The Aim of Belief

The Aim of Belief

Author: Timothy Hoo Wai Chan

Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 019967213X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Aim of Belief is the first book devoted to the question: 'what is belief?' Eleven newly commissioned essays by leading authors reflect the state of the art and further advance the current debate. The book will be key reading for researchers working on philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and meta-ethics.


The Epistemology of Belief

The Epistemology of Belief

Author: H. Vahid

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-10-24

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0230584470

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a challenge to certain epistemic features of belief, resulting in a unified and coherent picture of the epistemology of belief. The author examines current ideas in a number of areas, beginning with the truth-directed nature of belief in the context of the so-called 'Moore's paradoxes'. He then investigates the sensitivity of beliefs to evidence by exploring how sensory experiences can confer justifications on the beliefs they give rise to, and provides an account of the basing relation problem. The consequences of these arguments are carefully considered, particularly the issues involving the problem of easy knowledge and warrant transmission. Finally, he focuses on the purported fallibility of beliefs and our knowledge of their contents, arguing that the fallible/infallible distinction is best understood in terms of externalist/internalist conceptions of knowledge, and that the thesis of content externalism does not threaten the privileged character of self-knowledge.


The Norm of Belief

The Norm of Belief

Author: John Gibbons

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-08

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 019967339X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

John Gibbons presents a new account of epistemic normativity. Belief seems to come with a built-in set of standards or norms—truth and reasonableness, for example—but which one is the fundamental norm of belief? He explains both the norms of knowledge and of truth in terms of the fundamental norm, the one that tells you to be reasonable.


Rational Belief

Rational Belief

Author: Robert Audi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190221836

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a wide-ranging treatment of central topics in epistemology. It provides conceptions of belief and knowledge, offers a theory of how they are grounded in our experience and in the social context of testimony, and connects them with the will and with action, moral responsibility, and intellectual virtue.


Belief and Truth

Belief and Truth

Author: Katja Maria Vogt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-09-20

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0199916810

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato explores a Socratic intuition about belief, doxa — belief is "shameful." In aiming for knowledge, one must aim to get rid of beliefs. Vogt shows how deeply this proposal differs from contemporary views, but that it nevertheless speaks to intuitions we are likely to share with Plato, ancient skeptics, and Stoic epistemologists.


Knowledge, Belief, and God

Knowledge, Belief, and God

Author: Matthew A. Benton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0198798709

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas.


When is True Belief Knowledge?

When is True Belief Knowledge?

Author: Richard Foley

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-07-22

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0691154724

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief. In this provocative book, Richard Foley finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not knowledge, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs--something important that she doesn't quite "get." This may seem a modest point but, as Foley shows, it has the potential to reorient the theory of knowledge. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information one does or doesn't have. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that, contrary to what is often thought, there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one doesn't lack important nearby information. Challenging some of the central assumptions of contemporary epistemology, this is an original and important account of knowledge.


Believing Against the Evidence

Believing Against the Evidence

Author: Miriam Schleifer McCormick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1136682686

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible (and possible) to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief.


Degrees of Belief

Degrees of Belief

Author: Franz Huber

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2008-12-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1402091982

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of the competing theories of degrees of belief. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind and epistemic logic.


Reflective Knowledge

Reflective Knowledge

Author: Ernest Sosa

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-01-08

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0199217254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reflective Knowledge draws together ground-breaking work in epistemology by Ernest Sosa. He argues for a reflective virtue epistemology based on virtuous circularity, shows how this idea may be found explicitly or just below the surface in such illustrious predecessors as Descartes and Moore, and defends the view against its rivals.