Knowledge of facts is essential for the management of life. Most studies of the subject examine how we go about trying to obtain it; they describe the processes and proceedings of rational inquiry. The present work steps back from this to inquire into the limits and limitations of such processes and to identify the assets and the limitabilities of what they are able to supply for us. It examines how knowledge of facts is secured and consolidated as such, and what the resulting information can and cannot provide. It argues that the unavoidable incompleteness of our factual information also endows it with an element of incorrectness. By looking also at the negative side of human inquiry the book’s perspective clarifies the nature of our grip on the facts that constitute our view of the reality of things.
Knowledge of facts is essential for the management of life. Most studies of the subject examine how we go about trying to obtain it; they describe the processes and proceedings of rational inquiry. The present work steps back from this to inquire into the limits and limitations of such processes and to identify the assets and the limitabilities of what they are able to supply for us. It examines how knowledge of facts is secured and consolidated as such, and what the resulting information can and cannot provide. It argues that the unavoidable incompleteness of our factual information also endows it with an element of incorrectness. By looking also at the negative side of human inquiry the book’s perspective clarifies the nature of our grip on the facts that constitute our view of the reality of things.
Knowledge of facts is essential for the management of life. Most studies of the subject examine how we go about trying to obtain it; they describe the processes and proceedings of rational inquiry. The present work steps back from this to inquire into the limits and limitations of such processes and to identify the assets and the limitabilities of what they are able to supply for us. It examines how knowledge of facts is secured and consolidated as such, and what the resulting information can and cannot provide. It argues that the unavoidable incompleteness of our factual information also endows it with an element of incorrectness. By looking also at the negative side of human inquiry the book's perspective clarifies the nature of our grip on the facts that constitute our view of the reality of things.
The Realm of Reason is a manifesto for a new rationalism in philosophy. Christopher Peacocke develops an original theory of what makes a thinker entitled to form a given belief. The theory is articulated in three principles of rationalism, which together imply that all entitlement has an element that is independent of experience. Peacocke elaborates this rationalism in detail for the classical issues of perceptual knowledge, induction, and the status of moral thought. Hisnew generalized approach to epistemology has applications throughout philosophy, and it will interest all concerned with knowledge, truth, and rationality.
Philosophers have long been tempted by the idea that objects and properties are abstractions from the facts. But how is this abstraction supposed to go? If the objects and properties aren't 'already' there, how do the facts give rise to them? Jason Turner develops and defends a novel answer to this question: The facts are arranged in a quasi-geometric 'logical space', and objects and properties arise from different quasi-geometric structures in this space.
"Anyone who looks beyond the bestseller lists can see that the literary landscape outside its commercial walls is just as varied as that of visual art, just as wild, just as conceptual: novels in the form of dioramas, narratives read through virtual-reality glasses, or told as a series of tweets, stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting, genetic code, pixels, skin-as well as print and sound. The 100+ prose works and poems that make up Conceptualisms all have the strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it into literature. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what makes writing literature, and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature conceptual. Experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, anti- or new literature.... Across the years, a variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry and hybrid writing that, like conceptual visual art, foregrounds its ideas, explores new forms, challenges mainstream writing traditions, strives for ways to speak to the present. Along with whatever else they do, they ask, Why isn't this also literature?-and keep the boundaries of literature flexible and unresolved. Now, for the first time, here is an anthology that offers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. The first major anthology of this other tradition, Conceptualisms presents writing by over 90 authors, across three generations, representing a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to their subjects. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped the nature of contemporary writing, such Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. They'll also find authors, and responses to the canon, that they haven't yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live"--
Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts or truths do not exist. Do these views imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic ones, do not exist? The Normative Web develops a positive answer to this question. Terence Cuneo argues that the similarities between moral and epistemic facts provide excellent reason to believe that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist. But epistemic facts, it is argued, do exist: to deny their existence would commit us to an extreme version of epistemological skepticism. Therefore, Cuneo concludes, moral facts exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. In so arguing, Cuneo provides not simply a defense of moral realism, but a positive argument for it. Moreover, this argument engages with a wide range of antirealist positions in epistemology such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. If the central argument of The Normative Web is correct, antirealist positions of these varieties come at a very high cost. Given their cost, Cuneo contends, we should find realism about both epistemic and moral facts highly attractive.
New insights from the science of science Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. Samuel Arbesman shows us how knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and how this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives. He takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries.
