Truth Of Belief Research Articles

The limits of experience: Dogmatism and moral epistemology

AbstractLet “phenomenal dogmatism” be the thesis that some experiences provide some beliefs with immediate prima facie justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. A basic question‐mark looms over phenomenal dogmatism: Why should the fact that a person is visited by some phenomenal feel suggest the likely truth of a belief? In this paper, I press this challenge, arguing that perceptually justified beliefs are justified not purely by perceptual experiences’ phenomenology, but also because we have justified second‐order background beliefs to the effect that the occurrence of certain perceptual experiences is indicative of the likely truth of certain corresponding beliefs. To bring this out, I contrast “perceptual dogmatism” with “moral dogmatism”: the thesis that some emotional experiences provide some moral beliefs with immediate prima facie justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. I argue that moral dogmatism is much less antecedently appealing, precisely because the counterpart second‐order beliefs here are much less plausible.

Pocong Oath Law in Palembang City

This research was motivated by the phenomenon of the pocong oath carried out by Lorong A Rahman Residents, RT 10/04, Kelurahan 1 Ilir, Ilir Timur II District Palembang City, which had shocked the public on social media. Besides that, this issue often occurs in the community. The pocong oath is closely related to shari'áh. The pocong oath is substantially the same as a cultural practice or a community custom; it is done when there is a dispute or problem of a mystical nature or to prove something. Rationality is essential to distinguish between the truth of belief and rationality, which refers to the basis for believing it. The findings of this study are that the religious point of view related to the pocong oath is that there must be a name of God and that it is a truth. The method used in this study is qualitative research with three data collection techniques, namely in-depth interviews, conservation and documentation.

The Problem of Unwelcome Epistemic Company

AbstractMany of us are unmoved when it is objected that some morally or intellectually suspect source agrees with our belief. While we may tend to find this kind of guilt by epistemic association unproblematic, I argue that this tendency is a mistake. We sometimes face what I call the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. This is the problem of encountering agreement about the content of your belief from a source whose faults give you reason to worry about the belief's truth, normative status, etiology, or implications. On the basis of an array of cases, I elaborate four distinct kinds of problems that unwelcome epistemic company poses. Two of these are distinctly epistemic, and two are moral. I canvass possible responses, ranging from stubbornness to an epistemic prudishness that avoids unwelcome company at all costs. Finally, I offer preliminary lessons of the problem and distinguish it from the problem of peer disagreement.

Islamisasi Prinsip Counter Accounting

The purpose of this study is to explore the idea of Islamization of counter accounting principles. Such an Islamization is necessary because counter accounting princip-les are formulated by using the philosophy of punk from the western society which has different beliefs. In addition, the idea of Islamization in this study shows that Islamic knowledge can indeed be developed continuously. Therefore, the claim that there is no development inside this knowledge, and that it cannot be categorized as science, willl no longer exist. This study reveals the findings that the wisdom from argumentation which constructs the principles of counter accounting is parallel with the wisdom from Islamic values as interpreted by experts of Islamic accounting. The Islamiza-tion of counter accounting principles confirms the truth of belief in the existence of Allah and His revelation.

Phenomenology of certainty and belief. Reading William James

This essay studies the analysis that the psychologist and philosopher William James applies to the function of belief in relation to his concepts of the stream of thought and process of knowledge. Furthermore, it pays attention to James’s phenomenology of certainty within experience and to the explanation of the foundational place of feelings in experience. In James’s thought we may call certainty only what can provide a knowledge which stands in immediate relation to the inner state: the images provided by individual depths are both the locus of perplexity and the spring of certainty. The truth of beliefs is in this sense provisional upon the outcome of the continuing experience of understanding and of the continuing process of critical scrutiny.

