May 19, 2011

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 What, then, is to be said of these ‘inner states’, and of the direct reports of them that have played so important a role in traditional epistemology? For a person to feel is nothing else than for him to have an ability to make a certain type of non-inferential report, to attribute feelings to infants is to acknowledge in them latent abilities of this innate kind. Non-conceptual, non-linguistic ‘knowledge’ of what feelings or sensations is like is attributively to beings on the basis of potential membership of our community. We accredit infants and the more attractive animals with having feelings on the basis of that spontaneous sympathy that we extend to anything humanoid, in contrast with the mere ‘response to stimuli’ attributed to photoelectric cells and to animals about which no one feels sentimentally. It is consequently wrong to suppose that moral prohibition against hurting infants and the better-looking animals are those moral prohibitions grounded’ in their possession of feelings.  The relation of dependence is really the other way round. Similarly, we could not be mistaken in supposing that a four-year-old child has knowledge, but no one-year-old, any more than we could be mistaken in taking the word of a statute that eighteen-year-old can marry freely but seventeen-year-old cannot. There is no more ‘ontological ground’ for the distinction that may suit ‘us’ to make in the former case than in the later.
 Quine takes a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. These ‘intentional idioms’ resist smooth incorporation into the scientific world view, and Quine responds with scepticism toward them, not quite endorsing ‘eliminativism’, but regarding them as second-rate idioms, unsuitable for describing strict and literal facts. For similar reasons he has consistently expressed suspicion of the logical and philosophical propriety of appeal to logical possibilities and possible worlds. The languages that are properly behaved and suitable for literal and true descriptions of the world happen to those within the fields that draw upon  mathematics and science. We must take the entities to which our best theories refer with full seriousness in our ontologies, although an empiricist. Quine thus supposes that science requires the abstract objects of set theory, and therefore exist. In the theory of knowledge Quine associated with a ‘holistic view’ of verification, conceiving of a body of knowledge in terms of a web touching experience at the periphery, but with each point connected by a network of relations to other points.
 They have also known Quine for the view that we should naturalize, or conduct epistemology in a scientific spirit, with the object of investigation being the relationship, in human beings, between the inputs of experience and the outputs of belief.
 One answer is that the belief has a coherent place or role in a system of beliefs, perception or the having the perceptivity that has its influence on beliefs. As, you respond to sensory stimuli by believing that you are reading a page in a book than believing that you have a centaur in the garden. Belief has an influence on action, or its belief is a desire to act, if belief will differentiate the differences between them, that its belief is a desire or if you were to believe that you are reading a page than if you believed in something about a centaur. Sortal perceptivals hold accountably the perceptivity and action that are indeterminate to its content if its belief is the action as if stimulated by its inner and latent coherence in that of your belief, however. The same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays in a network of relations to other beliefs, some latently causal than others that relate to the role in inference and implication. For example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other belief, justly as I infer about other beliefs from.
 The input of perceptibility and the output of an action supplement the central role of the systematic relations the belief has to other belief, but the systematic relations give the belief the specific contentual representation it has. They are the fundamental source of the content of belief. That is how coherence comes in. A belief has the representational content by which it does because of the way in which it coheres within a system of beliefs (Rosenberg, 1988). We might distinguish weak coherence theories of the content of beliefs from stronger coherence theories. Weak coherence theories affirm that coherence is one determinant of the representation given that the contents are of belief. Strong coherence theories of the content of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the contentual representations of belief.
 Least of mention, a strong coherence theory of justification is a formidable combination by which a positive and a negative theory tell ‘us’ that a belief is justifiable if and only if it coheres with a background system of inter-connectivity of beliefs. Coherence theories of justification and knowledge have most often been rejected for being unable to deal with an accountable justification toward the perceptivity upon the projection of knowledge (Audi, 1988, and Pollock, 1986).
 Coherence theory would go beyond the claim of the weak coherence theory to affirm that the justification of all beliefs, including the belief that one sees the shaping to sensory data that holds accountable a measure of 105, or even the more cautious belief that one sees a shape, resulting from the perceptivals of coherence theory, in that it coheres with a background system. One may argue for this strong coherence theory in a number of different ways. One line or medium through which to appeal to the coherence theory of contentual representations. If the content of the perceptual belief results from the relations of the belief to other beliefs in a network system of beliefs, then one may notably argue that the justification of perceptivity, that the belief is a resultant from which its relation of the belief to other beliefs, in the network system of beliefs is in argument for the strong coherence theory is that without any assumptive reason that the coherence inference of the content, are of the beliefs in as much as the supposed causes that only produce the consequences we expect. Consider the very cautious belief that I see a shape. How could the justification for that perceptual belief be an existent result that they characterize of its material coherence with a background system of beliefs? What might the background system tell ‘us’ that would justify that belief? Our background system contains a simple and primal theory about our relationship to the world and surrounding surfaces that we perceive as it is or should be believed. To come to the specific point at issue, we believe that we can tell a shape when we see one, completely differentiated its form as perceived to sensory data, that we are to trust of ourselves about such simple matters as wether we see a shape before ‘us’ or not, as in the acceptance of opening to nature the inter-connectivity between belief and the progression through which we acquire from past experiential conditions of application, and not beyond deception. Moreover, when Trust sees the believing desire to act upon what either coheres with a weak or strong coherence of theory, she shows that its belief, as a measurable quality or entity of 105, has the essence in as much as there is much more of a structured distinction of circumstance, which is not of those that are deceptive about whether she sees that shape or sincerely does not see of its shaping distinction, however. Light is good, and the numeral shapes are large, readily discernible and so forth. These are beliefs that Trust has single handedly authenticated reasons for justification. Her successive malignance to sensory access to data involved is justifiably a subsequent belief, in that with those beliefs, and so she is justified and creditable.
