Daniel Dennett's Ideas and Presuppositions Essay

Blaise Pascal’s famous work, “the Wager,” utilizes about the concept of pragmatic justification in the terms of deciding whether or not to believe in God. In response to this, William Clifford publishes “The Ethics of Belief” countering Pascal’s view. Neither Pascal or Clifford’s views are perfect, but they are both worth examining. Clifford 's universal rejection of pragmatic justification is ultimately too harsh on Pascal’s Wager.

In his article “The Ethics of Belief (Clifford, 1877) W.K. Clifford sought to argue that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (as cited on p190). The aim of this essay is to establish whether indeed this view offered by Clifford, when considering religious faith, is convincing. In order to do this I will consider the arguments that Clifford put forward, including that which to believe anything based upon insufficient evidence always does harm and so is wrong. Such a statement is in direct opposition to those religious believers who regard their blind faith as a virtue and for whom evidence is something that is

In reference to James’ “Will to Believe” essay, which defends religious belief without scientific evidence, I mainly argue that we do not have the right to believe in a religion, without scientific evidence.

If you have no good reason to think that your belief is true, then you cannot rationally maintain it. 4. REVISION. We cannot rationally maintain our evaluative beliefs. [2, 3]

This shows that Lewis highly values reason and doesn’t want people to just believe something without having proved it to themselves first. W.K. Clifford is a bit more extreme in his belief that it is not okay to just believe without proof or reason as Clifford sees doing this as not just incorrect but ethically wrong. This relates to our class discussion on the connections between faith and reason and what roles each play in people’s

In this paper I will contrast the ways that Blaise Pascal and Saint Anselm of Canterbury attempted to convince people to believe in God. Before getting into the two arguments I should first clarify a few key terms. Firstly, the difference between ordinary and religious beliefs. An ordinary belief is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a typical belief based on adequate evidence. An example would be “I believe the sky is blue because I’ve observed it as blue countless times”. Religious beliefs on the other hand, are not based on reasoning, but instead “Sola Fide”, or faith alone suffices, meaning that these beliefs are based only on trust that the proposition is true. A basic example of a religious belief would be “God exists” despite a lack of evidence for the claim. The major conflict between the two different types of beliefs is that in ordinary belief its considered shame worthy to belief something without have reasons to support it while belief without evidence is the core of religious belief. Another key term that must be understood to understand the arguments is “faith seeking understanding”. This idea was championed by Anselm and is crucial to understanding his argument. In short, he means that if someone begins with just faith in God then through that God will help them attain understanding.

Since the 19th century, William Clifford and William James have been the foremost philosophers; arguing the basis of belief and validity. Each theorist has attempted to answer significant creation and theological mysteries, but none with one hundred percent certainty or defense. Nonetheless, Clifford and James have varying views on the belief debate, each formulating a rational

Reading, following, and believing someone, a common trait, is adopting that person’s thoughts, arguments, imaginations, hypothesis, and above all, the skill to convince. Most writers, thinkers, leaders, preachers, etc. always exhibit some sort of prejudice or inclination towards some particular beliefs. In fact, non-believers are also believers; they believe in non-existence of God. Effectively articulated arguments cannot be true always. But, one starts accepting the reading/explanations that falls in line with his/her own perceptions. Most theories start with assumptions and proceed with rational and irrefutable explanations. However, many theories with logical justifications keep changing

One important task of Epistemology is to find an analysis of knowledge that can both fulfil our intuitions and is genuinely informative. The traditional analysis of knowledge is tripartite. This so called “JTB” (Justified True Belief) account holds that for a subject “S” to know a proposition “p” (a) S must believe that p, (b) p must be true and (c) S must be justified in believing p (Ichikawa & Steup, 2014). In 1963 Edmund Gettier published a now-famous paper demonstrating the insufficiency of the JTB account. Here I will focus on the “nonpartisan” debate in the analysis of knowledge, which centres around the question of whether or not it is possible for a false belief

