Philosophy Exam 1

Front 1

What is apologetics?

Back 1

The task of giving a reasoned defense of Christian theism in light of objections raised against it and of offering evidence on its behalf.

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What is epistemology?

Back 2

The study of knowledge and justified belief.

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What is philosophy?

Back 3

The attempt to think hard about life, the world as a whole and the things that matter most in order to secure knowledge and wisdom about these matters.

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What is a worldview?

Back 4

An ordered set of propositions that one believes, especially propositions about life's most important questions.

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What is an example of a second-order discipline?

Back 5

A discipline that studies biology

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What is an example of a first-order discipline?

Back 6

Studying living organisms (biology).

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What is logic?

Back 7

Investigation of the principles of right reasoning

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What is metaphysics?

Back 8

The study of being or reality

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What is value theory?

Back 9

The study of value

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What is polemics?

Back 10

The task of criticizing and refuting alternative views of the world.

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What is integration?

Back 11

To blend or form into a whole.

Front 12

What is noetic effects of sin?

Back 12

Sin's effect on the mind, render the human intellect incapable of knowing truth.

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What is faith?

Back 13

1) Notitia - understanding the content of the Christian faith
2) Fiducia - trust
3) Assensus - the assent of the intellect to the truth of some proposition

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What is intellectual history?

Back 14

The attempt to trace the development of ideas through history by focusing on the rational factors involved in the ideas themselves, including their own inner logic and relationships to ideas coming after them.

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What is sociology of knowledge?

Back 15

The attempt to trace the development of ideas as a result of nonrational factors in a given culture.

Front 16

What is operational definition?

Back 16

A definition of some concept totally in terms of certain laboratory or experimental operations or test scores.

Front 17

What is external conceptual problems?

Back 17

When a theory conflicts with some doctrine of some philosophical theory, provided that the philosophical theory and its component doctrines are rationally well founded.

Front 18

What are examples of Socratic questions?

Back 18

1) Can I know anything?
2) What is it that I can know?
3) How can I myself assess whether or not a belief of mine is actually justified?

Front 19

What is knowledge by acquaintance?

Back 19

One knows something in that the object of knowledge is directly present to one's consciousness.

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What is intuition?

Back 20

A direct awareness of something that is directly present to consciousness.

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What is know-how?

Back 21

The ability or skill to behave in a certain way and perform some task or set of behaviors.

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What is knowledge by description or propositional knowledge or tripartite analysis?

Back 22

Knowledge is justified true belief

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What is justification/warrant?

Back 23

One has sufficient evidence for the belief, one formed and maintained the belief in a reliable way, or one's intellectual and sensory faculties were functioning properly in a good intellectual environment when he formed the belief in question.

Front 24

What is a Gettier-type counterexample?

Back 24

A counterexample to the standard JTB definition of knowledge.

Front 25

What is the deontological view of justification?

Back 25

Doing one's best to form one's beliefs according to certain epistemological rules.

Front 26

What is internalism?

Back 26

The view that the sole justifying factors of a belief are those internal to the subject

Front 27

What is externalism?

Back 27

The view that affirms that among the factors that justify a belief are those to which the believing subject does not have or does not need to have cognitive access.

Front 28

What is strong externalism?

Back 28

No factors that contribute to a belief's justification are internal to the agent.

Front 29

What is defeasible?

Back 29

Capable of being annulled or made void

Front 30

What is the causal theory?

Back 30

1) Knowledge is JTB + suitably caused belief
2) Knowledge is suitably caused TB

Front 31

What is the reliability theory?

Back 31

Knowledge is a true belief that is produced and sustained by a reliable belief-forming method.

Front 32

What is Aristotelian rationality?

Back 32

Man is a rational animal with the ultimate capacity or power to form concepts, think, deliberate, reflect, have intentionality.

Front 33

What are deliverances of reason?

Back 33

The faculty of reason is considered a source of certain items of knowledge and is contrasted with the sensory faculties

Front 34

What is a priori?

Back 34

Refers to the idea that justification for them does not appeal to sensory experiences

Front 35

What is self-evident?

Back 35

Upon simply understanding the proposition in question, one can feel a strong inclination to accept that the proposition is a necessary truth--it does not just happen to be true, but rather it could not be false.

Front 36

What is epistemic value?

Back 36

To have a justified belief is to have something of intellectual worth

Front 37

What are epistemic duties or rules?

Back 37

One's beliefs are formed, maintained and based on those rules and duties that are justified.

Front 38

What is doxastic voluntarism?

Back 38

the notion that people have at least some voluntary control over and choice about their beliefs, and thus they are intellectually responsible for choosing the right beliefs and avoiding a choice of unreasonable ones.

Front 39

What are rebutting defeaters?