Der Gelehrte bei Marsilius von Padua und Wilhelm von Ockham. Zur Abgrenzung von politischer und gelehrter Autorität in der Philosophie des 14. Jahrhunderts

Abstract In ‘The Republic’, Plato famously reduced practical authority to theoretical authority, arguing that a just society must be governed by philosophers. This idea of the philosopher-king flourished in the medieval specula principum. The medieval papacy was grounded on a similar blend of practical and theoretical authority. The Pope was credited with the capacity to decide on the truth of beliefs because he was elected to office. In their fight against the omnicompetence of the Pope, Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham were aware that in order to contain the power of the papal office, they had to find a way of legitimately distinguishing between theoretical and practical authority. Consequently, both of them severed the traditional link between political theory and virtue ethics, considering the virtue and the wisdom of the ruler as accidental to the legitimacy of government. In contrast to this demotion of theoretical authority in the state, both Marsilius and William argued that experts should play a bigger role in the church. The definition of true belief and heresy should not, according to them, lie in the hands of an elected official (i. e. the Pope), but rather in the hands of theological experts. This article aims to show that the critique of the papal monarchy gave rise to a new understanding of the distinction between theoretical and practical authority.

Truth Monism Without Teleology

Some say the swamping problem confronts all who believe that true belief is the sole fundamental epistemic value (“T-Monism”, to use Duncan Pritchard's term). This, I say, is mistaken. The problem only confronts T-Monists if they grant two teleological claims: (i) that all derived epistemic value is instrumental, and (ii) that it is the state of believing truly rather than the standard of truth in belief that is fundamentally epistemically valuable. T-Monists should reject (i) and (ii), and appeal to a non-teleological form of value derivation I call Fitting Response Derivation that obviates swamping. Since, alas, simple reliabilists can't apply this model to knowledge, the problem remains for them, and is local

The Idea of Universal Salvation in Piers Plowman B and C

This essay takes up Nicholas Watson's important and influential article, “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England,” and argues that, for William Langland at least, the promise of universal salvation is at best ambiguous. The essay examines in detail Christ's speech after he has harrowed hell, the principal locus for the expression of Langland's views on the matter, but attempts to place this speech in the context of and as the climactic statement of Langland's salvation theology as it develops through the poem. Important variations between the B and C texts in their treatment of the subject are given special attention. The emphasis is always on the continuously evolving drama of Piers Plowman as a poem searching for the truth of belief rather than as a poem that expounds a system of already-existing belief.

Whyte on desire fulfilment conditions: a simple problem

Abstract According to Jamie Whyte, the proper assignment of fulfilment conditions to an agent’s set of desires proceeds in three steps. First, one identifies various desire extinction and behavioural reinforcement conditions to obtain the fulfilment conditions of a certain subset of the agent’s desires. With these fulfilment conditions in hand, one then appeals to a principle connecting desire fulfilment conditions with belief truth conditions to obtain the truth conditions of a number of the agent’s beliefs. Finally, one uses these belief truth conditions to generate, via a third principle, the fulfilment conditions for the remaining desires. There is, however, a very straightforward reason why this strategy cannot yield the required results.

Reasons for Belief, Reasoning, Virtues

The paper offers an explanation of what reasons for belief are, following Paul Grice in focusing on the roles of reasons in the goal-directed activity of reasoning. Reasons are particularly salient considerations that we use as indicators of the truth of beliefs and candidates for belief. Reasons are distinguished from enabling conditions by being things that we should be able to attend to in the course of our reasoning, and in assessing how well our beliefs are supported. The final section argues that epistemic virtues have a role in enabling us to identify reasons and explores this by reference to the example of being observant.

E Pluribus Unum: Arguments against Conceptual Schemes and Empirical Content

The idea that there are conceptual schemes, relative to which we conceptualize experience, and empirical content, the nonconceptual (and so purely causal) data of experience that get conceptualized through our conceptual schemes into beliefs or sentences, is not new. The scheme-content dualist par excellance was Kant, and in the twentieth century the logical positivists formulated the dualism in terms of linguistic frameworks (or languages) and sense-data. Quine himself, though rejecting the positivists' characterization of linguistic frameworks as sets of analytic sentences, nonetheless continued to distinguish what he calls 'language', embodying our set of concepts, from 'extralinguistic facts', the raw data of experience. On this view a conceptual would be the total system of concepts and, so, the epistemic agent's total contribution to the truth of beliefs and sentences; understood linguistically, a conceptual would be the total linguistic contribution to doxastic and sentential truth. Empirical content would then be the total nonconceptual content given by the world itself and, so, the world's total contribution to doxastic and sentential truth—the total ej:^ralinguistic contribution to such truth. Nonetheless Quine argued that, though [i]t is obvious that truth in general depends on both and extralinguistic fact (1951, 36), this double dependence ... is not significantly traceable into the statements ... taken by one (42, my emphasis throughout).^ Instead, according to Quine, language or scheme is dispersed holistically throughout all the sentences of a theory.

