Portal:Epistemology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Article· Portal · Category · Task force· Stubs· Deletion· Cleanup· Noticeboard·
Philosophy· Metaphysics · Epistemology · Logic · Philosophy of science · Ethics
edit  

The Epistemology Portal

For other uses of the term "Theory of knowledge," see theory of knowledge (disambiguation)
According to Plato, knowledge is a subset of that which is both true and believed
According to Plato, knowledge is a subset of that which is both true and believed

Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature, methods, limitations, and validity of knowledge and belief.

The term "epistemology" is based on the Greek words "επιστήμη or episteme" (knowledge or science) and "λόγος or logos" (account/explanation). It was introduced into English by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864).[1]

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. In other words, epistemology primarily addresses the following questions: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?".

References

edit  

Selected article

Gettier Problem

The Gettier problem is considered a fundamental problem in modern epistemology or first-order logic, issuing from counter-examples to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief, and dealing extensively with the concept of justified true belief (JTB), and the scope of the concept of JTB, as well as those attacks upon JTB which Gettier exemplars introduce. The problem owes its name to a three-page paper published in 1963, by Edmund Gettier, called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", in which Gettier argues that this is not necessarily the case. Many or most analytic philosophers would wish to be able to hold to what is known as the JTB account of knowledge: the claim that knowledge can be conceptually analyzed as justified true belief — which is to say that the meaning of sentences such as "Smith knows that it rained today" can be given with the following set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:

A subject S knows that a proposition P is true if, and only if:

  1. P is true
  2. S believes that P is true, and
  3. S is justified in believing that P
edit  

Selected biography

Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. Nozick, schooled at Columbia, Oxford and Princeton, was a prominent American political philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. He did additional but less influential work in such subjects as decision theory and epistemology. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. He was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from Russia. He was married to the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His remains are interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

edit  

Great Epistemologists


Purge server cache