ellauri096.html on line 112: Agnostics overestimate how easy it is to identify what cannot be known. To know, one need only find a single proof. To know that there is no way to know, one must prove the negative generalization that there is no proof. After all, inability to imagine a proof is commonly due to a failure of ingenuity rather than the non-existence of a proof. In addition to being a more general proposition, a proof of unknowability requires epistemological premises about what constitutes proof. Consequently, meta-proof (proof about proofs) is even more demanding than proof.
ellauri096.html on line 114: The agnostic might be tempted to avoid presumptuousness by converting to meta-agnosticism. But this “retreats” in the wrong direction. Meta-meta-proof is, in turn, even more demanding than meta-proof. Meta-meta-proof requires both the epistemological premises about what constitutes proof that meta-proof needs and, in addition, meta-meta-proof needs epistemological premises about what constitutes meta-proof.
ellauri096.html on line 136: Foundationalists reject (1). They take some propositions to be self-evident. Coherentists reject (2). They tolerate some forms of circular reasoning. For instance, Nelson Goodman (1965) has characterized the method of reflective equilibrium as virtuously circular. Charles Peirce (1933–35, 5.250) rejected (3), an approach later refined by Peter Klein (2007) and championed at book-length by Scott F. Aikin (2011). Infinitists believe that infinitely long chains of justification are no more impossible than infinitely long chains of causation. Finally, the epistemological anarchist rejects (4). As Paul Feyerabend refrains in Against Method, “Anything goes” (1988, vii, 5, 14, 19, 159).
ellauri396.html on line 167: In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as "one of the 'four horsemen'" (along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence", is still off the mark in philosophy and law.
xxx/ellauri387.html on line 471: William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using...
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