4 ideas
| 19525 | If the only aim is to believe truths, that justifies recklessly believing what is unsupported (if it is right) [Conee/Feldman] |
| Full Idea: If it is intellectually required that one try to believe all and only truths (as Chisholm says), ...then it is possible to believe some unsubstantiated proposition in a reckless endeavour to believe a truth, and happen to be right. | |
| From: E Conee / R Feldman (Evidentialism [1985], 'Justification') | |
| A reaction: This implies doxastic voluntarism. Sorry! I meant, this implies that we can control what we believe, when actually we believe what impinges on us as facts. |
| 6456 | Sense-data are neutral uninterpreted experiences, separated from objects and judgements [Angeles] |
| Full Idea: Sense-data are that which is given to us directly and immediately such as colour, shape, smell, without identification of them as specific material objects; they are usually thought to be devoid of judgment, interpretation, bias, preconception. | |
| From: Peter A. Angeles (A Dictionary of Philosophy [1981], p.254) | |
| A reaction: This definition makes them clearly mental (rather than being qualities of objects), and they sound like Hume's 'impressions'. They are not features of the external world, but the first steps we make towards experience. |
| 19524 | We don't have the capacity to know all the logical consequences of our beliefs [Conee/Feldman] |
| Full Idea: Our limited cognitive capacities lead Goldman to deny a principle instructing people to believe all the logical consequences of their beliefs, since they are unable to have the infinite number of beliefs that following such a principle would require. | |
| From: E Conee / R Feldman (Evidentialism [1985], 'Doxastic') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't sound like much of an objection to epistemic closure, which I took to be the claim that you know the 'known' entailments of your knowledge. |
| 6017 | Nomos is king [Pindar] |
| Full Idea: Nomos is king. | |
| From: Pindar (poems [c.478 BCE], S 169), quoted by Thomas Nagel - The Philosophical Culture | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the earliest recorded shot in the nomos-physis wars (the debate among sophists about moral relativism). It sounds as if it carries the full relativist burden - that all that matters is what has been locally decreed. |