Category: Knowledge
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A Design Argument From the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?
You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes. Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles…
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Notes on Van Inwagen on Modal Epistemology
We have some modal knowledge. How? Substack latest.
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Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood
Anthony Flood writes, Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word. Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard,…
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Is Empiricism Self-Refuting?
Russell says it is; I examine his claim. Substack latest. Addenda (11/19) Tony Flood writes, Brian Kilmeade mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion to Christianity quickly as he introduced her, one of his guests tonight, but I heard it on TV which was on in the background; I thought I had misheard Kilmeade. I've always admired…
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David Benatar on Epistemic Injustice
An excerpt from The Uphill Battle of Unpopular Ideas: Regarding epistemic matters, many of those who identify themselves as progressives speak about “epistemic injustice” – the injustice that occurs when certain people, typically women and darker skinned people, are accorded less standing or authority as knowers or transmitters of knowledge. This is a profound and…
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A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson
Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge…
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On Perceptual ‘Taking’
Ed writes, Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”. This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake. But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to…
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I Know My Limits
I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know. Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. (Note how 'I' is used above. It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is…
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Epistemic Bluster
Man, who boasts of his knowledge, does not even know what knowledge is. ……………………. The thought is from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Apology for Raymond Sebond, trs. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Hackett Publishing, 2003, p. 12. The Apology first saw the light of day in 1580.
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To Know for Sure; To Be Forever
Objective certainty is to knowledge what absolute immutability is to being. We want to know for sure; we want to be forever. The spiritually awake cannot be content to stumble along in the twilight and then just fall off a cliff. This message will not get through to the sleepwalkers of the sublunary. Perhaps a…
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Our Knowledge of Sameness (2021 Version)
How ubiquitous, yet how strange, is sameness! The strangeness of the ordinary. Sameness is a structure of reality so pervasive and fundamental that a world that did not exhibit it would be inconceivable. There is synchronic and diachronic sameness. I will be discussing the latter. How do I know that the tree I now see…
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Knowledge and Belief
If there are truths that we cannot know but only believe, should we deny ourselves those truths because they cannot be known but only believed?
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Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?
1) I see a tree, a palo verde. Conditions are optimal for veridical perception. I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze. The tree is given to my perceptual acts as having these and other properties. Now while I do not doubt for a second the existence of the tree,…
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Secure Epistemic Foundations, Language, and Reality
This from Grigory Aleksin: I have been doing some reading and thinking, and there are a few things that I cannot quite get my head around. I was wondering whether you could help me, or point me in the direction of some work on the issue. My somewhat naive task has been to try and…
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Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty
We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47. [CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf. Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being. Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?] But now to work. There is a bag containing 99 white…