Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal?

Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal?
Author: Markus Patrick Hess
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110329557

This book is focused on a problem that has aroused the most controversy in recent epistemological debate, which is whether the truth can or cannot be the fundamental epistemic goal. Traditional epistemology has presupposed the centrality of truth without giving a deeper analysis. To epistemic value pluralists, the claim that truth is the fundamental value seems unjustified. Their central judgement is that we can be in a situation where we do not attain truth but something else that is also epistemically valuable. In contrast, epistemic value monists are committed to the view that one can only attain something of epistemic value by attaining truth. It was necessary to rethink the long-accepted platitude that truth is our primary epistemic goal, once several objections about epistemic value were formulated. The whole debate is instructive for understanding how the epistemic value domain is structured.

Knowledge, Truth, and Duty

Knowledge, Truth, and Duty
Author: Matthias Steup
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2001
Genre: Duty
ISBN: 0195128923

This text examines epistemic duty, doxastic voluntarism, the normativity of justification, internalism versus externalism, truth as the epistemic goal, and scepticism and the search for justification.

Justification and the Truth-Connection

Justification and the Truth-Connection
Author: Clayton Littlejohn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2012-06-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107016126

Presents and defends a bold new approach to the ethics of belief and to resolving the internalism-externalism debate in epistemology.

Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention

Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention
Author: Abrol Fairweather
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2017-05-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107089824

This title provides the first thorough defense of a naturalized virtue epistemology.

True Enough

True Enough
Author: Catherine Z. Elgin
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2017-10-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262341387

The development of an epistemology that explains how science and art embody and convey understanding. Philosophy valorizes truth, holding that there can never be epistemically good reasons to accept a known falsehood, or to accept modes of justification that are not truth conducive. How can this stance account for the epistemic standing of science, which unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true? In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that we should not assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy. To the contrary, their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic functioning. When effective, models and idealizations are, Elgin contends, felicitous falsehoods that exemplify features of the phenomena they bear on. Because works of art deploy the same sorts of felicitous falsehoods, she argues, they also advance understanding. Elgin develops a holistic epistemology that focuses on the understanding of broad ranges of phenomena rather than knowledge of individual facts. Epistemic acceptability, she maintains, is a matter not of truth-conduciveness, but of what would be reflectively endorsed by the members of an idealized epistemic community—a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends.

Epistemic Justification and Truth

Epistemic Justification and Truth
Author: Mark J. Hodges
Publisher:
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2008
Genre: Belief and doubt
ISBN:

Part 2 of the thesis explores the goal-theoretic approach to epistemology, i.e., the idea that the justification of a belief, B, can be analyzed as a relation between B, and some fundamental epistemic goal, aim or value; usually thought of as a truth-focused goal. First, it is argued that a goal-theoretic analysis capable of capturing our existing epistemic intuitions, and of overcoming the important objections to truth-focused accounts of justification such as process reliabilism, can be constructed. Next, it is argued that all goal-theoretic analyses based on the pragmatic or explanatory alternatives to a truth-goal will yield wildly counterintuitive results. From this it is concluded that truth, rather than pragmatic value or explanatory power, lies at the heart of our existing concept of justified belief, and that the relation between truth and justification is a goal-theoretic one.

Pentecostal Rationality

Pentecostal Rationality
Author: Simo Frestadius
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-11-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567689395

This book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism, but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination: the Elim Pentecostal Church. Pentecostal theologians increasingly acknowledge that their theological methodology should be informed by a Pentecostal rationality, epistemology and theological hermeneutics. Simo Frestadius offers such a Pentecostal rationality from a Foursquare perspective. Frestadius first analyses and evaluates some of the main contemporary Pentecostal rationalities and epistemologies to date, with a particular emphasis on the works of Amos Yong and James K.A. Smith and L. William Oliverio Jr., before proposing that Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-focused and historically-minded narrative approach is conducive in providing a more tradition-constituted Pentecostal rationality. Utilising the methodological insights of MacIntyre, the book then provides a philosophically informed historical narrative of a major British Pentecostal tradition, namely, the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, by exploring its underlying context and roots as a classical Pentecostal movement, its emergence as a religious tradition, and its two major 'epistemological crises'. Based on this historical narration and analysis, it is argued that Elim's tacit Pentecostal rationality is best defined as Pentecostal Biblical Pragmatism in a Foursquare Gospel framework. This form of rationality is then developed vis-à-vis Elim's Pentecostal concept of truth, biblical hermeneutics, and pragmatic epistemic justification in dialogue with William P. Alston. In doing the above, the book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination.

Intellectual Virtue

Intellectual Virtue
Author: Michael Raymond DePaul
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2003
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199219125

"Virtue ethics has attracted a lot of attention and there has been considerable interest in virtue epistemology as an alternative to traditional approaches in that field. This book fills a gap in the literature for a text that brings virtue epistemologists and virtue ethicists together."-- Back cover.

God, Mind and Knowledge

God, Mind and Knowledge
Author: Andrew Moore
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317126459

The themes of God, Mind and Knowledge are central to the philosophy of religion but they are now being taken up by professional philosophers who have not previously contributed to the field. This book is a collection of original essays by eminent and rising philosophers and it explores the boundaries between philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. Its introduction will make it accessible to newcomers to the field, especially those approaching it from theology. Many of the book’s topics lie at the focal point of debates - instigated in part by the so-called New Atheists - in contemporary culture about whether it is rational to have religious beliefs, and the role these beliefs can or should play in the life of individuals and of society.

Epistemology and the Regress Problem

Epistemology and the Regress Problem
Author: Scott Aikin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2010-11-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136841903

In the last decade, the familiar problem of the regress of reasons has returned to prominent consideration in epistemology. And with the return of the problem, evaluation of the options available for its solution is begun anew. Reason’s regress problem, roughly put, is that if one has good reasons to believe something, one must have good reason to hold those reasons are good. And for those reasons, one must have further reasons to hold they are good, and so a regress of reasons looms. In this new study, Aikin presents a full case for infinitism as a response to the problem of the regress of reasons. Infinitism is the view that one must have a non-terminating chain of reasons in order to be justified. The most defensible form of infinitism, he argues, is that of a mixed theory – that is, epistemic infinitism must be consistent with and integrate other solutions to the regress problem.