Results for 'certainty'

467 found
Order:
  1. Knowledge, certainty, and assertion.John Turri - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (2):293-299.
    Researchers have debated whether knowledge or certainty is a better candidate for the norm of assertion. Should you make an assertion only if you know it's true? Or should you make an assertion only if you're certain it's true? If either knowledge or certainty is a better candidate, then this will likely have detectable behavioral consequences. I report an experiment that tests for relevant behavioral consequences. The results support the view that assertability is more closely linked to knowledge (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  2. Certainty in Action.Bob Beddor - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):711-737.
    When is it permissible to rely on a proposition in practical reasoning? Standard answers to this question face serious challenges. This paper uses these challenges to motivate a certainty norm of practical reasoning. This norm holds that one is permitted to rely on p in practical reasoning if and only if p is epistemically certain. After developing and defending this norm, I consider its broader implications. Taking a certainty norm seriously calls into question traditional assumptions about the importance (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  3. Science, Certainty, and Descartes.Gary Hatfield - 1988 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988:249 - 262.
    During the 1630s Descartes recognized that he could not expect all legitimate claims in natural science to meet the standard of absolute certainty. The realization resulted from a change in his physics, which itself arose not through methodological reflections, but through developments in his substantive metaphysical doctrines. Descartes discovered the metaphysical foundations of his physics in 1629-30; as a consequence, the style of explanation employed in his physical writings changed. His early methodological conceptions, as preserved in the Rules and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  4. The Certainties of Delusion.Jakob Ohlhorst - 2021 - In Luca Moretti & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Non-Evidentialist Epistemology. Leiden: Brill. pp. 211-229.
    Delusions are unhinged hinge certainties. Delusions are defined as strongly anchored beliefs that do not change in the face of adverse evidence. The same goes for Wittgensteinian certainties. My paper refines the so-called framework views of delusion, presenting an argument that epistemically speaking, considering them to be certainties best accounts for delusions’ doxastic profile. Until now there has been little argument in favour of this position and the original proposals made too extreme predictions about the belief systems of delusional patients. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  5. Practical certainty and cosmological conjectures.Nicholas Maxwell - 2006 - In Michael Rahnfeld (ed.), Is there Certain Knowledge? Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
    We ordinarily assume that we have reliable knowledge of our immediate surroundings, so much so that almost all the time we entrust our lives to the truth of what we take ourselves to know, without a moment’s thought. But if, as Karl Popper and others have maintained, all our knowledge is conjectural, then this habitual assumption that our common sense knowledge of our environment is secure and trustworthy would seem to be an illusion. Popper’s philosophy of science, in particular, fails (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  6. Disagreement, Certainties, Relativism.Martin Kusch - 2018 - Topoi 40 (5):1097-1105.
    This paper seeks to widen the dialogue between the “epistemology of peer disagreement” and the epistemology informed by Wittgenstein’s last notebooks, later edited as On Certainty. The paper defends the following theses: not all certainties are groundless; many of them are beliefs; and they do not have a common essence. An epistemic peer need not share all of my certainties. Which response to a disagreement over a certainty is called for, depends on the type of certainty in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  7. New Work For Certainty.Bob Beddor - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (8).
    This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  8. Certainties and the Bedrock of Moral Reasoning: Three Ways the Spade Turns.Konstantin Deininger & Herwig Grimm - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy.
    n this paper, we identify and explain three kinds of bedrock in moral thought. The term "bedrock," as introduced by Wittgenstein in §217 of the Philosophical Investigations, stands for the end of a chain of reasoning. We affirm that some chains of moral reasoning do indeed end with certainty. However, different kinds of certainties in morality work in different ways. In the course of systematizing the different types of certainties, we argue that present accounts of certainties in morality do (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Certainty, soil and sediment.Kevin Mulligan - 2006 - In Markus Textor (ed.), The Austrian contribution to analytic philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 1--89.
