Results for 'Agnosticism'

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  1. Weak agnosticism defended.Graham Oppy - 1994 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36 (3):147 - 167.
    Agnosticism has had some bad press in recent years. Nonetheless, I hope to show that agnosticism can be so formulated that it is no less philosophically respectable than theism and atheism. This is not a mere philosophical exercise; for, as it happens, the formulated position is--I think--the one to which I subscribe. I include a qualification here since it may be that the position to which I subscribe is better characterised as fallibilist atheism--but more of that anon.
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  2. Is agnosticism liveable?Edgar Danielyan - 2021 - Academia Letters (June 2021).
    In 'Weak agnosticism defended' Graham Oppy set out to ’show that agnosticism can be so formulated that it is no less philosophically respectable than theism and atheism’. Oppy begins by differentiating between strong agnosticism, which obliges rational persons to suspend judgment on the question of God’s existence, and weak agnosticism, which allows rational persons to do so. Weak agnosticism is thus the philosophical position that it is possible and rational - but not obligatory - to (...)
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  3. Agnosticism.Graham Oppy - forthcoming - KİLİKYA JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY.
    I endorse the following claims in this paper. (1) Agnosticism is suspension of judgment on existence claims concerning gods and God. (2) Historical agnostics accepted (1) but unwisely insisted on further conditions best set aside. (3) Particular case agnosticism is less problematic than general principle-based agnosticism. (4) Agnostics should suspend judgment on—or, on occasion, reject—atomic claims of the form ‘God is F’.
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  4. The Varieties of Agnosticism.Filippo Ferrari & Luca Incurvati - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):365-380.
    We provide a framework for understanding agnosticism. The framework accounts for the varieties of agnosticism while vindicating the unity of the phenomenon. This combination of unity and plurality is achieved by taking the varieties of agnosticism to be represented by several agnostic stances, all of which share a common core provided by what we call the minimal agnostic attitude. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the framework by showing how it can be applied to several philosophical debates. In (...)
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  5. Logical Principles of Agnosticism.Luis Rosa - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (6):1263-1283.
    Logic arguably plays a role in the normativity of reasoning. In particular, there are plausible norms of belief/disbelief whose antecedents are constituted by claims about what follows from what. But is logic also relevant to the normativity of agnostic attitudes? The question here is whether logical entailment also puts constraints on what kinds of things one can suspend judgment about. In this paper I address that question and I give a positive answer to it. In particular, I advance two logical (...)
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  6. Agnosticism, the Moral Skepticism Objection, and Commonsense Morality.Daniel Howard-Snyder - 2014 - In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
    According to Agnosticism with a capital A, even if we don’t see how any reason we know of would justify God in permitting all the evil in the world and even if we lack evidential and non-evidential warrant for theism, we should not infer that there probably is no reason that would justify God. That’s because, under those conditions, we should be in doubt about whether the goods we know of constitute a representative sample of all the goods there (...)
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  7. Agnosticism, Skeptical Theism, and Moral Obligation.Stephen Maitzen - 2014 - In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
    Skeptical theism combines theism with skepticism about our capacity to discern God’s morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil. Proponents have claimed that skeptical theism defeats the evidential argument from evil. Many opponents have objected that it implies untenable moral skepticism, induces appalling moral paralysis, and the like. Recently Daniel Howard-Snyder has tried to rebut this prevalent objection to skeptical theism by rebutting it as an objection to the skeptical part of skeptical theism, which part he labels “Agnosticism” (with an (...)
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  8. Being neutral: Agnosticism, inquiry and the suspension of judgment.Matthew McGrath - 2021 - Noûs 55 (2):463-484.
    Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first (...)
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  9. (1 other version)Peirce: Underdetermination, agnosticism, and related mistakes.P. D. Magnus - 2005 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (1):26 – 37.
    There are two ways that we might respond to the underdetermination of theory by data. One response, which we can call the agnostic response, is to suspend judgment: "Where scientific standards cannot guide us, we should believe nothing". Another response, which we can call the fideist response, is to believe whatever we would like to believe: "If science cannot speak to the question, then we may believe anything without science ever contradicting us". C.S. Peirce recognized these options and suggested evading (...)