Back 39

Defeaters that directly attack the conclusion or thing being believed

Front 40

What are undercutting defeaters?

Back 40

Defeaters that do not directly attack the thing believed.

Front 41

What is academic skepticism?

Back 41

1) All things are inapprehen-sible, no one has any knowledge
2) We can dogmatically affirm that we know that no one has any knowledge

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What is pyrrhonian skepticism?

Back 42

Philosophy seeks wisdom and wisdom includes knowledge of truths relevant for living a good, skilled life

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Antithesis

Back 43

Both sides of an issue are placed in opposition to each other and skeptical arguments called "tropes" or "modes" are used for each side

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Epoche

Back 44

The suspension of judgment

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Ataraxia

Back 45

The ultimate desired state of tranquility

Front 46

Methodological Doubt or Cartesian Certainty

Back 46

Knowledge requires absolute certainty and that if it were logically possible to be mistaken about something, then one could not know the thing in question.

Front 47

Burden of Proof

Back 47

One does not know something unless he can prove he does against the skeptic

Front 48

Iterative skepticism

Back 48

When the skeptic refuses to offer an argument for his view but, instead, simply responds to every assertion with the question, how do you know?

Front 49

Metaepistemological Skepticism

Back 49

Advocates are skeptical and reject philosophy as traditionally conceived, and claim that philosophy is on a continuum with or merely a part of natural science.

Front 50

Naturalized epistemology

Back 50

Epistemology should be naturalized in the sense that it should be reduced to and treated as a branch of psychology and neurophysiology

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Heuristic or methodological skepticism

Back 51

Knowledge and justified belief are acknowledged, and skepticism is taken as a guiding principle to aid people in their search for a better understanding of epistemological issues.

Front 52

Knowledge skepticism

Back 52

a thesis to the effect that the conditions for knowledge do not obtain and people do not have knowledge

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Justificational skepticism

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Conditions for justification do not obtain and people do not have justification

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Unmitigated skepticism

Back 54

Holds its skepticism with greater assurance and certainty

Front 55

Mitigated skepticism

Back 55

More tentative about knowledge claims

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Global skepticism

Back 56

There is no knowledge in any area of human thought

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Local skepticism

Back 57

Allows for knowledge in some areas but local skeptics deny knowledge in this or that specific area

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First-order skepticism

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Involves skepticism directed at people's everyday beliefs

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Second-order skepticism

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The skeptic challenges the idea that people know that they have knowledge

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Cognitivist

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The one who accepts the fact that people do have knowledge

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Rebutting the skeptic

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Showing that skeptical arguments do not establish the fact that people do not have knowledge

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Argument from Error

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In each case of past error we confused appearance with reality and mistakenly thought we had knowledge

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brain in the vat arguments

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Pointing out that it is merely impossible, logically speaking, that we are mistaken in our knowledge claims.

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transfer of justification arguments

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arguments about the transfer of justification to knowledge claims beyond our present experience.

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The problem of the criterion

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Needing an answer to a previous question before one can proceed to the next question

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Methodism

Back 66

One starts the enterprise of knowing with a criterion for what does and does not count as knowledge

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Particularism

Back 67

People start by knowing specific, clear items of knowledge

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Logical "might"

Back 68

there is no logical contradiction in asserting that a knowledge claim is in error.

Front 69

Epistemic "might"

Back 69

There are good reasons for thinking that one actually is mistaken in a knowledge claim.

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Prima Facie Justified

Back 70

Innocent until proven guilty

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Proper function

Back 71

understood in terms of the way our faculties ought to function

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Pragmatically circular

Back 72

Something alleges to give reason for trusting our noetic equipment, but the reason is itself trustworthy only if those faculties are indeed trustworthy.

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Noetic structure

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the entire set of propositions that some person believes together with various epistemological relations that obtain among those beliefs themselves plus the relations among himself and those beliefs

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Foundationalism

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All knowledge rests on foundations

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basic foundationalism

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basic beliefs are immediately justified

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nonbasic foundationalism

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nonbasic beliefs are mediately justified in some way by the relationship they sustain to the basic beliefs

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Properly basic beliefs

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Beliefs are basic in the sense that they are not justified by or based on other beliefs

Front 78

Evidence

Back 78

Refers to cases in which a person believes a proposition and this serves as the basis for believing another proposition

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Classical foundationalism

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only sensory beliefs or beliefs about the truths of reason should be allowed in the foundations.