    Many of the most important questions about primitive certainty have to do with the distinction between primitive certainty as a practical attitude or disposition and primitive certainty as a psychological attitude and with the distinction between these and primitive, objective certainty.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  10. Certainty.Andrew Moon - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    This overview of the philosophy of certainty will distinguish two types of certainty, specify controversial theses about certainty from recent literature, and explain some of the arguments for and against those theses.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. Kantian Fallibilism: Knowledge, Certainty, Doubt.Andrew Chignell - 2021 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 45:99-128.
    For Kant, knowledge involves certainty. If “certainty” requires that the grounds for a given propositional attitude guarantee its truth, then this is an infallibilist view of epistemic justification. Such a view says you can’t have epistemic justification for an attitude unless the attitude is also true. Here I want to defend an alternative fallibilist interpretation. Even if a subject has grounds that would be sufficient for knowledge if the proposition were true, the proposition might not be true. And (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  12. What certainty teaches.Tomas Bogardus - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (2):227 - 243.
    Most philosophers, including all materialists I know of, believe that I am a complex thing?a thing with parts?and that my mental life is (or is a result of) the interaction of these parts. These philosophers often believe that I am a body or a brain, and my mental life is (or is a product of) brain activity. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel argument against this view. The argument turns on certainty, that highest epistemic status that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  13. Aesthetic Experience and Certainty.Rafael Azize - 2017 - In Anja Weiberg & Stefan Majetschak (eds.), Aesthetics Today: Contemporary Approaches to the Aesthetics of Nature and of Arts. Proceedings of the 39th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 15-17.
    Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy offers a therapeutic way out of some conundrums stemming from taxonomic expectations regarding philosophical description of experience in general. The paper asks if this is also true of the facts of aesthetic experience. This possibility is hinted at by examining an application of the notion of certainty to aesthetic experience. Some traits of possible uses of central concepts of the mature Wittgenstein to a philosophical aesthetics inspired by the “new method” are also canvassed.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14. Lying and Certainty.Neri Marsili - 2018 - In Jörg Meibauer (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Handbooks. pp. 170-182.
    In the philosophical literature on the definition of lying, the analysis is generally restricted to cases of flat-out belief. This chapter considers the complex phenomenon of lies involving partial beliefs – beliefs ranging from mere uncertainty to absolute certainty. The first section analyses lies uttered while holding a graded belief in the falsity of the assertion, and presents a revised insincerity condition, requiring that the liar believes the assertion to be more likely to be false than true. The second (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  15. Certainty, Necessity, and Knowledge in Hume's Treatise (The editor of the collection accidentally published penultimate drafts. The version in Philpapers is the final draft--please use the final draft.).Miren Boehm - 2013 - In Stanley Tweyman (ed.), David Hume: A Tercentenary Tribute. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Caravan Books.
    Hume appeals to different kinds of certainties and necessities in the Treatise. He contrasts the certainty that arises from intuition and demonstrative reasoning with the certainty that arises from causal reasoning. He denies that the causal maxim is absolutely or metaphysically necessary, but he nonetheless takes the causal maxim and ‘proofs’ to be necessary. The focus of this paper is the certainty and necessity involved in Hume’s concept of knowledge. I defend the view that intuitive certainty, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16. Certainty and Assertion.Jacques-Henri Vollet - 2022 - Dialectica 999 (1).
    It is widely held that assertions are partially governed by an epistemic norm. But what is the epistemic condition set out in the norm? Is it knowledge, truth, belief, or something else? In this paper, I defend a view similar to that of Stanley (2008), according to which the relevant epistemic condition is epistemic certainty, where epistemic certainty (but not knowledge) is context-sensitive. I start by distinguishing epistemic certainty, subjective certainty, and knowledge. Then, I explain why (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  17. Showing Certainty: An Essay on Wittgenstein's Response to Scepticism.Anne Newstead - manuscript
    Coping with everyday life limits the extent of one’s scepticism. It is practically impossible to doubt the existence of the things with which one is immediately engaged and interacting. To doubt that, say, a door exists, is to step back from merely using the door (opening it) and to reflect on it in a detached, theoretical way. It is impossible to simultaneously act and live immersed in situation S while doubting that one is in S. Sceptical doubts—such as ‘Is this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Spatial certainty : Feeling is the truth.Ophelia Deroy & Merle Fairhurst - 2019 - In Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy & Charles Spence (eds.), Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science. New York: Routledge.
