Philosophy Final Exam Review
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- Knowledge 3 requirements
- Justified true belief
- Gettier cases - example - what do they prove?
- The Gettier cases are counter examples to knowledge where there seems to be belief, truth and justification but there does not seem to be knowledge. Example would be if an employee hid under a desk and his twin brother was sitting in his chair, the boss would assume that the employee was there but it was in fact his brother and not him so it would not be knowledge - proves that there is no knowledge
-
4 direct sources of knowledge
OR
4 principles of justification - Reason, introspection, sense perception, and memory
- Which of the 4 sources of knowledge are most problematic for the skeptic?
- The sources most problematic for a skeptic are sense perception and memory. Sense perception can mislead individuals to the truth, and some senses are weaker in individuals, meaning they cannot gain knowledge as well as others. Memories can be very vague and can lead someone to believe that something is true, when it’s false.
- What are two indirect sources of knowledge?
- Testimony and inference by induction
- 2 Main theories of truth
- Correspondence - “common sense knowledge†the view that a statement is true if what it refers to exists. Coherence - “web of belief†or what you have come to know over the years
- Relationship between person's definition of complete justification and the likelihood that he/she will be a skeptic
- 4. Most people would define complete justification as being 100% true. If this were the case then that person would most likely not be a skeptic. These people would see something as being completely true or completely false. Whereas, skeptics find argument false arguments about true statements, and visa versa. Skeptics would not believe that there is such thing as complete justification
- How do we know Plato is a rationalist?
- He says that sense experience fails to provide us with any guarantee that what we experience is, in fact, true. The information we get by relying on sense experience is constantly changing and often unreliable. It can be corrected and evaluated for dependability only by appealing to principles that themselves do not change
- How do we know Descartes is a rationalist?
- Instead of beginning philosophical inquiry with the study of the nature of reality, he suggests that we ask what it would mean to know about reality. To believe that reality is fundamentally water or the Indeterminate or whatever seems pointless, he claims, unless we know first whether our belief itself is justified. To determine whether our beliefs are justified, we have to be able to trace them back to a statement, belief, or proposition that cannot be doubted
- How do we know Kant is a rationalist?
- He feels that everything can be arrived at through reason. He is against the views of Hume
- How do we know Locke is an empiricist?
- According to him, what we know is always properly understood as the relation between ideas, and he devoted much of the Essay to an extended argument that all of our ideas—simple or complex—are ultimately derived from experience
- How do we know Hume is an empiricist?
- His position is that since human beings do in fact live and function in the world, we should try to observe how they do so. He bases his belief on 2 principles: relations of ideas are beliefs grounded wholly on associations formed within the mind; they are capable of demonstration because they have no external referent. Matters of fact are beliefs that claim to report the nature of existing things; they are always contingent
- Why is Hume called a skeptic?
- 6. Hume is a skeptic because he believes in necessary knowledge, but finds this knowledge to be trivial. He refers to this knowledge as relations of ideas. Knowledge must come from the senses, and he calls this knowledge matters of fact. *He claims that ideas that we assume to be necessarily true are based neither on reason nor sense perception therefore cannot be true knowledge*
- Why did Kant refer to his theory of knowledge as a "Copernican revolution" in epistemology?
- 7. "Copernican Revolution," that, as he puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception. This gives rise to questions about whether our "knowledge" is anything to do with the "world as it is."
- Knowledge
- Justified true belief
- Incorrigible
- Not capable of correction, absolutely certain
- Rationalism
- Emphasizes reason as the primary source of knowledge, prior or superior to, and independent of, sense perceptions
- Empiricism
- All knowledge is directly derived or indirectly inferred from sense data - info provided by our senses serves as the basic building blocks of all knowledge
- a priori knowledge
- knowledge derived from the function of reason without reference to sense experience
- a posteriori knowledge
- knowledge gained from sense experience - to know something a posteriori is to know it by experiencing it by one's senses as an aspect of the world
- analytic statement
- statement true by definition
- synthetic statement
- statement that is informative
- necessary
- characterized by the impossibility of being otherwise
- Contingent
- refers to knowledge that is obtained by empirical means - must be regarded as only probably true
- skepticism
- state of doubting
- solipsism, epistemological
- theory that one's consciousness cannot know anything other than its own content
- solipsism, metaphysical
- Literally, "I myself only exist"; theory that no reality exists other than one's self
- deduction
- process of inference from implications of statements in which a necessarily true conclusion is arrived at by rules of logic
- induction
- a form of non-deductive inference in which the conclusion expresses something that goes beyond what is said in the premises
- What is the controversy over the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge?