 The philosophical problems include discovering whether belief differs from other varieties of assent, such as ‘acceptance’ discovering to what extent degrees of belief is possible, understanding the ways in which belief is controlled by rational and irrational factors, and discovering its links with other properties, such as the possession of conceptual or linguistic skills. This last set of problems includes the question of whether we have properly said that paralinguistic infants or animals have beliefs.
 Thus, we might think of coherence as inference to the best explanation based on a background system of beliefs, since we are not aware of such inferences for the most part, we must interpret the inferences as unconscious inferences, as information processing, based on or accessing the background system that proves most convincing of acquiring its act and used from the motivational force that its underlying and hidden desire are to do so. One might object to such an account on the grounds that not all justifiable inferences are self-explanatory, and more generally, the account of coherence may, at best, is ably successful to competitions that are based on background systems (BonJour, 1985, and Lehrer, 1990). The belief that one sees a shape competes with the claim that one does not, with the claim that one is deceived, and other sceptical objections. The background system of beliefs informs one that one is acceptingly trustworthy and enables one to meet the objections. A belief coheres with a background system just in case it enables one to meet the sceptical objections and in the way justifies one in the belief. This is a standard strong coherence theory of justification (Lehrer, 1990).
 It is easy to illustrate the relationship between positive and negative coherence theories in terms of the standard coherence theory. If some objection to a belief cannot be met in terms of the background system of beliefs of a person, then the person is not justified in that belief. So, to return to Trust, suppose that she has ben told that a warning light has been installed on her gauge to tell her when it is not functioning properly and that when the red light is on, the gauge is malfunctioning. Suppose that when she sees the reading of 105, she also sees that the red light is on. Imagine, finally, that this is the first time the red light has been on, and, after years of working with the gauge, Julie, who has always placed her trust in the gauge, believes what the gauge tells her, that the liquid in the container is at 105 degrees. Though she believes what she reads is at 105 degrees is not a justified belief because it fails to cohere with her background belief that the gauge is malfunctioning. Thus, the negative coherence theory tells ‘us’ that she is not justified in her belief about the temperature of the contents in the container. By contrast, when we have not illuminated the red light and the background system of Julies tell her that under such conditions that gauge is a trustworthy indicator of the temperature of the liquid in the container, then she is justified. The positive coherence theory tells ‘us’ that she is justified in her belief because her belief coheres with her background system of Julies tell her that under such conditions that gauge is a trustworthy indicator of the temperature of the liquid in the container, then she is justified. The positive coherence theory tells ‘us’ that she is justified in her belief because her belief coheres with her background system continues as a trustworthy system.
 The foregoing sketch and illustration of coherence theories of justification have a common feature, namely, that they are what we have called internalistic theories of justification what makes of such a view are the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general, have no reason for thinking the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, are none the less to appear epistemologically justified in accepting it. Thus, such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological traditions, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that the belief is true. An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
 They are theories affirming that coherence is a matter of internal relations between beliefs and that justification is a matter of coherence. If, then, justification is solely a matter of internal relations between beliefs, we are left with the possibility that the internal relations might fail to correspond with any external reality. How, one might object, can a completely internal; a subjective notion of justification bridge the gap between mere true belief, which might be no more than a lucky guess, and knowledge, which we must ground in some connection between internal subjective conditions and external objective realities?
 The answer is that it cannot and that we have required something more than justified true belief for knowledge. This result has, however, been established quite apart from consideration of coherence theories of justification. What we have required maybe put by saying that the justification that one must be undefeated by errors in the background system of beliefs. Justification is undefeated by errors just in case any correction of such errors in the background system of belief would sustain the justification of the belief on the basis of the corrected system. So knowledge, on this sort of positivity is acclaimed by the coherence theory, which is the true belief that coheres with the background belief system and corrected versions of that system. In short, knowledge is true belief plus justification resulting from coherence and undefeated by error (Lehrer, 1990). The connection between internal subjective conditions of belief and external objectivity are from which reality’s result from the required correctness of our beliefs about the relations between those conditions and realities.
