Knowledge and justification
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Foundation for Knowledge
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Are mathematical statements, true, justified beliefs? Does mathematical proof justify a mathematical statement? "Nothing can be both black and not black." Is this true? It is necessarily true? If so, from whence does this logical knowledge derive? What both empiricism and rationalism agree upon is the view that there is a foundation to knowledge. In other words, empiricism and rationalism agree that there are self-evident truths based on some form of direct acquaintance with objects. Where they disagree is on what this direct acquaintance is. Empiricists maintain that direct acquaintance is confined only to sense-experience; rationalists maintain that there is either rational insight into the existence of one's own soul (Descartes) or direct acquaintance with an abstract reality (Plato). It is worth remarking here that what empiricists and rationalists are debating is also the conception of man. The empiricist view is consistent with the belief that man is an information processing "machine". Empiricism is consistent with the view that man has evolved from other less complicated forms of biological organisation over time. Rationalism requires that man has an extra-sensory power of the mind, that might be called reason, and this is not consistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution.
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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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