Knowledge and justification
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Universals, Forms
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As already indicated, Russell appears to affirm empiricism when he says that we have acquaintance with sense-data, and this can provide the basis for truth. On the other hand, he later advances the view that we are also acquainted with objects that are not sense-data, which he calls universals: "We speak of whatever is given in sensation, or is of the same nature as things given in sensation, as a particular; by opposition to this, a universal will be anything which may be shared by many particulars, and has those characteristics which … distinguish justice and whiteness from just acts and white things." If universals exist then they do not exist in space and time. They are non-temporal, non-spatial entities. We call such entities abstract entities. Hence, Rusell (and most especially Plato before him) maintain that we are directly acquainted with an abstract reality, composed of universals. This is another way of saying that the mind is equipped with a power of direct intuition (acquaintance) that is separate from the five external senses. We will consider universals and whether we are indeed acquainted with them at more length on another occasion. Here we cite universals as a further candidate for objects that may be known by direct acquaintance. Rationalists generally maintain that there are universals, and Plato, the founder of Rationalism, used his arguments in favour of the existence of universals (which he called Forms ) as the basis of his attempt to refute empiricism.
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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