 What justification does, as we have that any of our justifications are undefeated? The fear that we might have none, that our beliefs might be the artifact of some deceptive demon or scientist, leads to the quest to reduce truth to some form, perhaps an idealized form, of justification (Rescher, 1973, and Rosenberg, 1980). That would close the threatening sceptical gap between justification and truth. Suppose that a belief is true if and only if it is justifiable of some person. For such a person there would be no gap between justification and truth or between justification and undefeated justification. Truth would be coherence with some ideal background system of beliefs, perhaps one expressing a consensus among systems or some consensus among belief systems or some convergence toward a consensus. Such a view is theoretically attractive for the reduction it promises, but it appears open to profound objectification. One is that there is a consensus that we can all be wrong about at least some matters, for example, about the origins of the universe. If there is a consensus that we can all be wrong about something, then the consensual belief system rejects the equation of truth with the consensus. Consequently, the equation of truth with coherence with a consensual belief system is itself incoherently.
 Coherence theories of the content of our beliefs and the justification of our beliefs themselves cohere with our background systems but coherence theories of truth do not. A defender of coherentism must accept the logical gap between justified belief and truth, but may believe that our capacities suffice to close the gap to yield knowledge. That view is, at any rate, a coherent one.
 What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? It is natural to think that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals depend on what causal subject to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursed this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ‘p’ is knowledge just in case it has the right sort of causal connection to the fact that ‘p’. Such a criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that ‘p’ is a sort that can reach causal relations, this seems to exclude mathematically and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular facts about the subject’s environment.
 For example, Armstrong (1973) proposed that a belief of the form ‘This (perceived) object is F’ is (non-inferential) knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F’, that is, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any subject ‘x’ is to occur, and so thus a perceived object of ‘y’, if ‘x’ undergoing those properties are for ‘us’ to believe that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’. (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the belief’s being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F’).
 This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficient for non-inferential perceptual knowledge because it is compatible with the belief’s being unjustified, and an unjustifiable belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your mechanisms for colour perception are working well, but you have been given good reason to think otherwise, to think, say, that the substantive primary colours that are perceivable, that things look chartreuse to you and chartreuse things look magenta. If you fail to heed these reasons you have for thinking that your colour perception or sensory data is a way and believing of a thing that looks magenta to you that it is magenta, your belief will fail to be justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, even though the thing’s being magenta in such a way causes it as to be a completely reliable sign, or to carry the information, in that the thing is magenta.
 One could fend off this sort of counterexample by simply adding to the causal condition the requirement that the belief be justified, buy this enriched condition would still be insufficient. Suppose, for example, that in nearly all people, but not in you, as it happens, causes the aforementioned aberration in colour perceptions. The experimenter tells you that you have taken such a drug but then says, ‘no, wait minute, the pill you took was just a placebo’, suppose further, that this last thing the experimenter tells you is false. Her telling you that it was a false statement, and, again, telling you this gives you justification for believing of a thing that looks a subtractive primary colour to you that it is a sensorial primary colour, in that the fact you were to expect that the experimenters last statements were false, making it the case that your true belief is not knowledgeably correct, thought as though to satisfy its causal condition.
 Goldman (1986) has proposed an importantly different sort of causal criterion namely, that a true belief is knowledge, if it is produced by a type of process that is ‘globally’ and ‘locally’ reliable. It is globally reliable if its propensity to cause true beliefs is sufficiently high. Local reliability has to do with whether the process would have produced a similar but false belief in certain counterfactual situations alternative to the actual situation. This way of marking off true beliefs that are knowledge does not require the fact believed to be casually related to the belief, and so it could in principle apply to knowledge of any kind of truth.
 Goldman requires that global reliability of the belief-producing process for the justification of a belief, he requires it also for knowledge because they require justification for knowledge, in what requires for knowledge but does not require for justification, which is locally reliable. His idea is that a justified true belief is knowledge if the type of process that produced it would not have produced it in any relevant counterfactual situation in which it is false. Noting that other concepts exhibit the same logical structure can motivate the relevant alternative account of knowledge. Two examples of this are the concept ‘flat’ and the concept ‘empty’ (Dretske, 1981). Both appear to be absolute concepts -a space is empty only if it does not contain anything and a surface is flat only if it does not have any bumps. However, the absolute character of these concepts is relative to a standard. In the case of ‘flat’, there is a standard for what counts as a bump and in the case of ‘empty’, there is a standard for what counts as a thing. To be flat is to be free of any relevant bumps and to be empty is to be devoid of all relevant things.
