Philosophy what do you know

Most think of Philosophy as a "way of life", "view of the world", "theory about life", etc The public has little conscious appreciation for the philosophic tradition. The future for Philosophy as an intellectual activity has come to be in doubt due to present social conditions: the anti-intellectual and anti-rational tendencies that characterize the current cultural scene and most of the influential and determining social and political movements within it..

There are over 20, philosophers in the world. There are more than 6, philosophers in thee United States. They are philosophers according to their academic training and degree and their professional affiliations, e. There are Philosophers who participate in different traditions. This approach alone, while promising much and necessary for inquiry, has not answered many of our most important problems. There are many definite characteristics of this tradition in the works of Marxists, Existentialists, and Pragmatists.

Finally, there is still if even in only the smallest of numbers 4 speculative Philosophy such as evidenced in this country by Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Weiss. Philosophy evolving an entire worldview and all encompassing conceptual framework: Philosophy in its most comprehensive form of thought.

Critical and comprehensive thinking continues to be carried on today but toward what end??? Our contemporary world is what it is partly as a result of past philosophical inquiry. Consider the impact and importance of Greek thought for mathematics, modern science and technology. Much of our world has come to be the way it is as a result of the world-views developed by philosophers and criticized and reformulated by philosophers and most of these thinkers were Hellenized-Christians, in fact DWEM's!!

Part of our contemporary dilemma is the inappropriateness of such traditional, even classical, world-views in the light of recent scientific advances in knowledge. In our present state not only the moral ends and hierarchy of values that accompanied such world-views have become dislodged but also the very notion of what thought can do for a society or a civilization.

Philosophers have surely contributed to the current situation being what it is and they shall contribute to whatever direction thought is to take in the immediate future as humans continue to grapple with the perennial issues and the most basic questions humans must answer. These issues and questions have been, are now, and, for some time to come, will continue to be associated with Philosophy.

Philosophers spend a good deal of time in reflection upon these basic issues. They produce ideas, at times strange ideas. Over time however, the ideas of Philosophers have changed the course of human events all over the planet. Sometimes their ideas move quickly into the mainstream of human culture and produce consequences in art, politics, religion and the political, social and private lives of human beings.

Sometimes their ideas move more slowly and only after centuries do they emerge through the thought and work of others to produce profound consequences. Whether it is Plato and his distrust of the senses and the importance of quantitative measurement or Peirce and his pragmatic approach to meaning and truth their ideas emerge in the foundations of Mathematics and Science and in the post modern movements, respectively.

Their ideas have changed the world. This latter issue is at the heart of various epistemological regress puzzles, and we will return to it below. But those regress puzzles are largely independent of the issue of metaphysical priority being discussed here. What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitive success? Not every cognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes.

What makes the difference? Recent work on this issue tends to defend one of the following three answers to this question: contractualism, consequentialism, or constitutivism. The contractualist says that a particular cognitive state counts as a kind of success because the practice of so counting it serves certain widely held practical interests.

The consequentialist says that a particular cognitive state counts as a kind of success because it tends to constitute or tends to promote some crucial benefit. According to some consequentialists, the benefit in question is that of having true beliefs and lacking false beliefs see BonJour , Audi According to others, it is the benefit of having a comprehensive understanding of reality.

According to others, it is a benefit that is not narrowly epistemic, e. Finally, the constitutivist may say that a particular cognitive state counts as a kind of success if it is the constitutive aim of some feature of our lives to achieve that state see Korsgaard for a defense of constitutivism concerning norms of rationality. For instance, the constitutivist might say that knowledge is a kind of cognitive success by virtue of being the constitutive aim of belief, or that understanding is a kind of cognitive success by virtue of being the constitutive aim of reasoning, or that practical wisdom is a kind of cognitive success by virtue of being the constitutive aim of all human activity.

Consider, for instance, the difference between the kind of success involved in having a state that is fitting for instance, holding a belief knowledgeably , and the kind of success involved in having a state that is valuable for instance, holding a belief the holding of which is beneficial.

Perhaps the constitutivist can explain the former kind of success better than the consequentialist can, but the consequentialist can explain the latter kind of success better than the constitutivist can. Of course, if and when the demands of these different kinds of success conflict, the agent will face the question of how to proceed.

These different ways of understanding cognitive success each give rise to a different understanding of the range of ways in which cognitive success can be obstructed, and so a different understanding of the range in which agents may be harmed, and sometimes even wronged, by such obstructions. That is to say, such harms may be done not merely by the specific ways in which we interpret or implement our practice of epistemic appraisal, but rather in the fundamental features of that practice itself.

