Epistemology of Belief

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-237
Author(s):  
Alina O. Kostina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief Formation ◽  
Social Bias ◽  
Epistemic Agent ◽  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Internal Experience ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

The following article discovers current trends of contemporary epistemology, related to epistemic agent and his/her activities. A number of issues raised here describe internal experience of the agent, such as (in)voluntary nature of belief formation, trust in one’s faculties of perception, correspondence of formed beliefs to evidence, demarcation between purely epistemic and pragmatic rationality. Another part of the issues is related to external experiences of the agent. The most crucial among them are: blameworthiness of the agent’s belief system, limited intake of testimonial knowledge as a result of social bias; epistemic disagreement and “epistemic peers” as the sources of knowledge or additional pressure from the environment. The author considers virtue epistemology as a new way of performing normativity.

Virtue Epistemology as Anti-luck Epistemology

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Alexey Z. Chernyak ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Propositional Knowledge ◽  
General Study ◽  
Intellectual Virtues ◽  
Mental Attitude ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
The Status ◽  
Veritic Luck ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

The idea that knowledge as an individual mental attitude with certain propositional content is not only true justified belief but a belief the truth of which does not result from any kind of luck, is widely spread in contemporary epistemology. This account is known as anti-luck epistemology. A very popular explanation of the inconsistency of that concept of knowledge with the luck-dependent nature of truth (so called veritic luck taking place when a subject’s belief could not be true if not by mere coincidence) presumes that the status of propositional knowledge crucially depends on the qualities of actions that result in the corresponding belief, or processes backing them, which reflect the socalled intellectual virtues mainly responsible for subject’s relevant competences. This account known as Virtue Epistemology presumes that if a belief is true exclusively or mainly due to its dependence on intellectual virtues, it just cannot be true by luck, hence no place for lucky knowledge. But this thesis is hard to prove given the existence of true virtuous beliefs which could nevertheless be false if not for some lucky (for the knower) accident. This led to an appearance of virtue epistemological theories aimed specifically at an assimilation of such cases. Their authors try to represent the relevant situations as such where the contribution of luck is not crucial whereas the contribution of virtues is crucial. This article provides a critical analysis of the corresponding arguments as part of a more general study of the ability of Virtue Epistemology to provide justification for the thesis of incompatibility of propositional knowledge with veritic luck. It is shown that there are good reasons to doubt that Virtue Epistemology can do this.

PHOTOGRAPHICALLY BASED KNOWLEDGE

Episteme ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Cavedon-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Pictorial Representation ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic Utility ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Foundational Issue ◽  
Do So

AbstractPictures are a quintessential source of aesthetic pleasure. This makes it easy to forget that they are epistemically valuable no less than they are aesthetically so. Pictures are representations. As such, they may furnish us with knowledge of the objects they represent. In this article I provide an account of why photographs are of greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures. To do so, I use a novel approach: I seek to illuminate the epistemic utility of photographs by situating both photographs and handmade pictures among the sources of knowledge. This method yields an account of photography's epistemic utility that better connects the issue with related issues in epistemology and is relatively superior to other accounts. Moreover, it answers a foundational issue in the epistemology of pictorial representation: ‘What kinds of knowledge do pictures furnish?’ I argue that photographs have greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures because photographs are sources of perceptual knowledge, while handmade pictures are sources of testimonial knowledge.

Virtue epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
Intellectual Virtue ◽  
Epistemic Values ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Epistemic Agent ◽  
Epistemic Evaluation ◽  
Theory Of Value

‘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 or some interesting subset of the former are called intellectual virtues. Some of these theories propose that the traditional concepts of justification or knowledge can be analysed in terms of intellectual virtue, whereas others maintain that these traditional concepts are defective or uninteresting and it is desirable to replace them with the notion of an intellectual virtue. In all these theories, epistemic evaluation rests on some virtuous quality of persons that enables them to act in a cognitively effective and commendable way. Simple reliabilism may be treated either as a precursor to virtue epistemology or as an early form of it. Later versions add requirements for virtue intended to capture the idea that it is a quality which makes an epistemic agent subjectively responsible as well as objectively reliable. Proponents of virtue epistemology claim a number of advantages. It is said to bypass disputes between foundationalists and coherentists on proper cognitive structure, to avoid sceptical worries, to avoid the impasse between internalism and externalism and to broaden the range of epistemological enquiry to include such neglected epistemic values as understanding and wisdom. Some theorists argue that the real virtue of virtue epistemology is the way it permits us to redefine the central questions of epistemology. In addition, since virtue epistemology can be blended with virtue ethics, it holds out the promise of a unified theory of value.

scholarly journals The work of Daphne Hampson: The God talk of one feminist theologian

2007 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maretha M. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Belief System ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Human History ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Contemporary Context

For almost all of human history both in ancient times and in modern contexts, talk about God has been mainly a male preserve. So closely has male God talk been associated by many with God’s own voice, that it is still not commonly realized and acknowledged. With the rise of feminism, especially during recent decades, it has changed. In this article the work of Daphne Hampson, a British feminist theologian, is considered: Her definition and critique of Christianity, her view of the relation between the present and our Christian past, specifically with regard to God talk, her dealing with prominent aspects of the Christian belief system and her emphasis on taking seriously all available knowledge and our contemporary context in doing theology. In line with some current trends in God talk, such as a movement away from anthropomorphism, and in dialogue with Friedrich Schleiermacher, she formulates what she calls a “future theism”.

