Download Knowledge, Cause, and Abstract Objects: Causal Objections to by Colin Cheyne (auth.) PDF

By Colin Cheyne (auth.)

According to platonists, entities comparable to numbers, units, propositions and houses are summary items. yet summary gadgets lack causal powers and a situation in house and time, so how may perhaps we ever come to understand of the lifestyles of such impotent and distant items? In Knowledge, reason, and summary Objects, Colin Cheyne provides the 1st systematic and precise account of this epistemological objection to the platonist doctrine that summary items exist and will be identified. for the reason that arithmetic has the sort of significant position within the acquisition of medical wisdom, he concentrates on mathematical platonism. He additionally concentrates on our wisdom of what exists, and argues for a causal constraint on such existential wisdom. eventually, he exposes the weaknesses of modern makes an attempt through platonists to account for our meant platonic knowledge.
This e-book could be of specific curiosity to researchers and complicated scholars of epistemology and of the philosophy of arithmetic and technology. it is going to even be of curiosity to all philosophers with a basic curiosity in metaphysics and ontology.

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This demonstrates why it is not enough to reject the Gettier examples on the grounds that they only work because they rely on too Iowa standard for belief justification. No matter how high one's standard of justification, if that standard allows the possibility of justified false belief, then it will be possible, in principle, to devise a Gettier counterexample. (G2) is not so plausible, but it is stronger than is required .. Perhaps not all valid deductions transmit justification. Long and complicated ones may not, but simple ones, like that carried out by Smith in the Ford example, surely do.

The next Cartesian move is to claim that propositions with that property will be believed by anyone who contemplates them, and that is why it is appropriate to call them self-evident. But this claim is perverse. There are no BELIEFS AND CAUSES 35 propositions that will inevitably give rise to belief, let alone the inability to doubt them, when contemplated. 3 Either self-evidence is a psychological property of belief-states, in which case having the property will not guarantee truth and this in turn will allow the possibility of a self-evident belief's being fortuitously correct.

But it is not so obvious that there are no conditions (perhaps vague conditions) that pick out rugby union, rugby league, soccer, gridiron, etc. as games of football. Perhaps we could even specity conditions for a game's being a competitive team sport. g. g. by direct perception or from witnesses. Another reason for not taking the Gettier examples too seriously might be to argue that they describe situations so bizarre that it is not surprising that our usual concepts cannot cope. A similar argument may be used to dismiss examples of person-splitting and person-joining when they are used to counter particular theories of personal identity.

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