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  10. Conventionalising rebirth: Buddhist agnosticism and the doctrine of two truths.Bronwyn Finnigan - 2024 - In Yujin Nagasawa & Mohammad Saleh Zarepour (eds.), Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion: From Religious Experience to the Afterlife. Oxford University Press USA.
    What should the Buddhist attitude be to rebirth if it is believed to be inconsistent with current science? This chapter critically engages forms of Buddhist agnosticism that adopt a position of uncertainty about rebirth but nevertheless recommend ‘behaving as if’ it were true. What does it mean to behave as if rebirth were true, and are Buddhist agnostics justified in adopting this position? This chapter engages this question in dialogue with Mark Siderits’ reductionist analysis of the Buddhist doctrine of (...)
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  11. Atheism, agnosticism, noncognitivism (1998).Theodore M. Drange - manuscript
    This online essay puts forth and defends precise definitions of the terms "atheism," "agnosticism." and "[theological] noncognitivism.".
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  12. (1 other version)Free Will Agnosticism.Stephen Kearns - 2013 - Noûs 47 (2):235-252.
    I argue that no one knows whether there is free will.
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  13. Metaethical Agnosticism: Practical Reasons for Acting When Agnostic About the Existence of Moral Reasons.Joseph Len Miller - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (1):59-75.
    There has been little discussion about how to act when uncertain about the existence of moral reasons in general. In this paper I will argue that despite being uncertain about the existence of moral reasons, someone can still have a practical reason to act in a particular way. This practical reason is morally relevant because it will have an impact on whether we’re making the correct moral decision. This practical reason will result from a principle of decision-making that can be (...)
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  14. Moral Agnosticism: An Ethics of Inquiry and Public Discourse.Lawerence Torcello - 2014 - Teaching Ethics 14 (2):3-16.
    Taking Anthropogenic global warming as its framing example this paper develops an ethics of inquiry and public discourse influenced by Rawlsian public reason. The need to embrace scientific fact during civil discourse on topics of moral and political controversy is stressed as an ethical mandate. The paper argues: (1) ethicists have a moral obligation to recognize scientific consensus when relevant to ethical discussions. (2) The failure to condemn science denialism when it interferes with the public’s understanding of ethical issues is (...)
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  15. On behalf of controversial view agnosticism.J. Adam Carter - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):1358-1370.
    Controversial view agnosticism is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion, morality and politics. Given that one’s social identity is in no small part a function of one’s positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably ‘spineless.’ That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement—conformism—according to which the rational (...)
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  16. Sophism and Moral Agnosticism, or, How to Tell a Relativist from a Pluralist.Lawrence Torcello - 2011 - The Pluralist 6 (1):87-108.
    Is it possible to recognize the limits of rationality, and thus to embrace moral pluralism, without embracing moral relativism? My answer is yes; nevertheless, certain anti-foundational positions, both recent and ancient, take a cynical stance toward the possibility of any critical moral judgment, and as such, must be regarded as relativistic.1 It is such cynicism, I argue, whether openly announced or unknowingly implied, that marks the distinction between relativism and pluralism.2 The danger of this cynicism is not so much that (...)
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  17. On the Incoherence of Agnosticism.Mike Almeida - manuscript
    Most theists do not put a (subjective) probability of 1 (certainty) on God's existence. Most atheists do not put a probability of 0 on God's existence. I argue that these familiar positions are incoherent. On the assumption of S5 and the probability calculus it can be shown that the only coherent (subjective) probabilities an agent can assign to God's existence/non-existence are 0 or 1. Believers must be completely committed believers and non-believers must be completely committed non-believers. Agnosticism is not (...)
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  18. Sañjaya’s Ajñānavāda and Mahāvīra’s Anekāntavāda: From Agnosticism to Pluralism.Anish Chakravarty - 2021 - In Krishna Mani Pathak (ed.), Quietism, Agnosticism and Mysticism Mapping the Philosophical Discourse of the East and the West. Springer, Singapore. pp. 93-108.
    This chapter aims to examine parallels between two ancient Indian philosophical schools, Jaina (Jainism) of Mahāvīra and Ajñāna (Unending Agnosticism) of Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta. Jaina and Ajñāna traditions were a part of the Non-Vedic larger Śramaṇa movement of seventh to sixth-century BCE India, where Śramaṇa were monastics, who dwelled in forests and lived a retired life, focussing themselves in the search of discovering the knowledge of truth, reality and existence. Sañjaya and Mahāvīra were contemporaries and were a prominent and well-known (...)
