12801
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Coherentists seek relations among beliefs that are simple, conservative and explanatory [Foley]
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Full Idea:
Coherentists try to provide an explication of epistemic rationality in terms of a set of deductive and probabilistic relations among beliefs and properties such as simplicity, conservativeness, and explanatory power.
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From:
Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.317)
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A reaction:
I have always like the coherentist view of justification, and now I see that this has led me to the question of explanation, which in turn has led me to essentialism. It's all coming together. Watch this space. 'Explanatory' is the key to everything!
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12800
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Externalists want to understand knowledge, Internalists want to understand justification [Foley]
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Full Idea:
Externalists are principally interested in understanding what knowledge is, ..while internalists, by contrast, are principally interested in explicating a sense of justification ..from one's own perspective.
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From:
Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.314)
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A reaction:
I find this very helpful, since I have a strong bias towards internalism (with a social dimension), and I see now that it is because I am more interested in what a (good) justification is than what some entity in reality called 'knowledge' consists of.
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12802
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We aren't directly pragmatic about belief, but pragmatic about the deliberation which precedes it [Foley]
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Full Idea:
It is rare for pragmatic considerations to influence the rationality of our beliefs in the crass, direct way that Pascal's Wager envisions. Instead, they determine the direction and shape of our investigative and deliberative projects and practices.
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From:
Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.320)
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A reaction:
[See Idea 6684 for Pascal's Wager] Foley is evidently a full-blown pragmatist (which is bad), but this is nicely put. We can't deny the importance of the amount of effort put into an enquiry. Maybe it is an epistemic duty, rather than a means to an end.
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5689
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Freud and others have shown that we don't know our own beliefs, feelings, motive and attitudes [Freud, by Shoemaker]
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Full Idea:
Freud persuaded many that beliefs, wishes and feelings are sometimes unconscious, and even sceptics about Freud acknowledge that there is self-deception about motive and attitudes.
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From:
report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Sydney Shoemaker - Introspection p.396
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A reaction:
This seems to me obviously correct. The traditional notion is that the consciousness is the mind, but now it seems obvious that consciousness is only one part of the mind, and maybe even a peripheral (epiphenomenal) part of it.
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4688
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We imagine small and large objects scaled to the same size, suggesting a fixed capacity for imagination [Lavers]
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Full Idea:
If we think of a pea, and then of the Eiffel Tower, they seem to occupy the same space in our consciousness, suggesting that we scale our images to fit the available hardware, just as computer imagery is limited by the screen and memory available.
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From:
Michael Lavers (talk [2003]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas)
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A reaction:
Nice point. It is especially good because it reinforces a physicalist view of the mind from introspection, where most other evidence is external observation of brains (as Nietzsche reinforces determinism by introspection).
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