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Author: J. Carter
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-04-12
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1137336641
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Is knowledge relative? Many academics across the humanities say that it is. However those who work in mainstream epistemology generally consider that it is not. Metaepistemology and Relativism questions whether the kind of anti-relativistic background that underlies typical projects in mainstream epistemology can on closer inspection be vindicated.
Author: Steven D. Hales
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-03-21
Total Pages: 960
ISBN-13: 1444392484
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A Companion to Relativism presents original contributions from leading scholars that address the latest thinking on the role of relativism in the philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics. Features original contributions from many of the leading figures working on various aspects of relativism Presents a substantial, broad range of current thinking about relativism Addresses relativism from many of the major subfields of philosophy, including philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics
Author: Carol Rovane
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-12-16
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0674726979
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Relativism is a hotly contested doctrine among philosophers, some of whom regard it as neither true nor false but simply incoherent. As Carol Rovane demonstrates in this analytical tour-de-force, the way to defend relativism is not initially by establishing its truth but by clarifying its content. The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism elaborates a doctrine of relativism that has a consistent logical, metaphysical, and practical significance. Relativism is worth debating, Rovane contends, because it bears directly on the moral choices we make in our lives. Three intuitive conceptions of relativism have been influential in philosophical discourse. These include the idea that certain unavoidable disagreements are irresolvable, leading to the conclusion that "both sides are right," and the idea that truth is always relative to context. But the most compelling, Rovane maintains, is the "alternatives intuition." Alternatives are truths that cannot be embraced together because they are not universal. Something other than logical contradiction excludes them. When this is so, logical relations no longer hold among all truth-value-bearers. Some truths will be irreconcilable between individuals even though they are valid in themselves. The practical consequence is that some forms of interpersonal engagement are confined within definite boundaries, and one has no choice but to view what lies beyond those boundaries with what Rovane calls "epistemic indifference." In a very real sense, some people inhabit different worlds--true in themselves, but closed off to belief from those who hold irreducibly incompatible truths.
Author: Paul Boghossian
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2007-10-11
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 0191622753
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The academic world has been plagued in recent years by scepticism about truth and knowledge. Paul Boghossian, in his long-awaited first book, sweeps away relativist claims that there is no such thing as objective truth or knowledge, but only truth or knowledge from a particular perspective. He demonstrates clearly that such claims don't even make sense. Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed - one as a thesis about truth and two about justification. And he rejects all three. The intuitive, common-sense view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them. This short, lucid, witty book shows that philosophy provides rock-solid support for common sense against the relativists; it will prove provocative reading throughout the discipline and beyond.
Author: Christos Kyriacou
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2018-09-19
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 3319933698
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book contains twelve chapters by leading and up-and-coming philosophers on metaepistemology, that is, on the nature, existence and authority of epistemic facts. One of the central divides in metaepistemology is between epistemic realists and epistemic anti-realists. Epistemic realists think that epistemic facts (such as the fact that you ought to believe what your evidence supports) exist independently of human judgements and practices, and that they have authority over our judgements and practices. Epistemic anti-realists think that, if epistemic facts exist at all, they are grounded in human judgements and practices, and gain any authority they have from our judgements and practices. This book considers both epistemic realist and anti-realist perspectives, as well as perspectives that 'transcend' the realism/anti-realism dichotomy. As such, it constitutes the 'state of the art' with regard to metaepistemology, and will shape the debate in years to come.
Author: M. Seidel
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2014-04-13
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 1137377895
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Markus Seidel provides a detailed critique of epistemic relativism in the sociology of scientific knowledge. In addition to scrutinizing the main arguments for epistemic relativism he provides an absolutist account that nevertheless aims at integrating the relativist's intuition.