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  19. Three Dogmas of First-Order Logic and some Evidence-based Consequences for Constructive Mathematics of differentiating between Hilbertian Theism, Brouwerian Atheism and Finitary Agnosticism.Bhupinder Singh Anand - manuscript
    We show how removing faith-based beliefs in current philosophies of classical and constructive mathematics admits formal, evidence-based, definitions of constructive mathematics; of a constructively well-defined logic of a formal mathematical language; and of a constructively well-defined model of such a language. -/- We argue that, from an evidence-based perspective, classical approaches which follow Hilbert's formal definitions of quantification can be labelled `theistic'; whilst constructive approaches based on Brouwer's philosophy of Intuitionism can be labelled `atheistic'. -/- We then adopt what may (...)
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  20. Review of: Graham Oppy. 2018. Atheism and Agnosticism. Cambridge University Press. [REVIEW]Dan Baras - 2019 - Reading Religion 1:1.
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  21. Skeptheism: Is Knowledge of God’s Existence Possible?Moti Mizrahi - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (1):41-64.
    In this paper, I sketch an argument for the view that we cannot know (or have good reasons to believe) that God exists. Some call this view “strong agnosticism” but I prefer the term “skeptheism” in order to clearly distinguish between two distinct epistemic attitudes with respect to the existence of God, namely, agnosticism and skepticism. For the skeptheist, we cannot know (or have good reasons to believe) that God exists, since there can be neither conceptual (a priori) (...)
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  22. Balet Dawkinsa w ogrodzie Teologii. Uwagi krytyczne w sprawie racjonalności głównych twierdzeń dotyczących wymiaru poznawczego twierdzeń o Bogu, zawartych w książce Richarda Dawkinsa Bóg urojony. Część II.Marek Pepliński - 2014 - Filo-Sofija 14 (25/2/2):355-376.
    Dawkins’ Ballet in the Garden of Theology. A Critical Assessment of Richard Dawkins’ Epistemological Theses on Theistic Beliefs from the God Delusion. Part II My paper presents an analysis and assessment of Richard Dawkins’ assumption from his book The God Delusion that there are no reason against treating belief in God as a scientific hypothesis, because even if the God existence is not disprovable, we could and maybe should ask if His existence is probable or highly improbable. My first aim (...)
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  23. Paratheism: A Proof that God neither Exists nor Does Not Exist.Steven James Bartlett - 2016 - Willamette University Faculty Research Website: Http://Www.Willamette.Edu/~Sbartlet/Documents/Bartlett_Paratheism_A%20Proof%20that%20God%20neither%2 0Exists%20nor%20Does%20Not%20Exist.Pdf.
    Theism and its cousins, atheism and agnosticism, are seldom taken to task for logical-epistemological incoherence. This paper provides a condensed proof that not only theism, but atheism and agnosticism as well, are all of them conceptually self-undermining, and for the same reason: All attempt to make use of the concept of “transcendent reality,” which here is shown not only to lack meaning, but to preclude the very possibility of meaning. In doing this, the incoherence of theism, atheism, and (...)
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  24. Hume: ¿Una puerta hacia el ateísmo ? / Hume: An Open Door To Atheism?Antonia Tejeda Barros - 2024 - Endoxa 54:301–313.
    RESUMEN: Hume no comparte la indispensable premisa del ateísmo (Dios no existe), pero sostiene que solamente podemos afirmar que existe lo que se puede probar, comprobar y verificar. Tanto la causalidad como la sustancia como el propio yo son solo creencias. Este aplastante escepticismo influirá inevitablemente en la idea de Dios. La filosofía de Hume comparte con el ateísmo tres puntos cruciales: 1. Crítica al argumento del diseño; 2. Mortalidad del alma; 3. Crítica a los monoteísmos. Con este artículo me (...)
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  25. Rejection, denial and the democratic primaries.Luca Incurvati - 2022 - Think 21 (61):105-109.