 This avoids the sorts of counterexamples we gave for the causal criteria, but it is vulnerable to one or ones of a different sort. Suppose you were to stand on the mainland looking over the water at an island, on which are several structures that look (from at least some point of view) as would ne of an actualized point or station of position. You happen to be looking at one of any point, in fact a barn and your belief to that effect are justified, given how it looks to you and the fact that you have exclusively of no reason to think nor believe otherwise. But suppose that the great majority of the barn-looking structures on the island are not real barns but fakes. Finally, suppose that from any viewpoint on the mainland all of the island’s fake barns are obscured by trees and that circumstances made it very unlikely that you would have to a viewpoint not on the mainland. Here, it seems, your justified true belief that you are looking at a barn is not knowledge, despite the fact that there was not a serious chance that there would have developed an alternative situation, wherefore you are similarly caused to have a false belief that you are looking at a barn.
 That example shows that the ‘local reliability’ of the belief-producing process, on the ‘serous chance’ explication of what makes an alternative relevance, yet its view-point upon which we are in showing that non-locality also might sustain of some probable course of the possibility for ‘us’ to believe in. Within the experience condition of application, the relationship with the sensory-data, as having a world-view that can encompass both the hidden and manifest aspects of nature would comprise of the mind, or brain that provides the excitation of neuronal ions, giving to sensory perception an accountable assessment of data and reason-sensitivity allowing a comprehensive world-view, integrating the various aspects of the universe into one magnificent whole, a whole in which we played an organic and central role. One-hundred years ago its question would have been by a Newtonian ‘clockwork universe’, an illustration of ‘I’, universes that are completely mechanical. The laws of nature have predetermined everything that happens and by the state of the universe in the distant past. The freedom one feels in regard to ones actions, even in regards to the movement of one’s body, is an illusory infraction and the world-view expresses as the Newtonian one, is completely coherent.
 Nevertheless, the human mind abhors a vacuum. When an explicit, coherent world-view is absent, it functions on the basis of a tactic one. A tactic world-view is not subject to a critical evaluation, and it can easily harbour inconsistencies. And, indeed, our tactic set of beliefs about the nature of reality consists of contradictory bits and pieces. The dominant component is a leftover from another period, the Newtonian ‘clock universe’ still lingers as we cling to this old and tired model because we know of nothing else that can take its place. Our condition is the condition of a culture that is in the throes of a paradigm shift. A major paradigm shift is complex and difficult because a paradigm holds ‘us captive: We see reality through it, as through coloured glasses, but we do not know that, we are convinced that we see reality as it is. Hence the appearance of a new and different paradigm is often incomprehensible. To someone raised believing that the Earth is flat, the suggestion that the Earth is spherical would seem preposterous: If the Earth were spherical, would not the poor antipodes fall ‘down’ into the sky?
 And yet, as we face a new millennium, we are forced to face this challenge. The fate of the planet is in question, and it was brought to its present precarious condition largely because of our trust in the Newtonian paradigm. As Newtonian world-view has to go, and, if one looks carefully, we can discern the main feature of the new, emergent paradigm. The search for these features is what was the influence of a fading paradigm. All paradigms include subterranean realms of tactic assumptions, the influence of which outlasts the adherence to the paradigm itself.
 The first line of exploration suggests the ‘weird’ aspects of the quantum theory, with fertile grounds for our feeling of which should disappear in inconsistencies with the prevailing world-view. This feeling is in replacing by the new one, i.e., if one believes that the Earth is flat, the story of Magellan’s travels is quite puzzling: How it is possible for a ship to travel due west and, without changing direct. Arrive at its place of departure? Obviously, when the belief replaces the flat-Earth paradigm that Earth is spherical, we have instantly resolved the puzzle.
 The founders of Relativity and quantum mechanics were deeply engaging but incomplete, in that none of them attempted to construct a philosophical system, however, that the mystery at the heart of the quantum theory called for a revolution in philosophical outlooks. During which time, the 1920's, when quantum mechanics reached maturity, began the construction of a full-blooded philosophical system that we based not only on science but on nonscientific modes of knowledge as well. As, the fading influences drawn upon the paradigm go well beyond its explicit claim. We believe, as the scenists and philosophers did, that when we wish to find out the truth about the universe, we can ignore nonscientific nodes of processing human experiences, poetry, literature, art, music are all wonderful, but, in relation to the quest for knowledge of the universe, they are irrelevant. Yet, it was Alfred North Whitehead who pointed out the fallacy of this speculative assumption. In this, as well as in other aspects of thinking of some reality in which are the building blocks of reality are not material atoms but ‘throbs of experience’. Whitehead formulated his system in the late 1920s, and yet, as far as I know, the founders of quantum mechanics were unaware of it. It was not until 1963 that J.M. Burgers pointed out that its philosophy accounts very well for the main features of the quanta, especially the ‘weird ones’, enabling as in some aspects of reality is ‘higher’ or ’deeper’ than others, and if so, what is the structure of such hierarchical divisions? What of our place  in the universe? And, finally, what is the relationship between the great aspiration within the lost realms of nature? An attempt to endow ‘us’ with a cosmological meaning in such a universe seems totally absurd, and, yet, this very universe is just a paradigm, not the truth. When you reach its end, you may be willing to join the alternate view as accorded to which, surprisingly bestow ‘us’ with what we have restored, although in a post-postmodern context.
