Talk:Epistemology

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Deletions

The irrationality section should be deleted, it has little to do with the current epistemological literature. It is POV.

“ It is common for epistemological theories to avoid skepticism by adopting a foundationalist approach. To do this, they argue that certain types of statements have a special epistemological status — that of not needing to be justified. So it is possible to classify epistemological theories according to the type of statement that each argues has this special status.”

- I deleted this because it is an inadequate introduction to the following section which doesn’t mainly concern types of foundationalism and the beliefs they identify as primary.

“or positivism, which places higher emphasis on ideas about reality rather than on experiences of reality.”

- Deleted because Postivists who place primary emphasis on experience, that’s what verificationism is about after all.

“The central problem for epistemology then becomes explaining this correspondence.”

- Deleted, not everyone supports the correspondence view of truth. The central problem of epistemology is standardly viewed as the problem of the meaning and possibility of knowledge.

“The Scientific Method was once favoured as the reason for scientific success, but recent difficulties in the philosophy of science have led to a rise in coherentism.”

- Deleted because coherentists usually support the “Scientific method”. The debate between foundationalism and coherentism little concerns the validity of the scientific method.

“Empiricists have traditionally denied that even these fields could be a priori knowledge. Two common arguments are that these sorts of knowledge can only be derived from experience (as John Stuart Mill argued), and that they do not constitute "real" knowledge (as David Hume argued).”

- Deleted because it’s inaccurate. Historically it’s safe to say that most empricists have believed that logical and mathematical knowledge ( especially logical knowledge) are knowable a-priori.

“Analytic statements (for example, mathematical truths), are held to be true without reference to the external world, and these are taken to be exemplary knowledge statements.”

-The section on idealism is inaccurate. This was particularly inaccurate. It was deleted because beliefs about the status of mathematical and logical knowledge vary from idealist to idealist, the views described above ( which are, by the way, poorly phrased) are not held by all idealists.

“The opposite theory to this is solipsism.”

- Deleted because it is (a) confusing and unnecessary (b) not necessarily accurate ( c) simplistic. The whole section on naive realism looks suspicious to me.

- The section on Pragmatism should be deleted or expanded because there are “as many pragmatisms as there are pragmatists”. Between the Neo-Pragmatism of Rorty and the Pragmatism of Quine there is little common ground. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 220.236.173.165 (talk • contribs) 2006-04-25 10:50:55 (UTC)

- The section on the "Galaxy Theory" should be deleted. It is a fringe view of one author. But it occupies a huge space in the main article on epistemology. There are dozens of epistemologists whose work is far more influential.

Typo

Semantic Attack Some (e.g. Hirsch) claim that Gettier was sloppy in his definition of justification. Gettier siletly assumes, that belief can be justified by belief. He accepts Smith's proposation "the one who gets the job will have ten cents in his pocket" as justified just because it turns out to be true, which is of course tautological. Then he debunks that contrived wrong case. The belief about the ten cents was in truth not justified, because it was based on [i]yet another[/i] belief - that Jones would get the job. That belief turned out to be wrong, therefore the belief aubout the ten cents was [i]not[/i] justified.

sileNtly?

Smith's proposItion, not proposAtion

italic command failed

Suggestion: "Then Hirsch debunks...", instead of "Then he debunks..." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.37.49.56 (talk • contribs) 11:57, 28 December 2006

Internalism/Externalism on Descartes

Considering that a link already exists to the Internalism/Externalism page, and that Descartes is only peripherally relevant to the Internalism/Externalism debate, I would recommend either cutting the paragraph, or reducing it to a very few sentences. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sedenko (talk • contribs) 03:00, 17 September 2009

External LInks

I think there are too many External Links in this article. Any URL that goes to a 404 or otherwise in error (e.g., the link works but it doesn't link to the article cited but to a general info page about the site) I'm just removing. Most of the time if I find a dead link I try using wayback first to find the archived version if possible but in this case IMO there are too many external links anyway and its best to just delete dead links in this case. BTW, I've left several that I think are highly questionable. I tend to be overly critical and am quicker to axe stuff than some editors so I'm leaving several links that my first response was to delete but if anyone else wants to go through and remove a few more I think it would help. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 15:49, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

Should we not have summaries of the different areas of Epistemology

Should we not have summaries of the different areas of Epistemology such as religious epistemology, and all the different branches since this is the parent article? --Inayity (talk) 18:36, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm not very familiar with religious epistemology. If it makes sense to add a link and some text to it feel free. Personally, I think the article is better off without such additions. An issue with philosophy is everything can be connected to everything else. In my readings the topic of epistemology, at least in modern philosophy is pretty much distinct from issues of religion and I think it dilutes the article to bring in too many additional variants but I don't feel strongly either way, if you think it makes sense, have the refs, etc. I'm OK with it. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 05:02, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

My issue is right now all over Wikipedia are article like Outline of epistemology, and Social epistemology, Evolutionary epistemology, Constructivist epistemology and I feel like something should glue them more. For example linguistics is the parent and it is glued to all the other topics in some structured way. Just throwing it out there, almost like we need a portal or something. --Inayity (talk) 12:54, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

I started to type "if I can be a bit philosophical" but then thought hey if one can't get a little philosophical on the talk page for epistemology... Anyway, you are touching on something that I notice a lot on Wikipedia articles. For example, on the topic of distributed computing there are several articles that really are all about the same topic it's just that whoever oversaw the article creation process wasn't technical enough to understand that "distributed computing" and "concurrent computing" are essentially the same topic. Or another example is content management, there are several articles that overlap quite a bit. When I get ambitious I will take the effort to merge or split articles as appropriate but it can be a pain. I ran into one guy who just raised a fit over such an article being merged and even though I felt very strongly that I was correct I just gave up, it wasn't worth the fight. If I were setting up a new Wikipedia the first thing I would do is create ontologies for the various topics. In this sense an ontology is a formal logical model. There is amazing technology from Stanford called Protege that lets you do that and that can also link the concepts up to articles and provide a knowledge level underlying the pages as opposed to just thinking about keywords and links the way most sites do. The whole project is called Semantic Web and it's the brainchild of one of the guys who invented the original Internet. Anyway, that's OT I know... I just like talking about it... but I agree with you there are lots of overlapping articles and I'll always support any effort to merge or integrate them. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 13:43, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

content from "Knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge by acquaintance"

Here is a some content that did not fit in the section it was in. This was in the section of "Knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge by acquaintance". It does not seem to relate in this section. I do not know where it should go in the rest of the article. "knowledge argument proposed by Frank Jackson" is not in the article, "Frank Jackson" is not in this article, no other arguments in this article use "color". Does any one else know where this might better fit?

In their response to the knowledge argument proposed by Frank Jackson, Lewis and Nemirow argues that in the case of someone who had never seen a certain color, for instance red, she did make a genuine discovery when she first experienced redness. But she was not coming to know a new fact of which she did not know before her release; instead she just learned a new ability. R00m c (talk) 20:21, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Also I found this [[1]] to be related to the content above. Maybe this context can help place this content, if it fits in this article somewhere. R00m c (talk) 20:31, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

content from "Knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge by acquaintance"

"N.B. some languages related to English have been said to retain these verbs, e.g. Scots: "wit" and "ken"." This is not relevant to the argument. Scots say, "I donna (do not) ken" for both knowing a person or knowing a fact. "I donna ken him," or "I donna ken what time it is."