ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similar Vein ◽  
University Spaces ◽  
Land Space ◽  
Policies And Practices

The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada’s commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of “de-mythologising” decolonisation, by first exposing and tracing how decolonising claims both reinforce and recite the racial and colonial terms under which Indigeneity and Blackness are “integrated” in the academy. From our respective contexts, we trace how white, western ownership of space and knowledge in the academy is reaffirmed through processes of invitation, commodification, and erasure of Indigenous/Black bodies and identities. However, we also suggest that the invitation and presence of Indigenous and Black bodies and identities in both academic contexts are necessary to the reproduction and survival of decolonising claims, which allows us to begin to interrogate how, why, and under what terms bodies and identities come to be “included” in the academy. We conclude by proposing that the efficacy of decoloniality lies in paradigmatic and epistemic shifts which begin to unearth and then unsettle white supremacy in both contexts, in order to proceed with aims of reconciliation and reclamation.

Reverse Lottery Stories

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Foley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Lottery Ticket ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Subject

This chapter examines reverse lottery stories, which focus on the fortunate holder of the winning lottery ticket. It searches for the important gaps in the information of the subject S as she believes herself to have possessed the winning ticket despite having no sources of information confirming this fact. Nonetheless, she is correct, and is in possession of a true belief. The chapter further expands on this story to reveal even more gaps in information, and also reintroduces another subject of a story from one of the earlier chapters. Finally, the chapter brings up the concept of knowledge blocks to further complicate the reverse lottery stories.

Knowledge, defeasibility theory of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall Swain
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Gettier Cases ◽  
Ethical Concept ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Analysis Of Knowledge

Based upon an analogy with the legal and ethical concept of a defeasible, or prima facie, obligation, epistemic defeasibility was introduced into epistemology as an ingredient in one of the main strategies for dealing with Gettier cases. In these cases, an individual’s justified true belief fails to count as knowledge because the justification is defective as a source of knowledge. According to the defeasibility theory of knowledge, the defect involved can be characterized in terms of evidence that the subject does not possess which overrides, or defeats, the subject’s prima facie justification for belief. This account holds that knowledge is indefeasibly justified true belief. It has significant advantages over other attempts to modify the traditional analysis of knowledge in response to the Gettier examples. Care must be taken, however, in the definition of defeasibility.

The Value of Knowledge and the Gettier Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Foley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Additional Advantage ◽  
Value Of Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Recent literature on the nature of knowledge is filled with stories in which a subject has a true belief but intuitively seems not to have knowledge. All these stories can be understood in the same way. They are all ones in which the subject is ignorant of something important about the situation, and this ignorance can be used to explain why the subject lacks knowledge. Knowledge is a matter of having accurate and comprehensive enough information, where the test of enough is negative. One cannot lack important true beliefs. This way of thinking about knowledge has the additional advantage of dissolving puzzles about the value of knowledge and true belief, puzzles that other accounts of knowledge find it surprisingly difficult to handle.

Anamorphosis and Subjectivity in the Space of Reasons

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Dominik Finkelde ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
True Belief ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Space Of Reasons ◽  
The Mind

Jacques Lacan comments repeatedly on anamorphic art as it exemplifies for him how the mind from a certain angle perceives through law-like patterns the world that would otherwise be nothing but a chaos of arbitrary multiplicities. The angle, though, has a certain effect on what is perceived; an effect that, as such, cannot be perceived within the realm of experience. The article tries to make the link between diffraction laws of perception more explicit in the subject-object dichotomy and refers for that purpose to the work of both Hegel and Lacan. A reference to Hegel is necessary, as Hegel was not only one of Lacan’s own most important sources of insights, but the author who first focused on justified true belief through a theory of a missed encounter between truth and knowledge.

Is God a Utilitarian?

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
D. M. Holley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Utilitarian Theory ◽  
Will Of God

In a well-known passage Mill defends his utilitarian theory against the objection that it is a godless doctrine. He argues,If it be a true belief that God desires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and that this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not a godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other. If it be meant that utilitarianism does not recognize the revealed will of God as the supreme law of morals, I answer that a utilitarian who believes in the perfect goodness and wisdom of God necessarily believes that whatever God has thought fit to reveal on the subject of morals must fulfil the requirements of utility in a supreme degree.

What is (the Point of) an Entrepreneur in Residence?