 Subjective matter’s has regulated the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, as to emphasis the connections between what I believe, in that investigations of such interconnectivity are anticipatorially the hesitations that are an exclusion held within the western traditions, however, other aspects express my own views and convictions, as turning about to be more difficult that anticipated, discovering that a conversational mode would be helpful, but, their conversations with each other and with me in hoping that all will be not only illuminating but finding to its read may approve in them, whose dreams are dreams among others than themselves.
 These examples make it seem likely that, if there is a criterion for what makes an alternative situation relevant that will save Goldman’s claim about reliability and the acceptance of knowledge, it will not be simple.
 The interesting thesis that counts asa causal theory of justification, in the meaning of ‘causal theory’ intend of the belief that is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process that is ‘globally’ reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs-that can be defined to a good enough approximation, as the proportion of the belief it produces, or would produce where it used as much as opportunity allows, that is true ~. Is sufficiently that a belief acquires favourable epistemic status by having some kind of reliable linkage to the truth? We have advanced variations of this view for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulations of are reliably in its account of knowing appeared in a not by F.P. Ramsey (1903-30) who made important contributions to mathematical logic, probability theory, the philosophy of science and economics. Instead of saying that quarks have such-and-such properties, the Ramsey sentence says the is rather something that has those properties. The most sustained and influential application of these ideas were in the philosophy of mind, or brain, as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) whom Ramsey persuaded that remained work for him to do, the way of an undoubtedly most charismatic figure of 20th-century philosophy, living and writing with a power and intensity that frequently overwhelmed his contemporaries and readers, being a kind of picture or model has centred the early period on the ‘picture theory of meaning’ according to which sentence represents a state of affairs of it. Containing elements corresponding to those of the state of affairs and structure or form that mirrors that a structure of the state of affairs that it represents. We have reduced to all logic complexity that of the ‘propositional calculus, and all propositions are ‘truth-functions of atomic or basic propositions.
 In the layer period the emphasis shafts dramatically to the actions of people and the role linguistic activities play in their lives. Thus, whereas in the “Tractatus” language is placed in a static, formal relationship with the world, in the later work Wittgenstein emphasis its use in the context of standardized social activities of ordering, advising, requesting, measuring, counting, excising concerns for each other, and so on. Clearly, there are many forms of reliabilism. Just as there are many forms of ‘foundationalism’ and ‘coherence’. How is reliabilism related to these other two theories of justification? We usually regard it as a rival, and this is aptly so, in as far as foundationalism and coherentism traditionally focussed on purely evidential relations than psychological processes, but we might also offer reliabilism as a deeper-level theory, subsuming some of the precepts of either foundationalism or coherentism. Foundationalism says that there are ‘basic’ beliefs, which acquire justification without dependence on inference, reliabilism might rationalize this indicating that reliable non-inferential processes have formed the basic beliefs. Coherence stresses the primary of systematicity in all doxastic decision-making. Reliabilism might rationalize this by pointing to increases in reliability that accrue from systematicity consequently, reliabilism could complement Foundationalism and coherence than completed with them.
 These examples make it seem likely that, if there is a criterion for what makes an alternate situation relevant that will save Goldman’s claim about local reliability and knowledge. Will did not be simple. The interesting thesis that counts as a causal theory of justification, in the making of ‘causal theory’ intended for the belief as it is justified in case it was produced by a type of process that is ‘globally’ reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs  ‒that can be defined, to a good enough approximations, as the proportion of the beliefs it produces, or would produce where it used as much as opportunity allows, that is true -is sufficiently relializable. We have advanced variations of this view for both knowledge and justified belief, its first formulation of a reliability account of knowing appeared in the notation from F.P.Ramsey (1903-30). The theory of probability, he was the first to show how a ‘personalist theory’ could be developed, based on a precise behavioural notion of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language. Much of Ramsey’s work was directed at saving classical mathematics from ‘intuitionism’, or what he called the ‘Bolshevik menace of Brouwer and Weyl. In the theory of probability he was the first to show how we could develop a personalists theory, based on precise behavioural notation of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language, Ramsey was one of the first thankers, which he combined with radical views of the function of many kinds of a proposition. Neither generalizations, nor causal propositions, nor those treating probability or ethics, describe facts, but each has a different specific function in our intellectual economy. Ramsey was one of the earliest commentators on the early work of Wittgenstein, and his continuing friendship that led to Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge and to philosophy in 1929.
