Reformed Empiricism
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Reformed Empiricism
Anil K. Gupta (; born 1949) is an Indian-American philosopher who works primarily in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Gupta is the Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, ''Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry'', was published by Harvard University Press in 2019. Biography Gupta earned his B.Sc. with first-class honors from the University of London in 1969. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh where he received his M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1977). Gupta has taught at several universities: McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ... (1975-1982), University of Illinois at Chicago ( ...
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Western Philosophy
Western philosophy refers to the Philosophy, philosophical thought, traditions and works of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the Pre-Socratic philosophy, pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" , "to love" and σοφία ''Sophia (wisdom), sophía'', "wisdom". History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology (the nature and origin of the universe), while rejecting unargued fables in place for argued theory, i.e., dogma superseded reason, ...
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American Academy Of Arts And Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other Founding Fathers of the United States. It is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Membership in the academy is achieved through a nominating petition, review, and election process. The academy's quarterly journal, '' Dædalus'', is published by the MIT Press on behalf of the academy, and has been open-access since January 2021. The academy also conducts multidisciplinary public policy research. Laurie L. Patton has served as President of the Academy since January 2025. History The Academy was established by the Massachusetts legislature on May 4, 1780, charted in order "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The sixty-tw ...
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Anti-realism
In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is the position that the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality. In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed. There are many varieties of anti-realism, such as metaphysical, mathematical, semantic, scientific, moral and epistemic. The term was first articulated by British philosopher Michael Dummett in an argument against a form of realism Dummett saw as 'colorless reductionism'. Anti-realism in its most general sense can be understood as being in contrast to a ''generic realism'', which holds that distinctive objects of a subject-matter exist and have properties independent of one's beliefs and conceptual schemes. The ways in which anti-realism rejects these types of claims ...
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Beliefs
A belief is a subjective Attitude (psychology), attitude that something is truth, true or a State of affairs (philosophy), state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some Life stance, stance, take, or opinion about something. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either truth value, true or false. To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection. For example, few individuals carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be ''occurrent'' (e.g., a person actively thinking "snow is white"), but can instead be ''dispositional'' (e.g., a person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). There are various ways tha ...
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Rationality
Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reason. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an ability, as in a rational animal, to a psychological process, like reasoning, to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions, or to persons who possess these other forms of rationality. A thing that lacks rationality is either ''arational'', if it is outside the domain of rational evaluation, or '' irrational'', if it belongs to this domain but does not fulfill its standards. There are many discussions about the essential features shared by all forms of rationality. According to reason-responsiveness accounts, to be rational is to be responsive to reasons. For example, dark clouds are a reason for taking an umbrella, which is why it is rational for an agent to do so in response. An important rival to this approach are coherence-based ac ...
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Knowledge
Knowledge is an Declarative knowledge, awareness of facts, a Knowledge by acquaintance, familiarity with individuals and situations, or a Procedural knowledge, practical skill. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often characterized as Truth, true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of Justification (epistemology), justification. While there is wide agreement among philosophers that propositional knowledge is a form of true belief, many controversies focus on justification. This includes questions like how to understand justification, whether it is needed at all, and whether something else besides it is needed. These controversies intensified in the latter half of the 20th century due to a series of thought experiments called ''Gettier cases'' that provoked alternative definitions. Knowledge can be produced in many ways. The main source of empirical knowledge is perception, which involves the usage of the senses to learn about ...
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Empiricist
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricists argue that empiricism is a more reliable method of finding the truth than purely using logical reasoning, because humans have cognitive biases and limitations which lead to errors of judgement. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions. Empiricists may argue that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences. Historically, empiricism was associated with the "blank slate" concept (''tabula rasa''), according to which the human mind is "blank" at birth and develops its thoughts only through later experience. Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especiall ...
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Philosophy Of Perception
The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of Perception, perceptual experience and the status of sense data, perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world.cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/ BonJour, Laurence (2007): "Epistemological Problems of Perception." ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', accessed 1.9.2010. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or Metaphysics, metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish Internalism, internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and Externalism, externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence ...
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If And Only If
In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (often shortened as "iff") is paraphrased by the biconditional, a logical connective between statements. The biconditional is true in two cases, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is biconditional (a statement of material equivalence), and can be likened to the standard material conditional ("only if", equal to "if ... then") combined with its reverse ("if"); hence the name. The result is that the truth of either one of the connected statements requires the truth of the other (i.e. either both statements are true, or both are false), though it is controversial whether the connective thus defined is properly rendered by the English "if and only if"—with its pre-existing meaning. For example, ''P if and only if Q'' means that ''P'' is true whenever ''Q'' is true, and the only case in which ''P'' is true is if ''Q'' is also true, whereas in the case of ''P if Q ...
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Tarski's Undefinability Theorem
Tarski's undefinability theorem, stated and proved by Alfred Tarski in 1933, is an important limitative result in mathematical logic, the foundations of mathematics, and in formal semantics. Informally, the theorem states that "arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic". The theorem applies more generally to any sufficiently strong formal system, showing that truth in the standard model of the system cannot be defined within the system. History In 1931, Kurt Gödel published the incompleteness theorems, which he proved in part by showing how to represent the syntax of formal logic within first-order arithmetic. Each expression of the formal language of arithmetic is assigned a distinct number. This procedure is known variously as Gödel numbering, ''coding'' and, more generally, as arithmetization. In particular, various ''sets'' of expressions are coded as sets of numbers. For various syntactic properties (such as ''being a formula'', ''being a sentence'', etc.), these s ...
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Nuel Belnap
Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. (; May 1, 1930 – June 12, 2024) was an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his retirement in 2011. Early life and education Belnap was born on May 1, 1930. He attended New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Illinois. He recalled Max Fisch assigned Whitehead readings. Belnap worked as a programmer on the IBM 701 for the National Security Agency through the United States Air Force for two years before attending graduate school at Yale University. He enjoyed metaphysics, and his professors included Paul Weiss, Arthur Pap, Henry Margenau, Frederic Fitch, and Rulon Wells. On a Fulbright Fellowship in 1958 he went to Louvain to study with Canon Robert Feys. Belnap domiciled in Brussels with wife and 2-year-old. Feys directed ...
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Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IU Indianapolis. The flagship campus of Indiana University is Indiana University Bloomington. Campuses Core campuses *Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington) is the flagship campus of Indiana University. The Bloomington campus is home to numerous premier Indiana University schools, including the College of Arts and Sciences, the Hutton Honors College, the Jacobs School of Music, an extension of the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Indiana University School of Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, which includes the former School of Library and Information Science (now Department of Library and Information Science), School of Optometry, the Indiana University School of Public and Enviro ...
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