Knowledge and justification
DOWNLOAD
FREE
|
Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
Equations are omitted for technical reasons - download the original pdf
We check the story of Napoleon, but not whether all the reports about him are based on sense-deception, forgery and the like. For whenever we test anything, we are already presupposing something that is not tested. Now am I to say that the experiment which perhaps I make in order to test the truth of a proposition presupposes the truth of the proposition that the apparatus I believe I see is really there (and the like)? "164. Doesn't testing come to an end? 165. One child might say to another: "I know that the earth is already hundreds of years old" and that would mean: I have learnt it. We can summarise Wittengstein's attack on Descartes' Method of Doubt by the slogan "doubt presupposes certaintly." Effectively, Wittgenstein is advocating what we call a coherence theory of truth. In its extreme form this coherence theory denies that there is a reality that exists independently of the sum total of judgements we make about it. What is real is what we say is real within the total system of our beliefs. What makes a system of statements true is their total coherence with each other; the system is consistent! However, consistency is also not a quality that lies outside the system. We cannot say that the whole system corresponds to a consistent (or logically possible) world. Consistency is also part of the system. Thus, coherence is all there is. This is an extreme form of the coherence theory, and seems to deny that there is any kind of correspondence between statements of our language and reality (the world of fact) at all. However, there is an alternative mid-way view.
|
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
|