 Ramsey’s sentence theory is the sentence generated by taking all the sentences affirmed in a scientific theory that use some term, e.g., ‘quark’. Replacing the term by a variable, and existentially quantifying into the result. Instead of saying that quarks have such-and-such properties, the Ramsey sentence says that there is something that has those properties. If we repeat the process for all of a group of the theoretical terms, the sentence gives the ‘topic-neutral’ structure of the theory, but removes any implication that we know what the term so treated distinguish, its leaves open the possibility of identifying the theoretical item with whatever, but it is that best fits the description provided. Virtually, all theories of knowledge. Of course, share an externalist component in requiring truth as a condition for known in. Reliabilism goes further, however, in trying to capture additional conditions for knowledge by ways of a nomic, counterfactual or other such ‘external’ relations between belief and truth. Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account of knowledge, primarily dur to Dretshe (1971, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of this approach is that ‘x’s’ belief that ‘p’ qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘x’ believes ‘p’, because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p’ was true, or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p’ if ‘p’ were not true. An enemy example, ‘x’ would not have its current reasons for believing there is a telephone before it. Or would not come to believe this in the ways it does, thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the belief’s bing true. An undaunted and the facts of counterfactual approach say that ‘x’ knows that ‘p’ only if there is no ‘relevant alternative’ situation in which ‘p’ is false but ‘x’ would still believe that a proposition ‘p’; must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives to ‘p’ where an alternative to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’? That in one’s justification or evidence for ‘p’ must be sufficient for one to know that every alternative to ‘p’ is false. This element of our evolving thinking, sceptical arguments have exploited about which knowledge. These arguments call our attentions to alternatives that our evidence sustains itself with no elimination. The sceptic inquires to how we know that we are not seeing a cleverly disguised mule. While we do have some evidence against the likelihood of such as deception, intuitively it is not strong enough for ‘us’ to know that we are not so deceived. By pointing out alternate but hidden points of nature, in that we cannot eliminate, as well as others with more general application, as dreams, hallucinations, etc. The sceptic appears to show that every alternative is seldom. If ever, satisfied.
 This conclusion conflicts with another strand in our thinking about knowledge, in that we know many things. Thus, there is a tension in our ordinary thinking about knowledge ~. We believe that knowledge is, in the sense indicated, an absolute concept and yet, we also believe that there are many instances of that concept.
 If one finds absoluteness to be too central a component of our concept of knowledge to be relinquished, one could argue from the absolute character of knowledge to a sceptical conclusion (Unger, 1975). Most philosophers, however, have taken the other course, choosing to respond to the conflict by giving up, perhaps reluctantly, the absolute criterion. This latter response holds as sacrosanct our commonsense belief that we know many things (Pollock, 1979 and Chisholm, 1977). Each approach is subject to the criticism that it preserves one aspect of our ordinary thinking about knowledge at the expense of denying another. We can view the theory of relevant alternatives as an attempt to provide a more satisfactory response to this tension in our thinking about knowledge. It attempts to characterize knowledge in a way that preserves both our belief that knowledge is an absolute concept and our belief that we have knowledge.
 According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for briefs some  related attitude.  For instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entail psychological certainty or acceptance (Lehrer, 1989). Nonetheless, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having belief-like attitudes toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does no entail belief or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis).
 Having its recourse to knowledge, its cental questions include the origin of knowledge, the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so, the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error, the possibility of universal scepticism, and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All of these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the natures of experience and meaning. It is possible to see epistemology as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the kob of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, s that the resulting edifice can be shown to be sound. This metaphor of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference as a method of construction, as that knowledge must be regarded as a structure risen upon secure, certain foundations. These are found in some formidable combinations of experience and reason, with different schools (empiricism, rationalism) emphasizing the role of one over that of the others. Foundationalism was associated with the ancient Stoics, and in the modern era with Descartes (1596-1650). Who discovered his foundations in the ‘clear and distinct’ ideas of reason? Its main opponent is coherentism, or the view that a body of propositions mas be known without a foundation in certainty, but by their interlocking strength, than as a crossword puzzle may be known to have been solved correctly even if each answer, taken individually, admits of uncertainty. Difficulties at this point led the logical passivists to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation together, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth. It is widely accepted that trying to make the connection between thought and experience through basic sentences depends on an untenable ‘myth of the given’.
 Still, of the other metaphor, is that of a boat or fuselage, that has no foundation but owes its strength to the stability given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea of a basis in the ‘given’, favours ideas of coherence and holism, but finds it harder to ward off scepticism.  In spite of these concerns, the problem, least of mention, is of defining knowledge in terms of true beliefs plus some favoured relations between the believer and the facts that began with Plato’s view in the “Theaetetus” that knowledge is true belief, and some logos.` Due of its natural epistemology, the enterprising of studying the actual formation of knowledge by human beings, without aspiring to certify those processes as rational, or proof against ‘scepticism’ or even apt to yield the truth. Natural epistemology would therefore blend into the psychology of learning and the study of episodes I the history of science. The scope for ‘external’ or philosophical reflection of the kind that might result in scepticism or its refutation is markedly diminished. Although the terms in modern, distinguished exponents of the approach include Aristotle, Hume, and J.S. Mills.