For instance, a practice that grants the status of knowledge to a belief formed on the basis of clearly conceptualized sense perception, but not to a belief formed on the basis of a less clearly conceptualized sense of a personal need, is a practice that systematically discredits beliefs formed by exercises of empathy, relative to beliefs formed in other ordinary ways. In a situation in which false testimony would be an epistemic harm, dishonest testimony would be an epistemic wrong.

But the range of epistemic harms and epistemic wrongs can be much broader than those involving falsehood and deception. Alternatively, I can harm you, and perhaps even wrong you, by getting you to think poorly of your own capacity to grasp a subject by not paying attention to what you think or say. And finally, I can harm you, and perhaps even wrong you, by indoctrinating you in a view so strongly that you lose the ability to consider alternative views.

But some of these harms and wrongs are constituted not by any particular act, but rather by the procedures that give rise to those acts: for instance, when a research program in the life sciences implicitly assumes an ideologically-driven conception of human nature see Longino and Anderson for fascinating case studies.

And sometimes, the harms and wrongs might even be built into our practice of epistemic appraisal—perhaps even a tendency that is somehow constitutive of that very practice. Suppose, for instance, that it is constitutive of our practice of epistemic appraisal to count someone as knowing a fact only if they possess concepts adequate to conceptualize that fact. And so, these same individuals will not be granted the same authority or credibility as other individuals, even when those latter are less cognitively sensitive to the range of facts in question.

Recent work in feminist epistemology has helped us to gain an appreciation of just how widespread this phenomenon is see the seminal discussion of epistemic injustice in M. Fricker , and the development of that account in Dotson Knowledge is among the many kinds of cognitive success that epistemology is interested in understanding.

Because it has attracted vastly more attention in recent epistemology than any other variety of cognitive success, we devote the present section to considering it in some detail.

Exactly how to individuate the various kinds of cognitive success is not something that can be determined solely by appeal to the lexicon of any particular natural language. But, despite not having ever known Napoleon, you could still know a great many facts about Napoleon—perhaps you know even more facts about Napoleon than did those who knew him most intimately.

This shows that knowing a person is not the same as knowing a great many facts about the person: the latter is not sufficient for the former. And perhaps the former is not even sufficient for the latter, since I might know my next door neighbor, and yet not realize that he is an undercover agent, and that almost everything he tells me about himself is false. Knowing a person is a matter of being acquainted with that person, and acquaintance involves some kind of perceptual relation to the person.

What kind of perceptual relation? Must acquaintance involve an ability to distinguish that individual from others? It depends upon what such an ability amounts to. In his groundbreaking book, The Concept of Mind , Gilbert Ryle argued that knowing how to do something must be different from knowing any set of facts.

And, of course, you might know how to swim even without knowing very many facts about swimming. For Ryle, knowing how is fundamentally different from knowing that. Ginet argued that knowing how to do something was simply knowing that a particular act was a way to do that thing. To know who is F , for instance, was simply to know that a particular person is F. To know why p is simply to know that a particular thing is the reason why p. And to know how to F was simply to know that a particular act is a way to F.

This view was elaborated in considerable detail by Stanley and Williamson , and then challenged or refined by many subsequent writers see, for instance, the essays in Bengson and Moffett , and also Pavese and Whenever a knower S knows some fact p , several conditions must obtain.

Therefore, knowledge requires belief. Therefore, knowledge requires truth. If we take these three conditions on knowledge to be not merely necessary but also sufficient, then: S knows that p if and only if p is true and S justifiably believes that p.

According to this account, the three conditions—truth, belief, and justification—are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for knowledge of facts. But what must justification be, if it can ensure that?

But, as we will see in the next section, if justification is understood in either of these ways, it cannot ensure against luck. JTB, therefore, is not sufficient for knowledge. Cases like that—known as Gettier cases [ 17 ] —arise because neither the possession of adequate evidence, nor origination in reliable faculties, nor the conjunction of these conditions, is sufficient for ensuring that a belief is not true merely because of luck.

Consider the well-known case of barn-facades: Henry drives through a rural area in which what appear to be barns are, with the exception of just one, mere barn facades. From the road Henry is driving on, these facades look exactly like real barns. Finally, his belief originates in a reliable cognitive process: normal vision of ordinary, recognizable objects in good lighting. To state conditions that are jointly sufficient for knowledge, what further element must be added to JTB?