- The controversy over synthetic a priori knowledge is that this type of knowledge would be knowledge already understood yet comes prior to experiences
- How did Hume and Kant view the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge?
-
Hume did not believe in it - because he was a skeptic. . Only relations of ideas or analytic a priori knowledge can be certain. Hume called synthetic a priori knowledge matters of fact and this type of knowledge can only be derived from experience and the truth of this knowledge is never necessary.
Kant did - concluded that some synthetic a priori knowledge from reason occurs. This type of knowledge is constructed out of experience and can only exist in the mind - Analytic
- True by definition - ex. Bachelors are unmarried, dasies are flowers
- Synthetic
- truth-value can only be determined by relying upon observation and experience
- A priori
- knowledge gained prior to experience
- A posteriori
- knowledge gained through experience
- Who is Thomas Kuhn?
- studied the philosophy of science. He claimed that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge; rather, “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.†He defined the word paradigm as a collection of beliefs by scientists, a set of arguments about how problems are to be understood
- Kuhn claimed 2 patterns of scientific development, what were they?
- One pattern that Kuhn proposed was a paradigm shift. He claimed that it is impossible to understand one paradigm through another paradigm
- Why is Kuhn controversial?
- The controversy with this thought was that if rival theories cannot be directly compared, then one cannot make a rational choice as to which one is better. (Didn’t find anything about Kuhn in my notes, so I took this from the internet. Not sure if this is what we need, but sounds good to me.)
- Cosmological
- "First Cause" - Something can't come from nothing.
- Teleological
-
'Telos' - final, end, purpose
-world isn't place where things happen randomly - there is order - "argument from design" - Natural law
- Someone or something had to of created the natural laws in our world
-
Moral Law argument
A)
and
B) -
A) Argument from existence of moral value or conscience
B) Kant's Moral Law Argument - life would be unbearable if there was no God - Argument from Religious Experience
- You had a religious experience and it furthered your belief in God
- Ontological
- Starts with concept of God, argues to existance
- Natural Theology
- The attempt to find evidence of God without recourse to any special or supposedly supernatural revelation
- Why does Hume reject natural theology?
- Hume rejects this possibility because it is not true knowledge; it is only based on reasoning
- What are Hume's "four circumstances" all about?
- Reasons for rejection: 1) since the world (the effect) is imperfect, we cannot conclude that God (the cause) is perfect. 2) justice in the universe is restricted to the imperfect justice that we see around us. 3) the singular and unparalleled nature of the universe prevents us from making analogical inferences about the creator.
- The problem of evil
- “God is all good and all powerful but there is evil in the world - moral, non-moral
- What is theodicy?
- an attempt to reconcile the co-existence of evil and God
- Solutions to the problem of evil?
- Solutions might include John Hicks free will defense and the virtue defense. The free will defense is that all humans have the choice to make decisions on their own and evil may result from their decisions. The virtue defense is
- Difference between moral value being subjective and objective?
- subjective moral value involves an individuals feeling, these morals exist in the mind, and objective moral values are values that are not influenced by personal feeling and they known
- Moral absolutists would take the nature of moral value to be (A). Moral relativists would take the nature of moral value to be (B)
-
(A) Objective
(B) Subjective - What is a right?
- that which a person has due to him or her
- Civil rights
- rights granted to citizens of a community by higher power
- Political rights
- the power to perform certain activities in a politically organized society such as vote or run for office
- Legal rights
- the power to use the legal system such as courts
- Natural rights
- freedoms possessed innately assumed by being a human being
- What is the UN Declaration of Human Rights?
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights - United Nations General Assembly (December 10, 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris) outlining the organization's view on the human rights guaranteed to all people
- How does a person distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate freedoms?
- Legitimate freedoms are freedoms that we should be allowed to have in society. Illegitimate freedoms are the opposite. Ex. We can be free as long as we don’t harm others
- Marx - what factors contribute to inevitable revolution in society?
- Revolution of society will come from the struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and finding common ground. The workers or the proletariat will begin to unionize and revolt against the wealthier factory owners (bourgeoisie)
- What solutions does Marx suggest to economic injustice and dehumanization of the worker?
- Marx’s solution was communism, giving form the proletariat into a class, overthrow the owners, and conquest of political power
- What is a worldview?
- Way of describing ones own system of beliefs of the world
- What is philosophy
- 20. Philosophy is critical analysis of assumptions and beliefs that are to be used in pursuit of wisdom and morals. The analysis is by means of logical reasoning