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The Problem Of The Speckled Hen
In the theory of empirical knowledge, the problem of the speckled hen is whether a single immediate observation of a speckled hen provides a certain knowledge of the number of speckles observed. Clearly, this is not an isolated example, and therefore it is of fundamental nature.Roderick Chisholm, "The Problem of the Speckled Hen", ''Mind'' 51 (1942): pp. 368–373. Philosophically, this problem probes the limits of knowledge by acquaintance: one is unable to know with certainty the existence of determinate things in one's experience merely by the virtue of the experience. Roderick Chisholm attributes it to Gilbert Ryle suggesting to A. J. Ayer. It is viewed as a criticism of the view expressed by C. I. Lewis that there can never be "positive bafflement in the presence of the immediate, because there is here no question which fails to find an answer".C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order, p. 128, As cited by Chisholm (1942). Joseph Heath remarks that this problem is one o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Empirical Knowledge
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. There is no general agreement on how the terms ''evidence'' and ''empirical'' are to be defined. Often different fields work with quite different conceptions. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational. This is only possible if the evidence is possessed by the person, which has prompted various epistemologists to conceive evidence as private mental states like experiences or other beliefs. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, evidence is understood as that which '' confirms'' or ''disconfirms'' scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. For this role, it is important th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Heath
Joseph Heath (born 1967) is a Canadian philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the ''Centre for Ethics''. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. Heath's webpage at the University of Toronto declares his work "is all related, in one way or another, to critical social theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School." He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling '' The Rebel Sell''. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice theory, action theory, and critical theory. He received his Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1990, where his teachers included Charles Taylor, and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy (1995) degrees are from Northwestern University, where he studied under Thomas A. McCarthy and Jürgen Habermas. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evidence
Evidence for a proposition is what supports this proposition. It is usually understood as an indication that the supported proposition is true. What role evidence plays and how it is conceived varies from field to field. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what makes it rational to hold a certain doxastic attitude. For example, a perceptual experience of a tree may act as evidence that justifies the belief that there is a tree. In this role, evidence is usually understood as a private mental state. Important topics in this field include the questions of what the nature of these mental states is, for example, whether they have to be propositional, and whether misleading mental states can still qualify as evidence. In phenomenology, evidence is understood in a similar sense. Here, however, it is limited to intuitive knowledge that provides immediate access to truth and is therefore indubitable. In this role, it is supposed to provide ultimate justifications fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epistemology Of Science
Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of science. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science. There is no consensus among philosophers about many of the central problems concerned with the philosophy of science, including whether science can reveal the truth about unobservable things and whether scientific reasoning can be justified at all. In addition to these general questions about science as a whole, philosophers of scienc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synthetic Proposition
Synthetic things are composed of multiple parts, often with the implication that they are artificial. In particular, 'synthetic' may refer to: Science * Synthetic chemical or compound, produced by the process of chemical synthesis * Synthetic organic compounds synthetic chemical compounds based on carbon (organic compounds). * Synthetic peptide * Synthetic biology * Synthetic elements, chemical elements that are not naturally found on Earth and therefore have to be created in experiments Industry * Synthetic fuel * Synthetic oil * Synthetic marijuana * Synthetic diamond * Synthetic fibers, cloth or other material made from other substances than natural (animal, plant) materials Other * Synthetic position, a concept in finance * Synthetic-aperture radar, a type or radar * Analytic–synthetic distinction, in philosophy * Synthetic language in linguistics, inflected or agglutinative languages * Synthetic intelligence a term emphasizing that true intelligence expressed by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meditations On First Philosophy
''Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated'' ( la, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur) is a philosophical treatise by René Descartes first published in Latin in 1641. The French translation (by the Duke of Luynes with Descartes' supervision) was published in 1647 as ''Méditations Métaphysiques''. The title may contain a misreading by the printer, mistaking ''animae immortalitas'' for ''animae immaterialitas'', as suspected by A. Baillet. The book is made up of six meditations, in which Descartes first discards all belief in things that are not absolutely certain, and then tries to establish what can be known for sure. He wrote the meditations as if he had meditated for six days: each meditation refers to the last one as "yesterday". (In fact, Descartes began work on the ''Meditations'' in 1639.) One of the most influential philosophical texts ever ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chiliagon
In geometry, a chiliagon () or 1000-gon is a polygon with 1,000 sides. Philosophers commonly refer to chiliagons to illustrate ideas about the nature and workings of thought, meaning, and mental representation. Regular chiliagon A ''regular chiliagon'' is represented by Schläfli symbol and can be constructed as a truncated 500-gon, t, or a twice-truncated 250-gon, tt, or a thrice-truncated 125-gon, ttt. The measure of each internal angle in a regular chiliagon is 179°38'24"/\fracrad. The area of a regular chiliagon with sides of length ''a'' is given by :A = 250a^2 \cot \frac \simeq 79577.2\,a^2 This result differs from the area of its circumscribed circle by less than 4 parts per million. Because 1,000 = 23 × 53, the number of sides is neither a product of distinct Fermat primes nor a power of two. Thus the regular chiliagon is not a constructible polygon. Indeed, it is not even constructible with the use of an angle trisector, as the number of sides is neither a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase " ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems. Some of Ryle's ideas in philosophy of mind have been called behaviourist. In his best-known book, '' The Concept of Mind'' (1949), he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'." Having studied the philosophers Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, Ryle suggested that the book instead "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label." Biography Family tree Gilbert Ryle's father, Reginald John Ryle, was a Brighton doctor, a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Observation
Observation is the active acquisition of information from a primary source. In living beings, observation employs the senses. In science, observation can also involve the perception and recording of data via the use of scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any data collected during the scientific activity. Observations can be qualitative, that is, only the absence or presence of a property is noted, or quantitative if a numerical value is attached to the observed phenomenon by counting or measuring. Science The scientific method requires observations of natural phenomena to formulate and test hypotheses. It consists of the following steps: # Ask a question about a natural phenomenon # Make observations of the phenomenon # Formulate a hypothesis that tentatively answers the question # Predict logical, observable consequences of the hypothesis that have not yet been investigated # Test the hypothesis' predictions by an experiment, observational study, field stu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from many academic institutions worldwide. Authors contributing to the encyclopedia give Stanford University the permission to publish the articles, but retain the copyright to those articles. Approach and history As of August 5th, 2022, the ''SEP'' has 1,774 published entries. Apart from its online status, the encyclopedia uses the traditional academic approach of most encyclopedias and academic journals to achieve quality by means of specialist authors selected by an editor or an editorial committee that is competent (although not necessarily considered specialists) in the field covered by the encyclopedia and peer review. The encyclopedia was created in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Certainty
Certainty (also known as epistemic certainty or objective certainty) is the epistemic property of beliefs which a person has no rational grounds for doubting. One standard way of defining epistemic certainty is that a belief is certain if and only if the person holding that belief could not be mistaken in holding that belief. Other common definitions of certainty involve the indubitable nature of such beliefs or define certainty as a property of those beliefs with the greatest possible justification. Certainty is closely related to knowledge, although contemporary philosophers tend to treat knowledge as having lower requirements than certainty. Importantly, epistemic certainty is not the same thing as psychological certainty (also known as subjective certainty or certitude), which describes the highest degree to which a person could be convinced that something is true. While a person may be completely convinced that a particular belief is true, and might even be psychologically ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