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 495-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magnus George ◽  
Ian Gordon ◽  
Eleanor Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Good Effect ◽  
University Management ◽  
Enterprise Development ◽  
Business World ◽  
University Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similar Vein ◽  
Host Organization ◽  
The Uk

The teaching of entrepreneurship as an academic subject, as opposed to the apprenticeship route, is the subject of ongoing debate. The authors suggest that there is a middle road and that, by integrating the business world into teaching in a significant way, the best of both approaches can be achieved. In a similar vein, the credibility of some university interaction with small business has been called into question. The authors discuss how they have used the role of ‘entrepreneur in residence’ (EIR) to integrate and improve research, teaching and academic-business interaction. The paper describes the experiences of the EIR hosted at Lancaster University Management School's Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (IEED) in the UK and examines the outcomes of his work and his perceptions of university life; how his presence challenged internal thinking; and how his fellowship led to service innovation in the host organization. Other formalized EIR activities within and outside the UK are also reviewed; and the authors conclude by proposing how UK HEIs might best make use of similar opportunities, with a challenge to non-management departments. The paper demonstrates one way in which the perceived gulf between entrepreneurship teaching and the business world can be bridged to good effect.

A Review of Graham Twelftree, In the Name of Jesus: Exorcism Among Early Christians

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-136
Author(s):  
Blaine Charette
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similar Vein

AbstractIn this study of the divergence of perspective in the New Testament on the subject of exorcism, Twelftree provides the reader with a reliable introduction and guide. The consistent historical approach to the topic significantly limits the review of the biblical evidence (there is little attention to the literary/theological concerns of the NT authors) but means that a strong feature of the book is its review and critique of academic literature written in a similar vein. For the most part the interpretive conclusions are sound (albeit with some examples of special pleading). Specific areas of criticism are as follows: 1) a certain confusion attaches to the classifications Twelftree uses to describe the exorcisms of Jesus and his followers; 2) the discussion on possible reasons for the absence of exorcisms stories from the Fourth Gospel is unconvincing and unduly negative towards the exorcism stories of the synoptic tradition; and 3) the study would have gained much by considering exorcisms within a larger biblical theological context and through greater attention to literary and canonical approaches.

Plato

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie-Grace Chappell
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Philosophical Writings

In the words of Alfred North Whitehead’s famous overstatement of the case: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, 1929, chapter 3). This is indeed an overstatement; to say the least, some of the footnotes have become rather long by now, and some of them are more like footnotes to Plato’s opponents (to Protagoras, Thrasymachus, and Democritus, for example). All the same, more than twenty-three centuries after his death at about eighty years old in c. 347 bce, the aristocratic Athenian statesman Plato’s philosophical writings are still key determinants of our conception of philosophy. As Richard Kraut puts it in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Plato, “The subject of philosophy… can be called his invention.” We pay tribute to that fact every time we ask whether knowledge is justified true belief, or wonder in what sense justice in the individual could be the same thing as justice in society, or try to define “virtue” (or any other key philosophical term), or explore the positions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics that are, not inappropriately, called Platonism.

A Probabilistic Approach to Epistemic Safety from the Perspective of Ascribers

Episteme ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Yingjin Xu
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Probabilistic Approach ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Significant Component ◽  
Possible World Semantics ◽  
The Subject

Abstract “Epistemic safety” refers to an epistemic status in which the subject acquires true beliefs without involving epistemic luck. There is a tradition of cashing out safety-defining modality in terms of possible world semantics (as put forward by Duncan Pritchard), and even Julian Dutant's and Martin Smith's normalcy-based notions of safety also take this semantics as a significant component of them. However, such an approach has to largely depend on epistemologists’ ad hoc intuitions on how to individuate possible worlds and how to pick out “close” worlds. In contrast, I propose a probabilistic approach to safety to maximally preclude the preceding type of ad hoc-ness. The main idea is as follows: Each epistemic vignette wherein a subject S holds a true belief p has to be evaluated by a safety-ascriber, hence, S holds a true belief p safely iff according to the safety-ascriber's evaluation (which is based on her background knowledge), the probability of the occurrence of the truth-maker of p is above a pre-fixed “safety threshold”. My theory will be applied to Lottery Cases, Gettierized Cases and Skeptical Cases to test the scope of its applicability.

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