Author: Conor Mchugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2019-02-07
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0198805365
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions. What does it mean to claim that someone ought to do or believe something? Do such claims express beliefs about independently existing facts, or only attitudes of approval and disapproval towards certain pieces of conduct? How do putative facts about what people ought to do or believe fit in to the natural world? In the case of ethics, such questions have been subject to extensive and systematic investigation, yielding the thriving subdiscipline of metaethics. Yet the corresponding questions have been largely ignored in epistemology; there is no serious subdiscipline of metaepistemology. This surprising state of affairs reflects a more general tendency for ethics and epistemology to be carried out largely in isolation from each other, despite the important substantive and structural connections between them. A movement to overturn the general tendency has only recently gained serious momentum, and has yet to tackle metanormative questions in a sustained way. This edited collection aims to stimulate this project and thus advance the new subdiscipline of metaepistemology. Its original essays draw on the sophisticated theories and frameworks that have been developed in metaethics concerning practical normativity, examine whether they can be applied to epistemic normativity, and consider what this might tell us about both.
Author: Martin Kusch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-01-28
Total Pages: 154
ISBN-13: 1108981372
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →'Relativism versus absolutism' is one of the fundamental oppositions that have dominated reflections about science for much of its (modern) history. Often these reflections have been inseparable from wider social-political concerns regarding the position of science in society. Where does this debate stand in the philosophy and sociology of science today? And how does the 'relativism question' relate to current concerns with 'post truth' politics? In Relativism in the Philosophy of Science, Martin Kusch examines some of the most influential relativist proposals of the last fifty years, and the controversies they have triggered. He argues that defensible forms of relativism all deny that any sense can be made of a scientific result being absolutely true or justified, and that they all reject 'anything goes' – that is the thought that all scientific results are epistemically on a par. Kusch concludes by distinguishing between defensible forms of relativism and post-truth thinking.
Author: Dominik Finkelde
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2020-05-05
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 311066691X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Several debates of the last years within the research field of contemporary realism – known under titles such as "New Realism," "Continental Realism," or "Speculative Materialism" – have shown that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality. This does not mean that we should abandon the notions of truth or objectivity all together, as has been posited repeatedly within certain currents of twentieth century philosophy. However, within the research field of contemporary realism, the concept of objectivity itself has not been adequately refined. What is objective is supposed to be true outside a subject’s biases, interpretations and opinions, having truth conditions that are met by the way the world is. The volume combines articles of internationally outstanding authors who have published on either Idealism, Epistemic Relativism, or Realism and often locate themselves within one of these divergent schools of thought. As such, the volume focuses on these traditions with the aim of clarifying what the concept objectivity nowadays stands for within contemporary ontology and epistemology beyond the analytic-continental divide. With articles from: Jocelyn Benoist, Ray Brassier, G. Anthony Bruno, Dominik Finkelde, Markus Gabriel, Deborah Goldgaber, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Johannes Hübner, Andrea Kern, Anton F. Koch, Martin Kusch, Paul M. Livingston, Paul Redding, Sebastian Rödl, Dieter Sturma.
Author: Fernando Broncano-Berrocal
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-02-15
Total Pages: 138
ISBN-13: 1000342867
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Group polarization—the tendency of groups to incline toward more extreme positions than initially held by their individual members—has been rigorously studied by social psychologists, though in a way that has overlooked important philosophical questions. This is the first book-length treatment of group polarization from a philosophical perspective. The phenomenon of group polarization raises several important metaphysical and epistemological questions. From a metaphysical point of view, can group polarization, understood as an epistemic feature of a group, be reduced to epistemic features of its individual members? Relatedly, from an epistemological point of view, is group polarization best understood as a kind of cognitive bias or rather in terms of intellectual vice? This book compares four models that combine potential answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions. The models considered are: group polarization as (i) a collective bias; (ii) a summation of individual epistemic vices; (iii) a summation of individual biases; and (iv) a collective epistemic vice. Ultimately, the authors defend a collective vice model of group polarization over the competing alternatives. The Philosophy of Group Polarization will be of interest to students and researchers working in epistemology, particularly those working on social epistemology, collective epistemology, social ontology, virtue epistemology, and distributed cognition. It will also be of interest to those working on issues in political epistemology, applied epistemology, and on topics at the intersection of epistemology and ethics.