    A common sense view is illustrated by Doubting Thomas, and surfaces in many philosophical and psychological writings : Touching is better than seeing. But can we make sense of this privilege? We rule out that it could mean that touch is more informative than vision, more ‘objective’ or more directly in contact with reality. Instead, we propose that touch offers not a perceptual, but a metacognitive advantage: touch is not more objective than vision but rather provides comparatively higher subjective (...). (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Certainty and Explanation in Descartes’s Philosophy of Science.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (2):302-327.
    This paper presents a new approach to resolving an apparent tension in Descartes’ discussion of scientific theories and explanations in the Principles of Philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes repeatedly claims that any theories presented in science must be certain and indubitable. On the other hand, Descartes himself presents an astonishing number of speculative explanations of various scientific phenomena. In response to this tension, commentators have suggested that Descartes changed his mind about scientific theories having to be certain and indubitable, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. (1 other version)Knowledge, Certainty, and Factivity: A Possible Rapprochement.Jeffrey Hoops - 2020 - Logos and Episteme 11 (2):237-243.
    In recent discussions in this journal, Moti Mizrahi defends the claim that knowledge equals epistemic certainty. Howard Sankey finds Mizrahi’s argument to be problematic, since, as he reads it, this would entail that justification must guarantee truth. In this article, I suggest that an account of the normativity of justification is able to bridge the gap between Mizrahi’s proposal and Sankey’s objections.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. The Certainty, Modality, and Grounding of Newton’s Laws.Zvi Biener & Eric Schliesser - 2017 - The Monist 100 (3):311-325.
    Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  22. Wittgenstein on Mathematics and Certainties.Martin Kusch - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (2-3):120-142.
    _ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 120 - 142 This paper aims to contribute to the debate over epistemic versus non-epistemic readings of the ‘hinges’ in Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_. I follow Marie McGinn’s and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s lead in developing an analogy between mathematical sentences and certainties, and using the former as a model for the latter. However, I disagree with McGinn’s and Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretations concerning Wittgenstein’s views of both relata. I argue that mathematical sentences as well as certainties are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  23. Theoretical Certainty: The Qian-Jia Rationalism.Shengli Feng - 2017 - Journal of Human Cognition 1 (1):40-52.
    In the 16th century, western science made a great leap. Meanwhile, in China, the development of textual criticism (including scholars Gu Yanwu 1613-1682, Dai Zhen 1724-1777, Duan Yucai 1735-1815, Wang Niansun 1744-1832) also facilitated the development of scientific factors (Hu Shi 1967).This paper argues that Qian-Jia scholars爷work represented a new era of traditional research that the value of scholarships and intellectual work (starting from Gu Yanwu 1613-1682, Dai Zhen 1724-1777, Duan Yucai 1735-1815, Wang Niansun 1744-1832, etc.) is essentially based on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. The History of Moral Certainty as the Pre-History of Typicality.Mario Hubert - 2024 - Physics and the Nature of Reality: Essays in Memory of Detlef Dürr.
    This paper investigates the historical origin and ancestors of typicality, which is now a central concept in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics and Bohmian Mechanics. Although Ludwig Boltzmann did not use the word typicality, its main idea, namely, that something happens almost always or is valid for almost all cases, plays a crucial role for his explanation of how thermodynamic systems approach equilibrium. At the beginning of the 20th century, the focus on almost always or almost everywhere was fruitful for developing measure (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Factivity and Epistemic Certainty: A Reply to Sankey.Moti Mizrahi - 2019 - Logos and Episteme 10 (4):443-444.
    This is a reply to Howard Sankey’s comment (“Factivity or Grounds? Comment on Mizrahi”) on my paper, “You Can’t Handle the Truth: Knowledge = Epistemic Certainty,” in which I present an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. While Sankey is right that factivity does not entail epistemic certainty, the factivity of knowledge does entail that knowledge is epistemic certainty.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  26. Induction and certainty in the physics of Wolff and Crusius.Hein van den Berg & Boris Demarest - 2024 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (5):1052-1073.
