Belief

In Timothy Williamson’s piece, “Knowledge and Belief”, he introduces a view called “knowledge first” which implies that belief and knowledge are two distinct entities. In other words, knowledge is simply a factive mental state that is “irreducible to belief” meaning that they cannot define one another (Williamson 124). Knowledge can include remembering, seeing, this is because he believes that belief can be either true or false, whereas knowledge can only be true. Although there is a possibility…

Solving the Gettier Problem American philosopher Edmund L. Gettier challenges the way knowledge is analyzed in his famous 1963 paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Gettier writes two cases in his paper, which illustrate that knowledge is more than just true belief and justification. As a side note: when I refer to the term “justification,” readers should know that justification is different from one person to another. Also, justification can change throughout time (Mason, “D. Knowledge…

Clifford Vs James In the “Ethics of Belief”, William K. Clifford presents us with an example. The example tells us why we always need sufficient evidence to believe something. He says that no one should believe something from a gut feeling or something we just think is true without any evidence of that it proves that it is right. We think of this as if it were a joke because it may not affect us now, but if everyone begins to follow this it will be a big difference from the way we think now.…

bike), and propositional knowledge (I know that snakes are reptiles). The first two forms of knowledge are interesting, but we are only concerned with the third, what it is to know some proposition, ‘p’. We automatically note a difference between belief and knowledge. Individuals can believe propositions that are not true; but if you know that ‘p’, then ‘p’ must be true. You cannot know something incorrect; if it is incorrect, then you do not know it. You have made an error, thinking it to be…

knowledge is Justified True Belief. Hence, one must first justify their belief before they can acquire any knowledge. Since most of the time the beliefs we assume we have justified and are justified based on other belief. Consequently, this promotes the concept of regress argument where the philosophers are on the quest to truly justify a belief thus we can know for sure that we have knowledge. Coherentist attempts to solve the regress problem by suggesting a system of beliefs where the…

about justification plausible? When it comes to the acquisition of a true belief leading to knowledge, it is thought that these beliefs should be justified. Coherentism is a form of internal, non-linear justification which holds the idea that for a belief to be justified in any way it must cohere with a current system of beliefs. BonJour wrote that 'what justifies beliefs is the way they fit together' , in essence, for beliefs to be justified they must metaphorically form a lattice like…

helps to demonstrate the view that justifies belief depending upon having good reasons or evidence. His firm belief in evidentialism, which means without certainty and a solid basis of evidence and knowledge of a situation you, should never put fully believe it. Meanwhile reformed epistemology states that you can rationalize the belief of god based upon given evidence. Reformed epistemology use of both faith and minimal evidence to justify their beliefs is not reasonable. Thus I lean more…

saying we are born knowing certain things, to everything we learn comes from experience. Each of these have different arguments to them, however, they each have a different idea of the basic definitions of knowledge and belief. There are also the questions of whether or not beliefs are rational, and is knowledge justifiable. The standard definition of knowledge is “information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or education.” (knowledge." Merriam-Webster.com.…

believers when faced with the same evidence find different conclusions, it is still rational to continue believing what you have been. There are different positions that one can hold in there belief system and why they believe what they do. There is a movement that has people “believing only if their belief is self-evident” even though this movement contradicts itself. Trust is a big part of our faith and thus a big part in believing that what we believe is rational. As well, when we ground…

Overall, Religion 106: What is Belief? has been extremely eye-opening and enriching. I have learned plenty about different beliefs and tolerance and have found many answers to questions I have asked myself for a long time. In my opinion, I engaged very well with all of the course-work as well as all of the texts that we read as a class. If I had to give myself a grade out of forty points, I think I would give myself a thirty-five. I think that this number of points best represents my learning…