Epistemology Of Testimony
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Epistemology Of Testimony
The philosophy of testimony (also, epistemology of testimony) considers the nature of language and knowledge's confluence, which occurs when beliefs are transferred between speakers and hearers through testimony. Testimony constitutes words, gestures, or utterances that convey beliefs. This definition may be distinguished from the legal notion of testimony in that the speaker does not have to make a declaration of the truth of the facts. The role of testimony in acquiring belief and knowledge has been a relatively neglected philosophical issue. CAJ (Tony) Coady believes that this is because traditional epistemology has had a distinctly individualist flavour. However, it seems that many of the beliefs that we hold have been gained through accepting testimony. For example, one may only know that Kent is a county of England or that David Beckham earns $30 million per year because one has learned these things from other people. A more striking example is the belief about one's own bir ...
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Testimony
Testimony is a solemn attestation as to the truth of a matter. Etymology The words "testimony" and "testify" both derive from the Latin word ''testis'', referring to the notion of a disinterested third-party witness. Law In the law, testimony is a form of evidence in which a witness makes a "solemn declaration or affirmation ... for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact". According to Bryan A. Garner, the editor of '' Black's Law Dictionary'', the word "testimony" is properly used as a mass noun (that is, always uninflected regardless of number), and not a count noun. Testimony may be oral or written, and it is usually made by oath or affirmation under penalty of perjury. Historically, to be admissible in court and to ensure maximum reliability and validity, written testimony presented in the form of an affidavit (i.e., the witness would not be appearing in court at the hearing at which the affidavit was considered as evidence) was usually witnessed by anot ...
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Perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.Goldstein (2009) pp. 5–7 Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Gregory, Richard. "Perception" in Gregory, Zangwill (1987) pp. 598–601. Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). The following process connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge) with restorative and selective mechanisms, ...
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Knowledge By Acquaintance
Bertrand Russell makes a distinction between two different kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Whereas knowledge by description is something like ordinary propositional knowledge (e.g. "I know that snow is white"), knowledge by acquaintance is familiarity with a person, place, or thing, typically obtained through perceptual experience (e.g. "I know Sam", "I know the city of Bogotá", or "I know Russell's ''Problems of Philosophy''"). According to Bertrand Russell's classic account of acquaintance knowledge, acquaintance is a direct causal interaction between a person and an object of experience. Pre-Russellian accounts Grote In 1865, philosopher John Grote distinguished between what he described as "knowledge of acquaintance" and "knowledge-about". Grote noted that these distinctions were made in many languages. He cited Greek (γνωναι and ειδεναι), Latin (noscere and scire), German (kennen and wissen), and French (connaître ...
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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Bertrand Russell", 1 May 2003. He was one of the early 20th century's prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against British idealism, idealism". Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote ''Principia Mathematica'', a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". Russell was a Pacifism, pacifist who ...
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Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid (; 7 May (Julian calendar, O.S. 26 April) 1710 – 7 October 1796) was a religiously trained Scotland, Scottish philosophy, philosopher best known for his philosophical method, his #Thomas_Reid's_theory_of_common_sense, theory of perception, and its wide implications on epistemology, and as the developer and defender of an Agent causality, agent-causal theory of free will. He also focused extensively on ethics, Action theory (philosophy), theory of action, philosophy of language, language and philosophy of mind. He was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A contemporary of David Hume, Reid was also "Hume's earliest and fiercest critic". Life Reid was born in the manse at Strachan, Aberdeenshire, on 26 April 1710, the son of Lewis Reid (1676–1762) and his wife Margaret Gregory, first cousin to James Gregory (mathematician), J ...
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Augustine Of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo ( , ; ; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430) was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include '' The City of God'', '' On Christian Doctrine'', and '' Confessions''. According to his contemporary, Jerome of Stridon, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith". In his youth he was drawn to the Manichaean faith, and later to the Hellenistic philosophy of Neoplatonism. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in 386, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and perspectives. Believing the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, he helped formulate the doctrine of original sin and m ...
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Theory Of Justification
Justification (also called epistemic justification) is a property of beliefs that fulfill certain norms about what a person should believe. Epistemologists often identify justification as a component of knowledge distinguishing it from mere true opinion. They study the reasons why someone holds a belief. Epistemologists are concerned with various features of belief, which include the ideas of warrant (a proper justification for holding a belief), knowledge, rationality, and probability, among others. Debates surrounding epistemic justification often involve the ''structure'' of justification, including whether there are foundational justified beliefs or whether mere coherence is sufficient for a system of beliefs to qualify as justified. Another major subject of debate is the sources of justification, which might include perceptual experience (the evidence of the senses), reason, and authoritative testimony, among others. Justification and knowledge "Justification" involves the ...
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David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who was best known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with '' A Treatise of Human Nature'' (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist. Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience ...
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Memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, it would be impossible for language, relationships, or personal identity to develop. Memory loss is usually described as forgetfulness or amnesia. Memory is often understood as an informational processing system with explicit and implicit functioning that is made up of a sensory processor, short-term (or working) memory, and long-term memory. This can be related to the neuron. The sensory processor allows information from the outside world to be sensed in the form of chemical and physical stimuli and attended to various levels of focus and intent. Working memory serves as an encoding and retrieval processor. Information in the form of stimuli is encoded in accordance with explicit or implicit functions by the working memory p ...
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Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, recognising excellence in science, supporting outstanding science, providing scientific advice for policy, education and public engagement and fostering international and global co-operation. Founded on 28 November 1660, it was granted a royal charter by Charles II of England, King Charles II and is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world. The society is governed by its Council, which is chaired by the society's president, according to a set of statutes and standing orders. The members of Council and the president are elected from and by its Fellows, the basic members of the society, who are themselves elected by existing Fellows. , there are about 1,700 fellows, allowed to use the postnominal title FRS (Fellow ...
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CAJ (Tony) Coady
Cecil Anthony John Coady , more commonly publishing as C. A. J. Coady and less formally known as Tony Coady (born 18 April 1936), is a prominent Australian philosopher, working particularly in epistemology but also in political and applied philosophy. Coady's best-known work relates to the epistemological problems posed by testimony, as expounded in his book ''Testimony: a Philosophical Study'' (Oxford University Press, 1990). It was influential in establishing a new branch of inquiry within the field of epistemology. He is also well known for his publications on issues related to political violence. Coady is a regular commentator in the Australian media on philosophical aspects of public affairs. Education Coady first studied philosophy at the University of Sydney as a part-time evening student while working full-time as a journalist. After gaining his B.A in 1962, he secured a scholarship to the University of Melbourne, leaving professional journalism behind, and was awarded M ...
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The Age Of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment) was a European intellectual and philosophical movement active from the late 17th to early 19th century. Chiefly valuing knowledge gained through rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment was concerned with a wide range of social and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state. The Enlightenment was preceded by and overlapped the Scientific Revolution, which included the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton, among others, as well as the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and John Locke. The dating of the period of the beginning of the Enlightenment can be attributed to the publication of René Descartes' ''Discourse on the Method'' in 1637, with his method of systematically disbelieving everything u ...
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