You watch the sun setting and form the belief this is beautiful. Along with this belief is an accompanying deep sense of pleasure and wonder. Being the reflective philosopher you are, you wonder if the scenery you are looking at does actually exemplify the property being beautiful. You then reflect a bit further: blind natural forces resulted in my having the faculties I have by way of random genetic mutation and natural selection. (more…)
Archive for September, 2006
Naturalism, Antirealism, Beauty
Thursday, September 28th, 2006Problem with Cohen’s Solution for Bootstrapping to Easy Knowledge
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006As a solution to bootstrapping, Cohen states that animal knowledge is differentiated from reflective knowledge. Animal knowledge cannot combine with self-knowledge to produce inferences [Cohen 2002, p. 327]. Thus, my knowledge of ‘the table looks red’ would not be an instance of animal knowledge. I think Cohen is wrong here. According to Cohen, animal knowledge is unreflective basic knowledge which we acquire in early unsophisticated stages of development. Cohen affirms that knowledge that ‘the table is red’ is an instance of animal knowledge, but ‘the table looks red’ is not. Why not? Surely, a two-year old, his paradigm example of an unreflective agent, can come to believe the proposition ‘the table looks red’ with “relatively minimal cognitive achievement†and without higher-order reflection. In fact, it seems that the two-year old would have to assent to the proposition ‘the table looks red’ in order to know that ‘the table is red’, even if he does not realize he assented to the proposition. So, ‘the table looks red’ would be an instance of animal knowledge. (more…)
Open Theism and God’s essential properties
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006OK. This question is loaded from the start and I’ll bring it up in class today. But, I’ve been thinking about this and I’d like to know your thoughts:
Open theism denies that God has foreknowledge of our future actions (Kane, 160). But, this does not entail that God is not omniscient. Omniscience, according to Open Theists, ranges over all present and past actions, but not future actions. God certainly knows the truth of every present and past occurrence. But, since the future has not yet happened, it is not real and so there is nothing real to be known. Open theism allows that God can know future truths that are entailed by the laws of nature and logic. But, future free choices by humans, qua indeterminate, are not real since they may not obtain. Though this seems to be a simple solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will, it requires some changes to the traditional theological properties attributed to God, which many theists resist.
If the main resistance to Open Theism is that we would have to change our theological conception of God, why is it philosophically resisted? If there is one thing that is clear in philosophy of religion, it is that no one has now or has ever had a complete and accurate conception of God and his divine properties. Traditional theological conceptions were created by fallible and finite men about an infallible and infinite God. Is it not more plausible that we (humans) might have been wrong in formulating the theology? Also, it seems that we are equivocating between the “God of the Philosophers” and the “God of Abraham”.
Thoughts?
Scientific Explanations and Knowing Why
Friday, September 15th, 2006I’ve been rereading the introduction of the Salmon book (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation) and I have some ground level questions.
Salmon begins (on p. 3) by distinguishing between knowing that and knowing why. He takes his target concept to be knowledge why. Now I’m familiar with knowledge that from mainstream epistemology. We are trying to find out what fills the blank in the following sentence:
Socrates was an Epistemic Internalist
Thursday, September 14th, 2006Actually, I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s plausible. I’m re-reading some of the classic elenchis dialogues, and the basic pattern seems to go as follows: find someone who putatively knows that P, use Socratic questioning to show that they cannot provide good reason for thinking that P is true, conclude that the person doesn’t know P after all (e.g. Laches, Euthyphro, etc.).
Socrates (or Plato) seems to think that either knowledge requires good reasons of the sort that can be identified upon reflection (i.e. an internalist requirement) OR that the inability to come up with a good reason serves as a defeater for whatever positive epistemic status a belief might have otherwise held, thus making the belief ineligible as knowledge.
Does this seem right or am I missing something? Has anyone claimed something like this in print (if so, where?)?
Agents, Reasons, and Causes
Thursday, September 7th, 2006I’ve revised and refined the concept map I presented in class on Wednesday. It’s still, unfortunately, rather oversimplified; if I have the time or inclination I may try to extend it to cover all the views discussed in Kane’s Introduction. Suggestions for different modifications welcome! (Click on the image below for a higher-resolution version.)