Knowledge: Instrumental and Testimonial

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This chapter goes into how we know through our instruments and interlocutors. It offers a way of understanding such knowledge in line with performance-based virtue epistemology. Testimonial knowledge is a collaborative accomplishment involving one's informational sources across time. In order to constitute knowledge, a testimony-derived belief must be accurate, and must thereby manifest competence, which should not be thought to require that the most salient explanation of its being right must involve the individual competence manifested by the subject in holding that belief. The explanatorily salient factors will probably lie elsewhere; what mainly accounts for the belief's correctness will likely involve others and their cognitive accomplishments.

Illuminating the Mind

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stoltz
Keyword(s):  
Previous Exposure ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Buddhist Epistemology ◽  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
Buddhist Tradition ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

This book provides readers with an introduction to epistemology within the Buddhist intellectual tradition. It is designed to be accessible to those whose primary background is in the “Western” tradition of philosophy and who have little or no previous exposure to Buddhist philosophical writings. The book examines many of the most important topics in the field of epistemology, topics that are central both to contemporary discussions of epistemology and to the classical Buddhist tradition of epistemology in India and Tibet. Among the topics discussed are Buddhist accounts of the nature of knowledge episodes, the defining conditions of perceptual knowledge and of inferential knowledge, the status of testimonial knowledge, and skeptical criticisms of the entire project of epistemology. The book seeks to put the field of Buddhist epistemology in conversation with contemporary debates in philosophy. It shows that many of the arguments and debates occurring within classical Buddhist epistemological treatises coincide with the arguments and disagreements found in contemporary epistemology. The book shows, for example, how Buddhist epistemologists developed an anti-luck epistemology—one that is linked to a sensitivity requirement for knowledge. Likewise, the book explores the question of how the study of Buddhist epistemology can be of relevance to contemporary debates about the value of contributions from experimental epistemology, and to broader debates concerning the use of philosophical intuitions about knowledge.

scholarly journals Knowledge as Achievement, More or Less

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Program Performance ◽  
Gettier Problem ◽  
Epistemic Evaluation ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology ◽  
The Gettier Problem

This chapter enhances and extends a powerful and promising research program, performance-based epistemology, which stands at the crossroads of many important currents that one can identify in contemporary epistemology, including the value problem, epistemic normativity, virtue epistemology, and the nature of knowledge. Performance-based epistemology offers at least three outstanding benefits: it explains the distinctive value that knowledge has, it places epistemic evaluation into a familiar and ubiquitous pattern of evaluation, and it solves the Gettier problem. But extant versions of performance-based epistemology have been the object of serious criticism. This chapter shows how to meet the objections without sacrificing the aforementioned benefits.

The Contribution of Confucius to Virtue Epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Ryan ◽  
Chienkuo Mi
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Confucian Thought ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

Scholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This chapter seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The third goal is to show that Confucian thought is not only of epistemological significance, but that it can make a contribution to progressing contemporary epistemology.

Reliabilism and the Testimony of Robots

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-356
Author(s):  
Billy Wheeler ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Legal Consequences

We are becoming increasingly dependent on robots and other forms of artificial intelligence for our beliefs. But how should the knowledge gained from the “say-so” of a robot be classified? Should it be understood as testimonial knowledge, similar to knowledge gained in conversation with another person? Or should it be understood as a form of instrument-based knowledge, such as that gained from a calculator or a sundial? There is more at stake here than terminology, for how we treat objects as sources of knowledge often has important social and legal consequences. In this paper, I argue that at least some robots are capable of testimony. I make my argument by exploring the differences between instruments and testifiers on a well-known account of knowledge: reliabilism. On this approach, I claim that the difference between instruments and testifiers as sources of knowledge is that only the latter are capable of deception. As some robots can be designed to deceive, so they too should be recognized as testimonial sources of knowledge.

On Dreaming and Being Lied To

Episteme ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
Testimonial Knowledge ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTAs sources of knowledge, perception and testimony are both vulnerable to sceptical arguments. To both arguments a Moorean response is possible: both can be refuted by reference to particular things known by perception and testimony. However, lies and dreams are different possibilities and they are different in a way that undercuts the plausibility of a Moorean response to a scepticism of testimony. The condition placed on testimonial knowledge cannot be trivially satisfied in the way the Moorean would suggest. This has substantial implications for any non-sceptical epistemological theory of testimony.

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