Can Empirical Knowledge Have A Foundation?

Kathryn Schulz argues in “Evidence”, a chapter of her book called Being Wrong, that we need to “learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it” (Schulz, 377”). By attending to counterevidence we can avoid making errors in our conclusions.

He explains why UCTs are as popular as they are in modern society, and why people should nevertheless disregard and approach them with caution. What Keeley refers to as “virtues” are the reason for the popularity of UCTs. He gives the virtue of explanatory reach as the first and main reason for UCTs popularity, which is the account of all knowledge including errant data. This is in stark contrast to the received theory, which is imperfect by nature. This quality of UCTs is particularly attractive because it appeals to human rationality by allowing for no loopholes. Keely argues that errant data alone is not significant enough, and that a theory should never fit all of the data. This leads into one of the main points, concerning falsifiability and skepticism. Unfalsifiability is acceptable when the item or person under investigation is not actively trying to escape from the investigator. Keeley contends that the problem is not the innate unfalsifiability, but rather the increasing amount of skepticism required. Keely seeks a hole in the concept of conspiracy theories that accounts for a person’s innate sense that belief in a particular conspiracy theory is not justified. In the case of the natural sciences, falsifiability is acceptable because of the rigorous protocols in place, and therefore, we are warranted in believing scientific claims.

William K. Clifford sets out to show in “The Ethics of Belief” that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence…” In this assignment, I aim to show deficiencies in his argument, and lack of key definitions needed in order to find his assumption and that it begs the question as to what qualifies as insufficient evidence. Moreover, I will show that the primary issue is not the belief but the results of the belief that is important and that all judgment and interpretation should be based upon said results.

David Hume, a philosopher who raised radical doubts about the rationality of the scientific enterprise. Hume believed that “experience can only assure us of what we are actually observing at present, or can remember having observed in the past” (Cottingham, 2008). In this paper I will show that David Hume’s claim on induction that when there is real knowledge of an event, it cannot correctly justify inductive assumptions.

Empirical ways of knowing refer to what types of knowledge which should be informed to oneself (Johns & Freshwater 1998, p. 4). In this situation, I needed four types of knowledge: the effectiveness of warming intravenous fluids to prevent decreasing temperature during caesarean operations under lumbar anaesthesia, the risks of adverse impacts of low temperature in the operation, the mental condition of patients in operating rooms and the appropriate ways of communication with colleagues.

First it is important to understand the type of belief we are talking about before we can truly understand Frede’s and Burnyeat’s dispute between epistemic and non-epistemic appearances. In The Outlines of Scepticism Sextus

BonJour manages to defend the claim that a priori justification is necessary in order to avoid a severe, indefensible skepticism and demonstrates that any argument against a priori justification would undermine itself. This dialectical argument demonstrates that a denial of a priori justification is not only unsatisfactory, but impossible for the sake or argumentation. An empiricist critic could only appeal to pragmatism while accepting skepticism or surmount the impossible task of empirical justification of inference. This dialectical argument is by far BonJour's

Empirical or predictive validity is the extent to which scores on one assessment correspond to the same behaviors measured with other assessment instruments. For an assessment to be empirically valid, statistical evidence must suggest the instrument measures what it is meant to measure (Trochim, 2006). The BDI-FastScreen was correlated with two other assessment instruments that measure symptoms of depression and with the diagnostic criteria for depression in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR (DSM-IV-TR). The correlations were r = .62 with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and r = .86, when correlated with the Beck Anxiety Inventory for Primary Care. Correlation with the DSM-IV-TR was

In Baron Reeds, “A New Argument for Skepticism,” a new idea is brought to light to agree with the argument for skepticism. Usually, skeptical arguments require knowledge to be

Therefore, it can be asserted that knowledge gained from causality is not a priori, rather a posteriori, which is knowledge gained from experience and empirical evidence.

The subject of this paper has at least five names. Documentary Hypothesis and JEDP Theory are the most common. In this paper, this scholarly position will always be referred to as Documentary Hypothesis with a few exceptions.

Authoritative epistemology occurs when an analyst relies on another person’s authority to make a judgement. Their “basis of knowledge resides in a reference to something more

Epistemology is purposed with discovering and studying what knowledge is and how we can classify what we know, how we know it, and provide some type of framework for how we arrived at this conclusion. In the journey to identify what knowledge is the certainty principle was one of the first concepts that I learned that explained how we, as humans, consider ourselves to know something. The certainty concept suggests that knowledge requires evidence that is sufficient to rule out the possibility of error. This concept is exemplified in cases like The Gettier problem in the instance that we suppose (S) someone to know (P) a particular proposition. As Gettier established the Justified True Belief as a conceptual formula for knowledge, certainty

Assumptions in the title of this essay imply that results, theories and laws resulting from the current system of peer review multiple perspectives produce completely infallible objective truth, this is a false premise. Whilst the group of knowers known as the scientific community have collectively less bias than one lone knower trying to understand the universe, there is still collective and engrained level of institutional bias. The same problems of confirmation bias and expectation are present in a group of knowers just as they are with one single knower. According to Karl Popper (1902-1994) the best way to eliminate any expectation and confirmation bias was to falsify and disprove rather than confirm one’s hypothesis and predictions. Popper argues: no matter how convincing an argument or theory is, all that is needed to disprove it is one piece of valid counterclaiming evidence. Whilst this theory is valid on an individual level, it really becomes an effective tool in the objectivity of science on a large scale. Despite this attempt at objectifying and ‘protecting against’ error and bias it is inadequate due to inherent flaws in the scientific method. Induction, moving from the specific to the general, is the key element in scientific logic. Any theory or law ‘proved’ through this logic has some key flaws: the main flaw being that inductive logic can never be certain of any event happening or of any prediction. Richard van de Lagemaat

Feminist interaction with the philosophy of science, and in particular a feminist interpretation of epistemology, concerns the extent to which bias influences and shapes knowledge within the scientific community, and means to rectify this. There are three main distinctions of feminist philosophy of science - feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism. I am to be comparing and contrasting two of the three, specifically feminist standpoint theory and empiricism. I shall argue that standpoint theory and empiricism are both legitimate methods for feminist epistemology, yet standpoint theory is a more applicable and plausible method for the analysis of science in particular. I will first explain the main tenets of the feminist philosophy of science, going on to then explain reasons why standpoint theory and postmodernism are legitimate tools of analysis in their own right, and then evaluate their legitimacy.