    Starting from the case of insurance claims, I investigate the dynamics of acceptance, rejection and denial. I show that disagreement can be more varied than one might think. I illustrate this by looking at the Warren/Sanders controversy in the 2020 democratic primaries and at religious agnosticism.
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  26. Suspending judgment the correct way.Luis Rosa - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (10):2001-2023.
    In this paper I present reasons for us to accept the hypothesis that suspended judgment has correctness conditions, just like beliefs do. Roughly put, the idea is that suspended judgment about p is correct when both p and ¬p might be true in view of certain facts that characterize the subject’s situation. The reasons to accept that hypothesis are broadly theoretical ones: it adds unifying power to our epistemological theories, it delivers good and conservative consequences, and it allows us to (...)
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  27. Higher-Order Epistemic Attitudes and Intellectual Humility.Allan Hazlett - 2012 - Episteme 9 (3):205-223.
    This paper concerns would-be necessary connections between doxastic attitudes about the epistemic statuses of your doxastic attitudes, or ‘higher-order epistemic attitudes’, and the epistemic statuses of those doxastic attitudes. I will argue that, in some situations, it can be reasonable for a person to believe p and to suspend judgment about whether believing p is reasonable for her. This will set the stage for an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, on which humility is a matter of your higher-order (...)
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  28. Disagreement and suspended judgement.Filippo Ferrari - 2022 - Metaphilosophy 53 (4):526-542.
    Can someone who suspends judgement about a certain proposition <p> be in a relational state of disagreement with someone who believes <p> as well as with some- one who disbelieves <p>? This paper argues for an af- firmative answer. It develops an account of the notions of suspended judgement and disagreement that explains how and why the suspender is in a relational state of disagreement with both the believer and the disbeliever about the very same proposition <p>. More specifically, the (...)
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  29. Voluntary Belief on a Reasonable Basis.Philip J. Nickel - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2):312-334.
    A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...)
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  30. Quantifiers and propositional attitudes: Quine revisited.Sean Crawford - 2008 - Synthese 160 (1):75 - 96.
    Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the (...)
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  31. On a Puzzle About Withholding.Juan Comesaña - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (251):374-376.
    I discuss Turri's puzzle about withholding. I argue that attention to the way in which evidence can justify withholding dissolves the puzzle.
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  32. Necessity, Theism, and Evidence.Mike Almeida - 2022 - Logique Et Analyse 259 (1):287-307.
    The minimal God exemplifies essential omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection, but none of the other properties of the traditional God. I examine the consequences of the minimal God in augmented S5, S4, and Kρσ. The metaphysical consequences for the minimal God in S5 include the impossibility that God—or any other object—might acquire, lose, or exchange an essential property. It is impossible that an essentially divine being might become essentially human, for instance. The epistemological consequences include the impossibility of agnosticism—it (...)
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  33. A Puzzle About the Agnostic Response to Peer Disagreement.Michele Palmira - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1253-1261.
    The paper argues that the view to the effect that one should suspend judgment in the face of a disagreement with a recognised epistemic peer results in a puzzle when applied to disagreements in which one party is agnostic. The puzzle is this: either the agnostic party retains her suspension of judgment, or she suspends it. The former option is discarded by proponents of the agnostic response; the latter leads the agnostic response to undermine itself.
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  34. Secular Worldviews: Scientific Naturalism and Secular Humanism.Mikael Stenmark - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (4):237-264.
    In this essay, I maintain that although atheism, minimally construed, consists simply of the belief that there is no God or gods, atheists must embrace a secular worldview of one kind or another. Since they cannot be without a worldview, atheists must develop an alternative to the religious, especially the theistic, worldviews which they, by implication, reject. Further, I argue that there are, at the very least, two options available to atheists and that these should not be conflated or treated (...)
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  35. Practical Moore Sentences.Matthew Mandelkern - 2019 - Noûs 55 (1):39-61.
    I discuss what I call practical Moore sentences: sentences like ‘You must close your door, but I don’t know whether you will’, which combine an order together with an avowal of agnosticism about whether the order will be obeyed. I show that practical Moore sentences are generally infelicitous. But this infelicity is surprising: it seems like there should be nothing wrong with giving someone an order while acknowledging that you do not know whether it will obeyed. I suggest that (...)
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  36. A Faith for the Future.Carl-Johan Palmqvist - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (1):95-122.
