Reflections of life, Modern Philosophy Blog, Literary Essays and Deep Thoughts for Personal Growth
¡Despierta tu mente y explora las grandes cuestiones de la vida en nuestra wiki de filosofía! Descubre todo sobre el pensamiento humano en un solo lugar.
Pluralist Theories of Truth Truth pluralism (or ‘alethic’ pluralism) is a view about the nature of truth. Broadly speaking, the thought behind the view is that truth may require different treatments for different kinds of subject matter. In particular, there is the prospect for it to be consistent to conceive of truth in a realist manner for discourse about the material world, while maintaining an
John Wisdom (1904-1993) Between 1930 and 1956, John Wisdom set the tone in analytic philosophy in the United Kingdom. Nobody expressed this better than J. O. Urmson in his Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two World Wars (1956) where, after Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wisdom is the most frequently quoted philosopher. Wisdom was the leading figure of the Cambridge School of Therapeutic Analysis
Cognitive Relativism Cognitive relativism asserts the relativity of truth. Because of the close connections between the concept of truth and concepts such as knowledge, rationality, and justification, cognitive relativism is often taken to encompass, or imply, the relativity of these other notions also. Thus, epistemological relativism, which asserts the relativity of knowledge, may be understood as a version of cognitive relativism, or at least as
Epistemic Circularity An epistemically circular argument defends the reliability of a source of belief by relying on premises that are themselves based on the source. It is a widely shared intuition that there is something wrong with epistemically circular arguments. William Alston, who first used the term in this sense, argues plausibly that there is no way to know or to be justified in believing
Natural Kinds A large part of our exploration of the world consists in categorizing or classifying the objects and processes we encounter, both in scientific and everyday contexts. There are various, perhaps innumerable, ways to sort objects into different kinds or categories, but it is commonly assumed that, among the countless possible types of classifications, one group is privileged. Philosophy refers to such categories as
Praise and Blame Joel Feinberg observed that “moral responsibility… is a subject about which we are all confused” (1970: 37). Perhaps nowhere is this confusion more evident than in our understandings of praise and blame. This entry will contrast three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. On the one hand, a broadly