Dennett argues first that to believe is to adopt a predictive strategy and second that the most appropriate predictive strategy for human behavior is what he calls an “intentional stance.” The intentional stance is a presumption that people act “rationally,” and this is argued to be the strongest stance in relation to minds. Even presuming that his first position is accurate, the second one has several flaws. The most immediate objection is that human beings do not appear to be rational agents. To argue that human beings are rational agents requires first that one define what it means to behave rationally, and second to prove that people act in this way. The best attempt at a theory which would allow for mapping onto actual human behavior is

In Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (1963) Edmund Gettier challenged the classical analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, showing cases where a justified true belief was held but knowledge wasn’t. In his cases luck correlates the belief with truth, not justification. If this analysis is correct, then justified true belief ≠ knowledge. In what follows, section-one will outline the classical analysis of knowledge and Gettier’s challenge to it. Then I will explore two respective proposals in response to this challenge: section-two, Lehrer and Paxson’s No-Defeaters approach (ND); section-three, Goldman’s Appropriate Causality Proposal (ACP). Concluding both limit knowledge too strictly to be full accounts of knowledge; raising further problems needing resolving. ND implies we know very little by due to subjunctive conditionals. ACP limits knowledge to a causal relation, thereby denying the internal account of knowledge and necessitating a further reliability condition. Ultimately, both raise unanswered questions on the limit of knowledge and to what degree any justification condition applies.

Doxastic trust and Preemption theory support identifying apocalyptic roots through authoritative topoi. The written expression of Doxastic trust is BcA, where B equals belief and A equals a resulting compatible belief. Jaakko Hintikka introduced this formula, explaining, “In all possible worlds compatible with what c Believes, it is the case that A”; A (another belief) follows due to B’s authority, rather than epistemological evidence for A. Scholars writing about Preemption theory move a step further. A person listening to an authoritative speaker and so accepts p (the authoritative speaker’s view or belief on the subject) will supplant his or her own constructs of reason with the speaker’s in any related area. Christoph Jäger and Paul Faulkner (among other scholars) have challenged Doxastic trust and Preemption theory of late, but their questions concern trust development, rather than whether hearer-speaker trust exists. Certain necessary conditions, however, predicate accepting p.

In this paper I argue that the Strong Program purpose to provide robust explanations of belief aquirement is limited by its commitment to the symmetry principle. the symmetry principle is intended to drive home the fact that epistemic norms are socially consists. My debate here is that even if our epistemic norm are fully naturalized even relativized they anyway can play a pivotal part in why human being adopt the beliefs that they do. In fact, sometimes the fact that a belief is locally endorsed as rational is the only reason why an human conttrol it. In this way, norms of rationality have a powerful and unique role in belief formation. But if this is true then the symmetry principle’s emphasis on ‘sameness of type’ is misguided. It has the

In the following paper the deference between a mere true belief and a justified true belief were given. The justified true belief, for a long time was the go to definition for knowledge, however that changed when Gettier came up with counterexamples. This action gave room for other definitions of knowledge to be created, however many of those definitions fail to explain why knowledge is valuable. Nevertheless, the best definition to explain why knowledge is valuable is the virtue

An adaptation of Foundationalism was presented through externalist versions. Exactly what the internalism and externalism views are limited by is not decisively defined in epistemology. Externalists contemplate profoundly distinctive views to persons of conventional Foundationalism; the construction of knowledge as well as the rationalisation from theories remains often one of Foundationalism’s initial configurations. Goldman’s reliabilism offers a perspective of externalist persuasion. The principle notion of reliabilism seems simplistic; a belief is justified if it is produced through reliable beliefs, making them likely to be true. Goldman does however determine that justified beliefs can be sub divided into belief-dependent or belief-independent, the process of belief distinguishing the difference. Those that are independently processed through stimuli that we take as input beliefs, possibly a evolved conclusion associated with specific sensorial stimuli which we reflect upon and thus form our conclusion about the external. These make them more likely to be true, which belief-dependent processes are generated from. Externalism may be attractive to those who adopt Foundationalist beliefs because of their allowance when considering justified belief in a fundamental