    In this paper, we analyse conceptions of induction and certainty in Wolff and Crusius, highlighting their competing conceptions of physics. We discuss (i) the perspective of Wolff, who assigned induction an important role in physics, but argued that physics should be an axiomatic science containing certain statements, and (ii) the perspective of Crusius, who adopted parts of the ideal of axiomatic physics but criticized the scope of Wolff’s ideal of certain science. Against interpretations that take Wolff’s proofs in physics (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. Reading 'On Certainty' through the Lens of Cavell: Scepticism, Dogmatism and the 'Groundlessness of our Believing'.Chantal Bax - 2013 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (4):515 - 533.
    While Cavell is well known for his reinterpretation of the later Wittgenstein, he has never really engaged himself with post-Investigations writings like On Certainty. This collection may, however, seem to undermine the profoundly anti-dogmatic reading of Wittgenstein that Cavell has developed. In addition to apparently arguing against what Cavell calls ‘the truth of skepticism’ – a phrase contested by other Wittgensteinians – On Certainty may seem to justify the rejection of whoever dares to question one’s basic presuppositions. According (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  28. (2 other versions)How to Be Sure: Sensory Exploration and Empirical Certainty.Mohan Matthen - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (1):38-69.
    I can be wrong about things I seem to perceive; the conditions might lead me to be mistaken about them. Since I can't rule out the possibility that the conditions are misleading, I can't be sure that I am perceiving this thing in my hand correctly. But suppose that I am able to examine it actively—handling it, looking closer, shining a light on it, and so on. Then, my level of uncertainty goes down; in the limit it is eliminated entirely. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  29. Certainty and Our Sense of Acquaintance with Experiences.François Kammerer - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):3015-3036.
    Why do we tend to think that phenomenal consciousness poses a hard problem? The answer seems to lie in part in the fact that we have the impression that phenomenal experiences are presented to us in a particularly immediate and revelatory way: we have a sense of acquaintance with our experiences. Recent views have offered resources to explain such persisting impression, by hypothesizing that the very design of our cognitive systems inevitably leads us to hold beliefs about our own experiences (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. Certainty, laws and facts in Francis Bacon's jurisprudence.Silvia Manzo - 2014 - Intellectual History Review 24 (4):457-478.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. "Moral Certainty", One Concept, Several Perspectives; Evaluation of Two Relative and Absolute Approaches about "Moral Certainty" Based on Wittgenstein's On Certainty.Mohammad Saeed Abdollahi - 2024 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations 18 (46):13-29.
    One of the important ethical concepts that has occupied the minds of many philosophers in the past years is the concept of "moral certainty". This means whether there are moral propositions that are so certain that no doubt or argument or evidence can face them. According to some philosophers, for example, the statement "the wrongness of killing innocent people" brings us such moral certainty. Among the philosophers who have written in this field, two basic readings of Nigel Pleasants (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. Dead certainty in the Cotard delusion.Kelly Roe - unknown
    Some people insist that they are dead. Rather than starting with the usual assumption that delusions are ‘false beliefs about external reality’ I want to consider how interpreting their claim as a report of a certain kind of anomalous experience assists us in understanding why they are certain, why their claim is immune from evidence to the contrary, and why they do not act in ways we would expect were they to believe their claim to be true of the world. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33.  88
    Some Worries About the Probability Account of the Feelings of (Un)Certainty.Sergiu Spatan - 2024 - Erkenntnis.
    In recent papers, Peter Carruthers and others have argued that the feeling of uncertainty is not metacognitive (i.e., it is not elicited by second-order cognitive appraisals) but is elicited solely by first-order likelihood estimates—a probability account of the feeling of uncertainty. In this paper, I make a case for why a probability account is sufficient to explain neither the feeling of uncertainty nor the feeling of certainty in self-reflecting humans. I argue first that humans’ feelings of (un)certainty vary (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Chasing Certainty After Cardiac Arrest: Can a Technological Innovation Solve a Moral Dilemma?Mayli Mertens, Janine van Til, Eline Bouwers-Beens & Marianne Boenink - 2021 - Neuroethics 14 (3):541-559.