    . In the philosophy of J. L. Schellenberg, “evolutionary religion” is a religious stance oriented towards the deep future. According to Schellenberg, the best form of evolutionary religion is non-doxastic faith in ultimism. I reject Schellenberg’s arguments for preferring ultimism and suggest that committing non-doxastically to traditional religion makes more sense from an evolutionary perspective. I argue that the alignment argument for traditional religion remains sound even when the deep future is considered. Furthermore, I assess Schellenberg’s claim that humanity is (...)
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  37. Balet Dawkinsa w ogrodzie teologii. Uwagi krytyczne w sprawie racjonalności głównych twierdzeń dotyczących wymiaru poznawczego twierdzeń o Bogu, zawartych w książce Richarda Dawkinsa Bóg urojony. Część I.Marek Pepliński - 2012 - Filo-Sofija 12 (18):293-322.
    Dawkins’ Ballet In the Garden of Theology. A Critical Assessment of Richard Dawkins’ Epistemological Theses On Theistic Beliefs From The God Delusion. Part I My paper presents a detailed analysis and assessment of Richard Dawkins’ epistemological theses from The God Delusion concerning the nature of religious belief, the existence of God and treating belief in God as a scientific hypothesis. In the first part of the article, I am interpreting Dawkins’ statement that atheism deserves respect as an epistemic achievement. I (...)
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  38. Expressive Vulnerabilities: Language and the Non-Human.Joe Larios - 2020 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5):662-676.
    Emmanuel Levinas’s work seemingly places a great emphasis on language leading some commentators towards a Kantian reading of him where moral consideration would be based on the moral patient’s capacity for reason with language functioning as a proxy for this. Although this reading is possible, a closer look at Levinas’s descriptions of language reveal that its defining characteristic is not reason but the capacity to express beyond any thematized contents we would give to the Other. This expressivity (which Levinas calls (...)
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  39. On the meta-ethical status of constructivism: Reflections on G.A. Cohen's `facts and principles'.Miriam Ronzoni & Laura Valentini - 2008 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 7 (4):403-422.
    The Queen's College, Oxford, UK In his article `Facts and Principles', G.A. Cohen attempts to refute constructivist approaches to justification by showing that, contrary to what their proponents claim, fundamental normative principles are fact- in sensitive. We argue that Cohen's `fact-insensitivity thesis' does not provide a successful refutation of constructivism because it pertains to an area of meta-ethics which differs from the one tackled by constructivists. While Cohen's thesis concerns the logical structure of normative principles, constructivists ask how normative principles (...)
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  40. Normative relations between ignorance and suspension of judgement: a systematic investigation.Anne Meylan & Thomas Raleigh - forthcoming - In Alexandra Zinke & Verena Wagner (eds.), Suspension in Epistemology and Beyond. Routledge.
    In the recent epistemological literature much has been written about the nature of suspending judgement or agnosticism. There has also been a surge of recent interest in the nature of ignorance. But what is the relationship between these two epistemically significant states? Prima facie, both suspension and ignorance seem to involve the lack of a correct answer to a question. And, again prima facie, there may be some intuitive attraction to the idea that when one is ignorant whether p, (...)
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  41. Subjective Probabilities Need Not be Sharp.Jake Chandler - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (6):1273-1286.
    It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choice that he claims to be borne (...)
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  42. Locke's ontology.Lisa Downing - 2007 - In Lex Newman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding". New York: Cambridge University Press.
    One of the deepest tensions in Locke’s Essay, a work full of profound and productive conflicts, is one between Locke’s metaphysical tendencies—his inclination to presuppose or even to argue for substantive metaphysical positions—and his devout epistemic modesty, which seems to urge agnosticism about major metaphysical issues. Both tendencies are deeply rooted in the Essay. Locke is a theorist of substance, essence, quality. Yet, his favorite conclusions are epistemically pessimistic, even skeptical; when it comes to questions about how the world (...)
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  43. Suspending is Believing.Thomas Raleigh - 2019 - Synthese (3):1-26.
    A good account of the agnostic attitude of Suspending Judgement should explain how it can be rendered more or less rational/justified according to the state of one's evidence – and one's relation to that evidence. I argue that the attitude of suspending judgement whether p constitutively involves having a belief; roughly, a belief that one cannot yet tell whether or not p. I show that a theory of suspending that treats it as a sui generis attitude, wholly distinct from belief, (...)