This is known as the Gettier problem. Some philosophers attempt to solve the Gettier problem by adding a fourth condition to the three conditions mentioned above, while others attempt to solve it by either replacing or refining the justification condition. How we understand the contrast between replacing the justification condition and refining it depends, of course, on how we understand the justification condition itself, which is the topic of the next section.

Some philosophers reject the Gettier problem altogether: they reject the aspiration to understand knowledge by trying to add to JTB. Other such philosophers try to explain knowledge by identifying it as a genus of many familiar species: they say that knowledge is the most general factive mental state operator see Williamson And still other such philosophers try to explain knowledge by explaining its distinctive role in some other activity.

According to some, to know a fact is for that fact to be a reason for which one can do or think something. And according to still others, to know a fact is to be a trustworthy informant concerning whether that fact obtains.

Whatever precisely is involved in knowing a fact, it is widely recognized that some of our cognitive successes fall short of knowledge: an agent may, for example, conduct herself in a way that is intellectually unimpeachable, and yet still end up thereby believing a false proposition.

Julia has every reason to believe that her birthday is July it says so on her birth certificate and all of her medical records, and everyone in her family insists that it is July Nonetheless, if all of this evidence is the result of some time-keeping mistake made at the time of her birth, her belief about her birthday could be false, despite being so thoroughly justified.

Debates concerning the nature of justification [ 20 ] can be understood as debates concerning the nature of such non-knowledge-guaranteeing cognitive successes as the one that Julia enjoys in this example. Here is an example: Tom asked Martha a question, and Martha responded with a lie. Was she justified in lying? What might Jane mean when she thinks that Martha was justified in responding with a lie?

A natural answer is this: She means that Martha was under no obligation to refrain from lying. This understanding of justification, commonly labeled deontological , may be defined as follows: S is justified in doing x if and only if S is not obliged to refrain from doing x.

If, when we apply the word justification not to actions but to beliefs, we mean something analogous, then the following holds:. Deontological Justification DJ S is justified in believing that p if and only if S is not obliged to refrain from believing that p. What kind of obligations are relevant when we wish to assess whether a belief , rather than an action, is justified or unjustified?

Whereas when we evaluate an action, we are interested in assessing the action from either a moral or a prudential point of view, when it comes to beliefs, what matters may be something else, [ 24 ] e. Exactly what, though, must we do in the pursuit of some such distinctively epistemic aim? According to one answer, the one favored by evidentialists, we ought to believe in accord with our evidence. Other philosophers might deny this evidentialist answer, but still say that the pursuit of the distinctively epistemic aims entails that we ought to follow the correct epistemic norms.

If this answer is going to help us figure out what obligations the distinctively epistemic aims impose on us, we need to be given an account of what the correct epistemic norms are. The deontological understanding of the concept of justification is common to the way philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Moore and Chisholm have thought about justification.

Recently, however, two chief objections have been raised against conceiving of justification deontologically. First, it has been argued that DJ presupposes that we can have a sufficiently high degree of control over our beliefs. But beliefs—this objection alleges—are akin not to actions but rather things such as digestive processes, sneezes, or involuntary blinkings of the eye. The idea is that beliefs simply arise in or happen to us. To this objection, some advocates of DJ have replied that lack of control over our beliefs is no obstacle to thinking of justification as a deontological status see R.

Feldman a. Other advocates of DJ have argued that we enjoy no less control over our beliefs than we do over our intentional actions see Ryan ; Sosa ; Steup , , , ; and Rinard b. According to the second objection to DJ , deontological justification cannot suffice for an agent to have a justified belief.

This claim is typically supported by describing cases involving either a benighted, culturally isolated society or subjects who are cognitively deficient. Such cases involve subjects whose cognitive limitations make it the case that they are under no obligation to refrain from believing as they do, but whose limitations nonetheless render them incapable of forming justified beliefs for a response to this objection, see Steup Those who reject DJ think of justification not deontologically, but rather as a property that that a belief has when it is, in some sense, sufficiently likely to be true.

Sufficient Likelihood Justification SLJ S is justified in believing that p if and only if S believes that p in a way that makes it sufficiently likely that her belief is true.

If we wish to pin down exactly what the likelihood at issue amounts to, we will have to deal with a variety of tricky issues. This is just what cases involving benighted cultures or cognitively deficient subjects are designed to show for elaboration on the non-deontological concept of justification, see Alston What makes a belief that p justified, when it is?

Whether a belief is justified or unjustified, there is something that makes it so. Which features of a belief are J-factors?