 The task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much positivist philosophy of science, few philosophers now subscribe o it. It places too great a confidence in the possibility of a purely a prior ‘first philosophy’, or standpoint beyond that of the working practitioners, from which they can measure their best efforts as good or bad. This standpoint now seems too many philosopher to be a fantasy. The more modest of tasks that we actually adopt at various historical stages of investigation into different areas with the aim not so much of criticizing but more of systematization, in the presuppositions of a particular field at a particular tie. There is still a role for local methodological disputes within the community investigators of some phenomenon, with one approach charging that another is unsound or unscientific, but logic and philosophy will not, on the modern view, provide an independent arsenal of weapons for such battles, which indeed often come to seem more like political bids for ascendancy within a discipline.
 This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connection between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge processed through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwin’s theory of biological natural selection. There is a widespread misconception that evolution proceeds according to some plan or direct, put it has neither, and the role of chance ensures that its future course will be unpredictable. Random variations in individual organisms create tiny differences in their Darwinian fitness. Some individuals have more offsprings than others, and the characteristics that increased their fitness thereby become more prevalent in future generations. Once upon a time, at least a mutation occurred in a human population in tropical Africa that changed the haemoglobin molecule in a way that provided resistance to malaria. This enormous advantage caused the new gene to spread, with the unfortunate consequence that sickle-cell anaemia came to exist.
 Chance can influence the outcome at each stage: First, in the creation of genetic mutation, second, in wether the bearer lives long enough to show its effects, thirdly, in chance events that influence the individual’s actual reproductive success, and fourth, in wether a gene even if favoured in one generation, is, happenstance, eliminated in the next, and finally in the many unpredictable environmental changes that will undoubtedly occur in the history of any group of organisms. As Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has so vividly expressed that process over again, the outcome would surely be different. Not only might there not be humans, there might not even be anything like mammals.
 We will often emphasis the elegance of traits shaped by natural selection, but the common idea that nature creates perfection needs to be analysed carefully. The extent to which evolution achieves perfection depends on exactly what you mean. If you mean “Does natural selections always take the best path for the long-term welfare of a species?” the answer is no. That would require adaption by group selection, and this is, unlikely. If you mean “Does natural selection creates every adaption that would be valuable?” The answer again, is no. For instance, some kinds of South American monkeys can grasp branches with their tails. The trick would surely also be useful to some African species, but, simply because of bad luck, none have it. Some combination of circumstances started some ancestral South American monkeys using their tails in ways that ultimately led to an ability to grab onto branches, while no such development took place in Africa. Mere usefulness of a trait does not necessitate it mean that will evolve.
 This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connection between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge proceeds through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwin’s theory of biological natural selection. The three major components of the model of natural selection are variation selection and retention. According to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, variations are not pre-designed to perform certain functions. Rather, these variations that perform useful functions are selected. While those who are not selected as such of a selection are responsible for the appearance that variational intentionality occurs. In the modern theory of evolution, genetic mutations provide the blind variations (blind in the sense that variations are not influenced by the effects they would have-the likelihood of a mutation is not correlated with the benefits or liabilities that mutation would confer on the organism), the environment provides the filter of selection, and reproduction provides the retention. Fit is achieved because those organisms with features that make them less adapted for survival do not survive in connection with other organisms in the environment that have features that are better adapted. Evolutionary epistemology applies this blind variation and selective retention model to the growth of scientific knowledge and to human thought processes in general.
 The parallel between biological evolution and conceptual or we can see ‘epistemic’ evolution as either literal or analogical. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology dees biological evolution as the main cause of the growth of knowledge. On this view, called the ‘evolution of cognitive mechanic programs’, by Bradie (1986) and the ‘Darwinian approach to epistemology’ by Ruse (1986), that growth of knowledge occurs through blind variation and selective retention because biological natural selection itself is the cause of epistemic variation and selection. The most plausible version of the literal view does not hold that all human beliefs are innate but rather than the mental mechanisms which guide the acquisition of non-innate beliefs are themselves innate and the result of biological natural selection. Ruse (1986) demands a version of literal evolutionary epistemology that he links to sociolology (Rescher, 1990).
 On the analogical version of evolutionary epistemology, called the ‘evolution of theory’s program’, by Bradie (1986). And the ‘Spenserians approach’ (after the nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer) by Ruse (1986), a process analogous to biological natural selection has governed the development of human knowledge, rather than by an instance of the mechanism itself. This version of evolutionary epistemology, introduced and elaborated by Donald Campbell (1974) as well as Karl Popper, sees the [partial] fit between theories and the world as explained by a mental process of trial and error known as epistemic natural selection.