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  44. Absence of evidence against belief as credence 1.Andrew del Rio - 2022 - Analysis 83 (1):31-39.
    On one view of the traditional doxastic attitudes, belief is credence 1, disbelief is credence 0 and suspension is any precise credence between 0 and 1. In ‘Rational agnosticism and degrees of belief’ (2013) Jane Friedman argues, against this view, that there are cases where a credence of 0 is required but where suspension is permitted. If this were so, belief, disbelief and suspension could not be identified or reduced to the aforementioned credences. I argue that Friedman relies on (...)
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  45. A Probabilistic Defense of Proper De Jure Objections to Theism.Brian C. Barnett - 2019
    A common view among nontheists combines the de jure objection that theism is epistemically unacceptable with agnosticism about the de facto objection that theism is false. Following Plantinga, we can call this a “proper” de jure objection—a de jure objection that does not depend on any de facto objection. In his Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga has produced a general argument against all proper de jure objections. Here I first show that this argument is logically fallacious (it makes subtle probabilistic (...)
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  46. On Some Moral Implications of Linguistic Narrativism Theory.Natan Elgabsi & Bennett Gilbert - 2020 - De Ethica 6 (1):75-91.
    In this essay we consider the moral claims of one branch of non-realist theory known as linguistic narrativism theory. By highlighting the moral implications of linguistic narrativism theory, we argue that the “moral vision” expressed by this theory can entail, at worst, undesirable moral agnosticism if not related to a transcendental and supra-personal normativity in our moral life. With its appeal to volitionism and intuitionism, the ethical sensitivity of this theory enters into difficulties brought about by several internal tensions (...)
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  47. Why Should Metaphysics be Systematic? Contemporary Answers and Kant’s.Nicholas Stang - forthcoming - In Aaron Segal & Nick Stang (eds.), Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford University Press.
    The other chapters in this volume discuss the important, but neglected, topic of systematicity in metaphysics. In this chapter I begin by taking a step back and asking: why is systematicity important in metaphysics? Assuming that metaphysics should be systematic, why is this the case? I canvas some answers that emerge naturally within contemporary philosophy and argue that none of them adequately explains why metaphysics should be systematic. I then turn to Kant’s account of systematicity for his explanation. I argue (...)
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  48. The Problem of Respecting Higher-Order Doubt.David J. Alexander - 2013 - Philosophers' Imprint 13.
    This paper argues that higher-order doubt generates an epistemic dilemma. One has a higher-order doubt with regards to P insofar as one justifiably withholds belief as to what attitude towards P is justified. That is, one justifiably withholds belief as to whether one is justified in believing, disbelieving, or withholding belief in P. Using the resources provided by Richard Feldman’s recent discussion of how to respect one’s evidence, I argue that if one has a higher-order doubt with regards to P, (...)
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  49. The Principle of Analogy.Harry Bunting - 2006 - In Gavin McGrath & C. Stephen Evans (eds.), New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics. Inter-Varsity Press. pp. 69 - 74.
    The Principle of Analogy. ABSTRACT. Sceptics question whether ‘distinctively human’ predicates such as ‘just’, ‘loving’ and ‘powerful’ can intelligibly be attributed to a divine being. If not, then a vicious form of agnosticism seems to threaten orthodox theism. Especially if one assumes a broadly empiricist semantics the challenge, whether formulated in terms of a univocal or an equivocal understanding of predicates, seems to generate intractable philosophical problems. Aquinas’ theory of analogical predication, understood either in terms of ‘analogy duorum ad (...)
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  50. Is Atheism Good Evidence for Atheism ? On John Schellenberg’s Argument from Ignorance.Cyrille Michon - 2015 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (1):71--88.
    The argument from ignorance mounted by John Schellenberg argues from the existence of non-faulty unbelief to the non-existence of God, from the fact of atheism or agnosticism to the truth of atheism. It relies on two putative conceptual relations: between the idea of love and that of personal relationship, and between personal relationship and existential belief on each side of the relation concerning the other relatum. I argue that each is debatable, and so the argument cannot proceed.
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