This Is Epistemology. J. Adam Carter. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: J. Adam Carter
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119680376
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in front your face. What do you see? It looks just like a hand. On the assumption that ambient lighting conditions are normal and that you're not drugged or otherwise mentally incapacitated, it's plausible to suppose that whatever the conditions for knowing a proposition are (e.g. whatever a correct solution to the above “S knows that p if and only if ___” puzzle would be) you surely satisfy these conditions when you're looking at your hand in broad daylight at point‐blank range.

      I.8 Now, here's where the skeptic comes in. The skeptic begins by inviting us to consider what initially will sound like a ridiculous scenario (these scenarios get called “skeptical hypotheses”). Let's work with this one:

       Simulation

      I.10 Let's take a step back and regroup. You, the reader, will now hopefully have some idea what an epistemologist is getting at when he/she tells you that epistemology is about the “nature and scope of human knowledge.” The only problem is that epistemology is about way more than just that. (And if an epistemologist tells you otherwise, they're lying!)

      I.11 It's a bit tricky to explain exactly what else epistemology is without simply showing you. And so, This Is Epistemology is our best attempt to do just this – to show you. We have selected 11 key “subtopics” that epistemologists often argue with each other about, and in each case, we do our best to tell all sides of the story. Whether or not we’ve succeeded in this aim, we've certainly told many sides of many stories in this book (some might wonder: did we tell too many?) – and the result is that the chapters are lengthier than is typical. There are already quite a few short introductions to epistemology on the market, and it's fair to say that this is not one of them. What we lack in brevity we hope to have overcome in comprehensiveness.

      I.12 In the next section, we describe briefly what each of the 11 chapters is about. But before proceeding to do that, we want to first say at least something a bit more general about what unifies epistemology as a subject matter – something that (in some way or another) the reader might fruitfully view as a kind of “common denominator” among the 11 themes canvassed.

      I.15 Beliefs in this respect are satisfied in the opposite kind of way. When they succeed (e.g. by being true, or known), it's because they “fit” how the world already is (regardless of how it is desired to be). The direction of fit that characterizes beliefs is accordingly a mind‐to‐world direction of fit, rather than a world‐to‐mind direction of fit (like desires, hopes, wishes, intentions, etc.) Beliefs are the kinds of things that, when they succeed, succeed because things actually are as they are believed to be, because the mind “fits” the world.

      I.16 Having defined the cognitive and the practical aspects of intelligent life in this way (lumping beliefs on the side of the cognitive and desires on the side of the practical), we might now say a bit about the more general subject matter of epistemology in terms of the cognitive.