epistemology exam

What is the purpose of Epistemology

Answers “what is reasonable?”

Study of human knowledge, its nature, its sources, its justification

What are the two relationships between metaphysics and epistemology?

1. Epistemology acts as a test for metaphysics

2. Epistemology is the natural result of the metaphysical inquiry of the ancients and the medievals

What are the four general approaches to explaining the difference between knowledge and any merely “true belief”

Normative

Naturalistic

Skepticism

Virtue Epistemology

6 Common Points of Rationalism

1. Reason is the primary or most superior source of knowledge about reality

2. Sense experience is an unreliable and inadequate route to knowledge

3. Fundamental truths about the world can be known a priori; they are either innate it self-evident to our minds

4. Knowledge is possible

5. Only through reason can knowledge be obtained

6. Beliefs based on reason represent reality

3 Common Points of Empiricism

1. The only source of fundamental knowledge is sense experience

2. Reason is an unreliable and inadequate route to knowledge unless it is grounded in sense experience

3. There is no evidence of innate ideas within the mind that are known apart from experience

Empiricists emphasize _____, while rationalists emphasize ______

experience, reason

The mark of the cogito is its ____

Clarity and distinctness

Primary qualities for Descartes and Locke

D: objects available to mathematics

L: properties of the objects themselves

Secondary qualities for Descartes and Locke

D: objects available to senses

L: properties that affect our sense organs

According to Locke, our minds begin as a _____ and all knowledge comes from _____

blank slate, experience

Locke’s three categories of the mind

Sensation: data provided by the senses

Ideas: our immediate perception of an object

Quality: what we have called attribute (redness, roundness, ect)

What did George Berkeley mean by “to be is to be perceived”?

An object can only exist when it is observed

Hume takes ___ to be the central idea of all reasoning

Causation

Hume’s fork is the idea that for a belief to be justified it must either be a ___ or a ____

relation of ideas, matter of fact

What is Hume’s Fork and what is it supposed to demonstrate?

It displays what a justifiable belief must be and attempts to demonstrate that knowledge is unattainable

What is Kant’s solution to Hume’s Fork?

Categories of the Mind or Synthetic A Priori

____ and ____ believed that there are no substances

Berkeley, Hume

For Descartes, clear and distinct propositions are the criteria for ____

knowledge

Empiricism is the philosophical theory that asserts _____

all knowledge, except for certain logical truths and principles of mathematics, comes from experience

Fundamental distinction between rationalism and empiricism

idk

r: ideas

e: experience

e usually believes knowledge is unattainable

Descartes coined the expression

Cogito Ergo Sum

Justified true belief is often advanced as a candidate for a definition of ____

knowledge (??)