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Ancient classic foundationalism

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the view that certain sensory beliefs are evident to the senses and should be taken as foundational

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Modern classical foundationalism

Back 81

beliefs are in foundation

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Self-presenting properties

Back 82

psychological attributes or modes of consciousness within the experiencing subject himself

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Infallible

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Impossible in some sense for a person to hold the belief and be mistaken about it

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Certainty

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Refers to a certain depth of psychological conviction

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Indubitability

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a feature a belief has when no one could have grounds for doubting the belief in question

Front 86

Weak foundationalists

Back 86

deny that foundational beliefs must have such strong epistemic status

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Prima facie justified

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No good reason to think that he is not justified in doing so

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Ground

Back 88

Properly basic beliefs have some basis other than another belief

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Internalism

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The conditions that ground properly basic beliefs are internal to the knower

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Externalism

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The factors grounding the justification of a properly basic belief are not those to which the subject must have internal access

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Irreflexive

Back 91

Something cannot stand in that relation to itself

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Myth of the given

Back 92

the idea that facts are directly present or "given" to consciousness in a preconceptual, prejudgmental way

Front 93

Coherence theories of belief or meaning

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Theories that claim, in one way or another, that the content of a belief is the role the belief plays in an entire system of beliefs

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Coherence theories of truth

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the notion that a proposition is true if and only if it is part of a coherent set of propositions

Front 95

Correspondence theory of truth

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the notion that the truth of a proposition is a function of its correspondence with the "external" world

Front 96

Doxastic assumption

Back 96

the view that the sole factor that justifies a belief for a person is the other beliefs that the person holds

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Logical consistency

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A set of beliefs cannot explicitly or implicitly contain contradictory propositions

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Entailment coherence

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a set of beliefs is coherent only if each member of the set is entailed by all the other members of the set

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Explanatory coherence

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each member of a set of beliefs helps to explain and is explained by the other members of the set

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Probability coherence

Back 100

a set of beliefs is coherent only if it does not include the belief that P and the belief that P is improbable

Front 101

Weak coherentism

Back 101

Coherence is but one determinant of justification and thus weak coherentism is compatible with versions of foundationalism that allow coherence to play a role in justification

Front 102

Strong coherentism

Back 102

asserts that coherence is the sole determinant of justification

Front 103

Linear coherentism

Back 103

beliefs are justified by other individual beliefs (or small set of beliefs) in a linear, circular chain

Front 104

Holistic coherentism

Back 104

affirms that in order for some person to be justified in believing P, P must be in a coherent relation with the set of all of that person's beliefs.

Front 105

Plurality objection

Back 105

There could be two or more equally coherent sets of beliefs that could be logically incompatible with each other.

Front 106

Relativism

Back 106

A claim is true relative to the beliefs or valuations of an individual or group that accepts it

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Absolute truth or objective truth

Back 107

People discover truth, they do not create it, and a claim is made true or false in some way or another by reality itself, totally independent of whether the claim is accepted by anyone.

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Law of identity

Back 108

P is identical to itself and different from other things

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Law of noncontradiction

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P cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time

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Law of excluded middle

Back 110

P is either true or false

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Truth condition

Back 111

a description of what constitutes the truth of a claim

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Criteria for truth

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Consists of epistemological tests for deciding or justifying which claims are true and false

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Redundancy theory of truth

Back 113

the word true has no unique or special function within language and can be eliminated without limiting what can be expressed in language

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Sentence

Back 114

a linguistic type or token consisting in a sense-perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set of syntactical rules

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Statement

Back 115

A sequence of sounds or body movements employed by a speaker to assert a sentence on a specific occasion.

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Proposition

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The content of declarative sentences/statements and thoughts/beliefs that is true or false

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Facts or State of Affairs

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Any actually existing whole that is ordered by the relation of predication or exemplification

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Intentionality

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Ofness, aboutness, directedness towards an object

Front 119

Phenomenological argument

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Focuses on a careful description and presentation of specific cases to see what can be learned from them about truth.

Front 120

Dialectical argument

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Those who advance alternative theories of truth or who simply reject the correspondence theory actually presuppose it in their own assertions, especially when they present arguments for their views or defend them against defeaters.

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Pragmatic theory of truth

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Implies that a belief is true if and only if it works or is useful to have

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Nonepistemic pragmatism

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a belief is true just in case accepting it is useful, where "useful" is spelled out in terms that make no reference to epistemic values.

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Epistemic pragmatism

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Identify the truth of a proposition with its epistemic successes

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Modernity

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the period of European though that developed out of the Renaissance and flourished in the Enlightenment in the ideas of people like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant

Front 125

Dichotomous thinking

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Occurs when someone divides a range of phenomena into two groups and goes on to claim that one is better than the other

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Cartesian anxiety

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The desire to have certainty

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Nominalism

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Names for groups of things rather than terms representing real universals

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Essentialism

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Some things have essential and accidental properties

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Critical realist theory of perception

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When a subject is looking at a red object, the object itself is the direct object of the sensory state