The Theory And The Coherence Theory Essay

In this paper, I’ll state, explain and evaluate Ruth Barcan Marcus’s argument in section 4 of her article “A Proposed Solution to a Puzzle about Belief”.

The topic of knowledge and belief has been a subject of investigation and a primary field in philosophical research for centuries. Whether it was Aristotle or Descartes, multiple ideas on knowledge and belief arise, such as the epistemological theories of foundationalism or coherentism, which provide philosophical explanations to this debate. For the sake of this essay, and in my own opinion, knowledge should be distinguished from belief. Everyone is subject to different types of beliefs based on upbringing, however knowledge of basic items is universal, therefore it immediately becomes apparent that there is a clear distinction between the two concepts.

People try to understand the world through perception of experiences that they encounter. These encounters include either living through the experience first hand or the experience being conveyed by another person. Our perception weeds out main ideas from those experiences deeming them realistic and if so labels them truths. However, our perception of the obtained truth from those experiences is not always credible because as a recipient we are restricted to the amount of experience we can retain. Meaning the perceptions of the labeled truths is a result of our translation of incomplete experiences into new perception resulting from what he or she could retain from the original experience. Those incomplete experiences give rise to new

Mr. Russell’s problem he wanted to solve is the use of a logical analytical approach to determine the truth about common claims based on inference. This implies that every truth or claim should be the foundation of the logical constructions versus inferred entities.

What is your understanding of “ truth” after your study of conflicting perspectives and their representation?

The stasis theory defined in chapter three of our textbook is basically a systematic approach to asking questions about rhetorical situations in order to develop a strong argument for it. Through the use of the stasis, one could have a much stronger argument that is not easily denied and would also prove to be more persuasive. The chapter starts out by discussing the steps to achieving stasis. According to the text, we should begin with a statement that could be agreed or disagreed upon an “issue” (58).

We use language in order to traverse the infinite distance between the Same and the Other. This “distance is untraversable, and at the same time traversed” (62). Truth arises when a person recognizes the Other as such, “where a being separated from the other is no engulfed in him, but speaks to him” (62).

the truth − this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth.

In this paper, I will discuss the truth-belief-justification conceptual analysis of knowledge, which I will refer to as TBJ, Gettier cases, and an example that refutes TBJ. Conceptual analysis is an analysis of a proposition P with given premises to acquire knowledge of that P. The truth-belief-justification analysis of knowledge fails to provide sufficient conditions for someone to possess knowledge. For a condition to be necessary, it has to be satisfied to have knowledge of a proposition. If a condition is sufficient, then the person x will have some information to know something about proposition P. Jointly sufficient conditions are conditions that all need to be satisfied together to have knowledge about some P. They are necessary and supposedly jointly sufficient, but Gettier cases prove that extra conditions on top of TBJ are required to be jointly sufficient.

Since the 19th century, William Clifford and William James have been the foremost religious theorist and have attempted to answer significant creation and theological mysteries. However, Clifford and James have varying views on the belief debate, each formulating a rational argument of what the basis for belief should be. Clifford’s, Ethics of Belief and James’ The Will to Believe outline their respective arguments which are vastly similar and but have marked differences. Both articles will be examined for these similarities and difference and stated within this paper.

In everyday life, people often claim knowledge of various facts and experiences. However, despite the regularity of such claims, it is difficult to articulate what knowledge specifically is and what conditions are necessary to constitute knowledge of a specific fact or event. One set of conditions for knowledge, known as justified true belief, states that a person knows something if that thing is true, if they believe it, and if they are justified in believing it (Gettier 345). This theory, however, was shown to be problematic by the philosopher Edmund Gettier. By proposing two examples, Gettier showed that the conditions of justified true belief are not sufficient to establish knowledge (345-346). Although Gettier found this flaw, he did not propose any alternate conditions of knowledge to add to or replace those of justified true belief (346). This is where Nozick’s idea of knowledge, presented in “”Knowledge” from Philosophical Explanations,” becomes relevant. Nozick’s conditions for knowledge attempt to define knowledge without being swayed by cases such as the Gettier examples. In this paper, I will first summarize Nozick’s conception of knowledge as well as some of the reasoning for including each condition. I will then try to find an example to show that Nozick’s conditions, although more widely applicable to knowledge than justified true

Not surprisingly, truths are not universally agreed upon. I will examine and discuss the different philosophical perspectives of

In his book ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, Descartes writes that all beliefs, even the most irresistible convictions, may not correspond to how the world really is; and this is something that defenders of the correspondence theory are arguably unable to dismiss. As a result, the coherence theory takes a different approach and argues that a proposition (truth-bearer) is true if it ‘fits’ or coheres with a specific set of beliefs (truth-maker). These beliefs may belong either to the individual (and include the laws of logic, for example), to human beings at the ultimate stage of historical development, or to a system of beliefs held by a God or the Absolute (Walker, 1989). So in the example where Billy believes that ‘dogs have five legs’, his claim can be assessed by considering if this statement coheres with a specific set of true beliefs. For instance, it may be commonly understood that dogs have four legs not five, that there has never been a dog with more than four legs, and that no one apart from Billy has ever claimed that dogs can have more than four legs. Thus, it follows that the key to determining whether Billy’s statement is true or false is “internal consistency and logical standards” (Dunwoody, 2009, p. 117).

For that reason, truth differentiates among individuals thorough their contrasting opinions. But, truth is something that everyone believes to be correct. Thus, it greatly depends on what’s true in the minds of the people. On the contrary, truth that’s spoken with bad intent is considered to be worse than a lie. Hence, truth is an expression, symbol or statement that corresponds to reality and happiness.

The production of knowledge is a process that occurs through a sequence of related actions, these series of actions allows for the Ways of Knowing to interact in a way that works to develop the knowledge that is being produced. From the prescribed title we can claim that while the Ways of Knowing may appear to be acting in isolation when forming knowledge, they are actually working in a variety of different ways in the construction and formation. In some cases, the Ways of Knowing are interacting so closely together that it is often hard to differentiate between them, for example emotion and reason, or imagination and memory. Given the right circumstances faith can be isolated to a point where it can be acting by itself to produce knowledge. However, this knowledge is often deemed as unreliable, due to faith being seen as one of the more “subjective” ways of knowing. This inability to differentiate the ways of knowing from each other during the production of knowledge, raises the questions “Can any knowledge in any Area of Knowledge be produced by a single Way of Knowing?” and “Is it possible to distinguish between Ways of Knowing if they are working together?”. While reason is used in almost all production of knowledge, it is the other Ways of Knowing used that can determine whether the knowledge is reliable or not, as some Ways of Knowing are more subjective than others. This essay will attempt to