Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Knowledge

  • Memory and the Operations of Reason

    "Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651)  This seems right.  Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge: 1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and…

  • More on Knowledge and Belief

    Here is yesterday's aporetic triad: 1. Knowledge entails belief. 2. Belief is essentially tied to action. 3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action. Daniel K comments and I respond in blue: First, as to your aporetic triad: I would like to reject (3) in one sense that I describe…

  • Knowledge and Belief: An Aporetic Triad

    Here is a trio of propositions that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible: 1. Knowledge entails belief. 2. Belief is essentially tied to action. 3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action. Clearly, any two of these propositions is logically inconsistent with the remaining one.  Thus the conjunction of (1)…

  • On the Obvious

    As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." Or as I like to say, "One man's datum is another man's theory." But is it obvious that it ain't obvious what's obvious?  It looks as if we have a little self-referential puzzle going here.  Does the Hilarian dictum apply to itself?  An absence of…

  • Ignorabimus

    We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant  in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here.  But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which — we will remain ignorant in this life.…

  • If All Knowledge Comes from Experience, is All Knowledge Subjective?

    This is the kind of e-mail I like, brief and pointed: Recently I've encountered an argument that runs like this: 1. All knowledge comes from experience2. All experiences are subjective 3. Ergo, all knowledge is subjective. I think I can argue somewhat against this argument, but I need a nice snappy response to it. The…

  • Psychotropic Drugs, Veridicality, Criteria

    It is gratifying to know that I am getting through to some people as is evidenced by the fact that they recall my old posts; and also that I am helping them think critically as is evidenced by the fact that they test my different posts on  a given topic for mutual consistency.  This from…

  • Can Reason Be Understood Naturalistically? More Notes on Nagel

    This is the third in a series of posts on Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012).  The first is an overview, and the second addresses Nagel's reason for rejecting theism.  This post will comment on some of the content in Chapter 4, "Cognition." In Chapter 4,  Nagel tackles the topic of reason, both theoretical and…

  • The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

    Is it ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence? If it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it…

  • Things Not Worth Knowing

    One's own genealogy, for example. What does it matter who begat whom in one's line?  Most of us will discover the names and dates of insignificant people who have left nothing behind but their namesand dates. Or is it just a philosopher's prejudice to be concerned more with timeless universals than with temporal particulars? To thrill to…

  • On Paul Churchland’s ‘Refutation’ of the Knowledge Argument

    If this post needs theme music, I suggest Party Lights (1962) by the one-hit wonder, Claudine Clark:  "I see the lights/I see the party lights/They're red and blue and green/Everybody in the crowd is there/But you won't let me make the scene!"  (Because, mama dear, you've kept me cooped up in a black-and-white room studying neuroscience.)…

  • Does Knowledge Entail Belief or Exclude Belief?

    A reader who says he is drawn to the view that knowledge excludes belief comments: I am taking a philosophy class now that takes for granted that knowledge entails belief. My sense is that most philosophers now think that that condition is obvious and settled. They tend to dispute what "justification" means, or add more conditions…

  • Are Facts Perceivable? An Aporetic Pentad

    'The table is against the wall.'  This is a true contingent sentence.  How do I know that it is true except by seeing (or otherwise sense perceiving) that the table is against the wall?  And what is this seeing if not the seeing of a fact, where a fact is not a true proposition but…

  • Prima Facie Evidence

    A reader inquires:      Is 'prima facie' evidence something with self-evident contextual     significance or a evidence that constitutes some sort of     transcendental first principle? I am having some trouble with this     concept. The Latin phrase means 'on the face of it,' or 'at first glance.'  Prima facie evidence, then, is evidence that makes a strong…

  • Knowledge as Absolute Impossibility of Mistake

    I incline towards Panayot Butchvarov's notion of knowledge as involving the absolute impossibility of mistake. In The Concept of Knowledge (Northwestern  UP, 1970), Butchvarov writes that "an epistemic judgment of the form 'I know that p' can be regarded as having the same content as one of the form 'It is absolutely impossible that I…