La conversion: voie du politique ou de l'identité?

This article examines the autobiographical interpretation that a Sakalava, from the northwest of Madagascar, offers of his conversion to Christianity, which took place in the 1930s, and the interpretation his grandson makes of it for the purpose of a thesis based on the theory of inculturation after 30 years of national independence. Between these two moments, history has done its work of producing meaning which, in turn, informs the actors' outlooks. The differences revealed at the end of this comparison do not bear on the finality of the act: in both cases it is a question of regrasping of speech which intends to grasp the world. The differences bear on the shifts of meaning which affect the witness to faith, in its content and in its project for the self. One is tempted to conclude that the act of conversion results less from a testing of the truth of beliefs than from a renegotiation of the subject's relation to the world, imposed by history. In conversion is it the accomplishment — or thwarting — of political assertion that constitutes the major event?

Desire, Evil and Grace

In Plato's Meno, there is a famous discussion of desire and evil. This paper is not a contribution to Platonic scholarship, but a direct taking up of the issue whether someone can desire evil. One stock interpretation of the putative impossibility of desiring what is evil or bad is the interpretation which emphasizes an internal or conceptual tie between desire and good. This interpretation compares pairs of terms such as ‘fear—danger’, ‘belief—truth’ and ‘desire—good’. To fear something is to regard it as, or believe that it is, dangerous (or harmful); to believe something is to regard it as, or believe it to be, true (in this case the connection is trivially obvious); to desire something is to regard it as, to believe it to be, good. Since it is obvious that people believe things which are false, it is maintained that it is equally obvious that people may desire what is (in fact) bad and fear what is (in fact) harmless or of no danger. Let us call this interpretation of the doctrine that it is impossible to desire evil the weak thesis. The weak thesis allows what seems a plain fact of human reality, that people believe falsehoods, fear things that cannot harm them and desire things which are not good. Equally obviously, it allows that people fail to believe truths, fail to desire goods, and fail to fear things that are dangerous. On this weak interpretation, the manner in which wickedness to others and self-destructiveness are due to ignorance is that people are ignorant about the nature of things and ways of acting, ignorant about what it would be like to possess something or ignorant about what it would be like to do something or other.

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

Preface THE CONDITIONS OF KNOWLEDGE Why a Theory of Knowledge? Traditional Answers to Skepticism Meaning and Meaningfulness Knowledge and Belief Truth THE SCOPE OF KNOWLEDGE Perception Memory Knowledge of Oneself and Others A Priori Knowledge CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER PROBLEMS A Complete Theory of Knowledge? Bibliography Index

Personal identity in Spinoza

Spinoza's avowed aim is to discover and present the essential stages in achieving the life of human blessedness. The most important element in this progression is knowledge, of one's own nature as man, and of one's place in the universe. Utility as opposed to truth of belief will not serve Spinoza's purpose. Spinoza assumes the unity of the human individual without question, and it is doubtful whether this assumption is justified on his own principles. The concept of the human individual is examined first as a system of modifications of substance under the attributes of extension and thought, then as enduring and finally as an agent. The conclusion is reached that unity and self‐identity are illusions, but the question then arises: Who or what could be under such illusions ? The possibility of false claims to self‐identity is examined and found to be difficult to accept. Nevertheless, if Spinoza is taken as speaking suitably at varying levels of discourse, he has enlightening things to say about the human person, even though from one point of view his enterprise may be seen as self‐stultifying.