    When information on a coma patient’s expected outcome is uncertain, a moral dilemma arises in clinical practice: if life-sustaining treatment is continued, the patient may survive with unacceptably poor neurological prospects, but if withdrawn a patient who could have recovered may die. Continuous electroencephalogram-monitoring is expected to substantially improve neuroprognostication for patients in coma after cardiac arrest. This raises expectations that decisions whether or not to withdraw will become easier. This paper investigates that expectation, exploring cEEG’s impacts when it becomes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  35. Cartesian Certainty, Realism and Scientific Inference.Manuel Barrantes - 2019 - In Jorge Secada & Cecilia Wee (eds.), The Cartesian Mind. Routledge.
    In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes explains several observable phenomena showing that they are caused by special arrangements of unobservable microparticles. Despite these microparticles being unobservable, many passages suggest that he was very confident that these explanations were correct. In other passages, however, Descartes points out that these explanations merely hold the status of “suppositions” or “conjectures” that could be wrong. My main goal in this chapter is to clarify this apparent conflict. I argue first that for Descartes it was (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  36. Subjective probability and quantum certainty.Carlton M. Caves, Christopher A. Fuchs & Rüdiger Schack - 2007 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (2):255-274.
    In the Bayesian approach to quantum mechanics, probabilities—and thus quantum states—represent an agent’s degrees of belief, rather than corresponding to objective properties of physical systems. In this paper we investigate the concept of certainty in quantum mechanics. Particularly, we show how the probability-1 predictions derived from pure quantum states highlight a fundamental difference between our Bayesian approach, on the one hand, and Copenhagen and similar interpretations on the other. We first review the main arguments for the general claim that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  37. Questioning the Body. Certainties between Epistemology and Psychopathologies.Claudio Fabbroni - 2023 - In Ines Skelac & Ante Belić (eds.), What Cannot Be Shown Cannot Be Said: Proceedings of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, Zagreb, Croatia, 2021. Lit Verlag. pp. 161-174.
    Having a body is one of those unquestionable certainties of which we could not really understand the negation: the latter would not be a legitimate doubt in our linguistic, and therefore the epistemic game. In facts, according to Wittgenstein, contravening certain cornerstones of our language game implies that the used combination of words is being excluded from the game, withdrawn from circulation. The idea of this paper is that the external labelling of a behaviour as a mental illness, prima facie, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38. Wittgenstein on certainty.Peter Eastman - 2022 - Medium.Com.
    The purpose of this article is to sketch out a contrast between the kind of ‘philosophising’ practiced by the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and those of a similar mindset; and ‘philosophising’ in the pursuit of an accurate understanding of one’s ordinary experiential existence, specifically with a view to achieving an insight into it, such that one might proceed in the direction of resolving the mystery at the core of our experience. (Whether or not this latter approach is any way (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  39. Quintilian's Theory of Certainty and Its Afterlife in Early Modern Italy.Charles McNamara - 2016 - Dissertation, Columbia University
    This dissertation explores how antiquity and some of its early modern admirers understand the notion of certainty, especially as it is theorized in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, a first-century educational manual for the aspiring orator that defines certainty in terms of consensus. As part of a larger discussion of argumentative strategies, Quintilian turns to the “nature of all arguments,” which he defines as “reasoning which lends credence to what is doubtful by means of what is certain” (ratio per ea (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. Lambert on Moral Certainty and the Justification of Induction.Aaron Wells - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 2024.
    I reconstruct J. H. Lambert’s views on how practical grounds relate to epistemic features, such as certainty. I argue, first, that Lambert’s account of moral certainty does not involve any distinctively practical influence on theoretical belief. However, it does present an interesting form of fallibilism about justification as well as a denial of a tight link between knowledge and action. Second, I argue that for Lambert, the persistence principle that underwrites induction is supported by practical reasons to believe; (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  41. Descartes on certainty in deduction.Jacob Zellmer - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 105 (C):158-164.
