Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Content Preservation', 'Against Dryness: a polemical sketch' and 'Intention'

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3 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 1. External Justification
Subjects may be unaware of their epistemic 'entitlements', unlike their 'justifications' [Burge]
     Full Idea: I call 'entitlement' (as opposed to justification) the epistemic rights or warrants that need not be understood by or even be accessible to the subject.
     From: Tyler Burge (Content Preservation [1993]), quoted by Paul Boghossian - Analyticity Reconsidered §III
     A reaction: I espouse a coherentism that has both internal and external components, and is mediated socially. In Burge's sense, animals will sometimes have 'entitlement'. I prefer, though, not to call this 'knowledge'. 'Entitled true belief' is good.
20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 1. Intention to Act / a. Nature of intentions
Intentional actions are those which are explained by giving the reason for so acting [Anscombe]
     Full Idea: Intentional actions are those to which a certain sense of the question 'Why?' is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting.
     From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Intention [1957], p.9), quoted by Rowland Stout - Action 2 'Two kinds'
     A reaction: This works better for grand large-scale actions than for small ones, like taking the knife out of the drawer before the fork. Kahnemann nowadays tells us that the reasons we articulate might not be the ones that are operative.
23. Ethics / F. Existentialism / 1. Existentialism
Man is a brave naked will, separate from a background of values and realities [Murdoch]
     Full Idea: Existentialists no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will.
     From: Iris Murdoch (Against Dryness: a polemical sketch [1983], p.46), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 7 'Subjectivism'
     A reaction: It is one thing to deny the values, and another to deny the realities. This piece is a 'polemic', and reads more like an exhortation than a truth. Many of us are, at best, cowardly naked wills.