What is it, though, to possess evidence for p? Some evidentialists though not all would say it is to be in an experience that presents p as being true. According to these evidentialists, if the coffee in your cup tastes sweet to you, then you have evidence that the coffee is sweet. If you feel a throbbing pain in your head, you have evidence that you have a headache. If you have a memory of having had cereal for breakfast, then you have evidence about what you had for breakfast.

On this view, evidence consists of perceptual, introspective, memorial, and intuitional experiences, and to possess evidence is to have an experience of that kind. Other versions of evidentialism might identify other factors as your evidence, but would still insist that those factors are the J-factors.

Evidentialism is often contrasted with reliabilism, which is the view that a belief is justified by resulting from a reliable source, where a source is reliable just in case it tends to result in mostly true beliefs. Reliabilists, of course, can also grant that the experiences mentioned in the previous paragraph can matter to the justification of your beliefs. However, they deny that justification is essentially a matter of having suitable experiences.

Rather, they say, those experiences matter to the justification of your beliefs not merely by virtue of being evidence in support of those beliefs, but more fundamentally, by virtue of being part of the reliable source of those beliefs.

Different versions of reliabilism have been defended: some philosophers claim that what justifies a belief is that it is produced by a process that is reliable for instance, see Goldman , others claim that what justifies a belief is that it is responsive to grounds that reliably covary with the the truth of that belief, other claim that what justifies a belief is that it is formed by the virtuous exercise of a capacity, and so on.

Consider a science fiction scenario concerning a human brain that is removed from its skull, kept alive in a vat of nutrient fluid, and electrochemically stimulated to have precisely the same total series of experiences that you have had. Therefore, justification is determined solely by those internal factors that you and your envatted brain doppelganger share. Externalism is simply the denial of internalism. Externalists say that what we want from justification is the kind of likelihood of truth needed for knowledge, and the internal conditions that you share with your BIV doppelganger do not generate such likelihood of truth.

So justification involves external conditions. Among those who think that justification is internal, there is no unanimity on how to understand the notion of internality—i. We can distinguish between two approaches. According to the first, justification is internal because we enjoy a special kind of access to J-factors: they are always recognizable on reflection. Evidentialism is typically associated with internalism of at least one of these two varieties, and reliabilism with externalism.

Evidentialism says, at a minimum, two things:. By virtue of E2, evidentialism is an instance of mentalist internalism. Whether evidentialism is also an instance of accessibility internalism is a more complicated issue. The conjunction of E1 and E2 by itself implies nothing about the accessibility of justification. But mentalist internalists who endorse the first principle below will also be committed to accessibility internalism, and evidentialists who also endorse the second principle below will be committed to the accessibility of justification:.

Necessity The principles that determine what is evidence for what are a priori recognizable. Although E1 and E2 by themselves do not imply access internalism, their conjunction with Luminosity and Necessity may imply access internalism.

Next, let us consider why reliabilism is an externalist theory. Even if the operations of the sources are mental states, their reliability is not itself be a mental state. Therefore, reliabilists reject mentalist internalism. Anyone who knows anything necessarily knows many things. Our knowledge forms a body, and that body has a structure: knowing some things requires knowing other things. But what is this structure?

Epistemologists who think that knowledge involves justification tend to regard the structure of our knowledge as deriving from the structure of our justifications. We will, therefore, focus on the latter. According to foundationalism, our justified beliefs are structured like a building: they are divided into a foundation and a superstructure, the latter resting upon the former. Beliefs belonging to the foundation are basic. Beliefs belonging to the superstructure are nonbasic and receive justification from the justified beliefs in the foundation.

Before we evaluate this foundationalist account of justification, let us first try to spell it out more precisely.

What is it for a justified belief to be basic? The following definition captures this thought:. So you believe. Unless something very strange is going on, B is an example of a justified belief. DB tells us that B is basic if and only if it does not owe its justification to any other beliefs of yours. So if B is indeed basic, there might be some item or other to which B owes its justification, but that item would not be another belief of yours.

The study of Logic teaches us what distinguishes good from bad reasoning and thereby enables us to think critically. In History of Philosophy we learn how the greatest thinkers in the history of humankind answered these and similar questions.

All of these areas of interest are grounded in facts and responsive to the theories put forth by experts in a myriad of disciplines, such as physics and psychology. To study Philosophy is to see the connection between ideas, and to explicate that connection in a reasoned and logical way. Different areas of philosophy are distinguished by the questions they ask.

Do our senses accurately describe reality? What makes wrong actions wrong? How should we live?