    This article examines how deduction preserves certainty and how much certainty it can preserve according to Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind. I argue that the certainty of a deduction is a matter of four conditions for Descartes. First, certainty depends on whether the conjunction of simple propositions is composed with necessity or contingency. Second, a deduction approaches the certainty of an intuition depending on how many “acts of conceiving” it requires and—third—the complexity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  42. (2 other versions)A Pragmatist Conception of Certainty: Wittgenstein and Santayana.Guy Andrew Bennett-Hunter - 2012 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4 (2):146-157.
    The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developedand articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his pragmatist reference (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  43. Probability and Certainty.Jonny Blamey - 2008 - Praxis 1 (1).
    Probability can be used to measure degree of belief in two ways: objectively and subjectively. The objective measure is a measure of the rational degree of belief in a proposition given a set of evidential propositions. The subjective measure is the measure of a particular subject’s dispositions to decide between options. In both measures, certainty is a degree of belief 1. I will show, however, that there can be cases where one belief is stronger than another yet both beliefs (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  44. Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief.Martin Smith - 2016 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   124 citations  
  45. Leibniz on the Metaphysical Certainty of Innate Ideas.Alberto Luis López - 2023 - In Juan Antonio Nicolás, Alejandro Herrera, Roberto Casales, Leonardo Ruiz & Alfredo Martinez (eds.), G.W. Leibniz: Razón, verdad y diálogo. Granada: Comares. pp. 117-128.
    In Leibniz’s New Essays stands out, within many important topics, his doctrine of innate ideas, which supposes the division between sense knowledge and innate knowledge and implies the distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. That doctrine is particularly relevant for Leibniz’s philosophy, but implicitly entails the epistemological difference between belief, on one hand, and certainty, on the other. In this paper I outline, according to my interpretation, how Leibniz explains that humans can have certainty about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  46. How to Assess the Epistemic Wrongness of Sponsorship Bias? The Case of Manufactured Certainty.Jon Leefmann - 2021 - Frontiers In 6 (Article 599909):1-13.
    Although the impact of so-called “sponsorship bias” has been the subject of increased attention in the philosophy of science, what exactly constitutes its epistemic wrongness is still debated. In this paper, I will argue that neither evidential accounts nor social–epistemological accounts can fully account for the epistemic wrongness of sponsorship bias, but there are good reasons to prefer social–epistemological to evidential accounts. I will defend this claim by examining how both accounts deal with a paradigm case from medical epistemology, recently (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  47. The Role of Certainty.Timm Triplett - 2021 - Acta Analytica 36 (2):171-190.
    I argue that we can achieve certainty about some empirical propositions. When someone is having a migraine and attending to it, she can be certain that she is in pain. I show that examples intended to undermine claims of certainty or to raise doubts about the reliability of introspection do not touch such cases. Traditional foundationalists have held that epistemically certain beliefs can serve as the basis for all one’s other justified beliefs. This is not so, because those (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  48. Dreaming and certainty.Jim Stone - 1984 - Philosophical Studies 45 (May):353-368.
    I argue that being wide awake is an epistemic virtue which enables me to recognize immediately that I'm wide awake. Also I argue that dreams are imaginings and that the wide awake mind can immediately discern the difference between imaginings and vivid sense experience. Descartes need only pinch himself.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  49. You Can’t Handle the Truth: Knowledge = Epistemic Certainty.Moti Mizrahi - 2019 - Logos and Episteme 10 (2):225-227.
    In this discussion note, I put forth an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. If this argument is sound, then epistemologists who think that knowledge is factive are thereby also committed to the view that knowledge is epistemic certainty.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  50. Knowledge and certainty.Jason Stanley - 2008 - Philosophical Issues 18 (1):35-57.
    This paper is a companion piece to my earlier paper “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”. There are two intuitive charges against fallibilism. One is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. The second is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, even though (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   114 citations  
1 — 50 / 467