 We have usually taken both versions of evolutionary epistemology to be types of naturalized epistemology, because both take some empirical facts as a starting point for their epistemological project. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology begins by accepting evolutionary theory and a materialist approach to the mind and, from these, constructs an account of knowledge and its developments. In contrast, the analogical; the version does not require the truth of biological evolution: It simply draws on biological evolution as a source for the model of natural selection. For this version of evolutionary epistemology to be true, the model of natural selection need only apply to the growth of knowledge, not to the origin and development of species. Crudely put, evolutionary epistemology of the analogical sort could still be true even if creationism is the correct theory of the origin of species.
 Although they do not begin by assuming evolutionary theory, most analogical evolutionary episteremologists are naturalized epistemologists as well, their empirical assumptions, least of mention, implicitly come from psychology and cognitive science, not evolutionary theory. Sometimes, however, evolutionary epistemology is characterized in a seemingly non-naturalistic fashion. (Campbell, 1974) says that ‘if one is expanding knowledge beyond what one knows, one has no choice but to explore without the benefit of wisdom’, i.e., blindly. This, Campbell admits, makes evolutionary epistemology close to being a tautology (and so not naturalistic). Evolutionary epistemology does assert the analytic claim that when expanding one’s knowledge beyond what one knows, one must precessed to something that is already known, but, more interestingly, it also makes the synthetic claim that when expanding one’s knowledge beyond what one knows, one must proceed by blind variation and selective retention. This claim is synthetic because we can empirically falsify it. The central claim of evolutionary epistemology is synthetic, not analytic. If the central contradictory, which they are not. Campbell is right that evolutionary epistemology does have the analytic feature he mentions, but he is wrong to think that this is a distinguishing feature, since any plausible epistemology has the same analytic feature (Skagestad, 1978).
 Two extra-ordinary issues lie to awaken the literature that involves questions about ‘realism’, i.e., What sort of metaphysical commitment does an evolutionary epistemologist have to make? And progress, i.e., according to evolutionary epistemology, does knowledge develop toward a goal? With respect to realism, many evolutionary epistemologists endorse that is called ‘hypothetical realism’, a view that combines a version of epistemological ‘scepticism’ and tentative acceptance of metaphysical realism. With respect to progress, the problem is that biological evolution is not goal-directed, but the growth of human knowledge seems to be. Campbell (1974) worries about the potential disanalogy, as it represents, but is willing to bite the stone of conscience and admit that epistemic evolution progress toward a goal (truth) while biological evolution does not. Some have argued that evolutionary epistemologists must give up the ‘truth-topic’ sense of progress because a natural selection model is in essence non-teleological, instead, following Kuhn (1970), an embraced along with evolutionary epistemology.
 Among the most frequent and serious criticisms levelled against evolutionary epistemology is that the analogical version of the view is false because epistemic variation is not blind (Skagestad, 1978), and Ruse, 1986, (Stein and Lipton (1990) have argued, however, that this objection fails because, while epistemic variation is not random, its constraints come from heuristics which, for the most part, are selective retention. Further, Stein and Lipton argue that these heuristics are analogous to biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary pre-biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary cursors, such as a half-wing, a precursor to a wing, which have some function other than the function of their descendable structures: The function of descendable structures, the function of their descendable character embodied to its structural foundations, is that of the guidelines of epistemic variation is, on this view, not the source of disanalogy, but the source of a more articulated account of the analogy.
 Many evolutionary epistemologists try to combine the literal and the analogical versions (Bradie, 1986), and Stein and Lipton, (1990), saying that those beliefs and cognitive mechanisms, which are innate results from natural selection of the biological sort and those which are innate results from natural selection of the epistemic sort. This is reasonable asa long as the two parts of this hybrid view are kept distinct. An analogical version of evolutionary epistemology with biological variation as its only source of blondeness would be a null theory: This would be the case if all our beliefs are innate or if our non-innate beliefs are not the result of blind variation. An appeal to the legitimate way to produce a hybrid version of evolutionary epistemology since doing so trivializes the theory. For similar reasons, such an appeal will not save an analogical version of evolutionary epistemology from arguments to the effect that epistemic variation is blind (Stein and Lipton, 1990).
 Although it is a relatively new approach to theory of knowledge, evolutionary epistemology has attracted much attention, primarily because it represents a serious attempt to flesh out a naturalized epistemology by drawing on several disciplines. In science is relevant to understanding the nature and development of knowledge, then evolutionary theory is among the disciplines worth a look. Insofar as evolutionary epistemology looks there, it is an interesting and potentially fruitful epistemological programme.
 What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? It is natural to think that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals depends on what caused the subject to have the belief. Im recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ‘p’ is knowledge just in case it has the right sort of causal connection to the fact that ‘p’. They can apply such a criterion only to cases where the fact that ‘p’ is a sort that can enter inti causal relations, as this seems to exclude mathematical and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual representations where knowledge of particular facts about subjects’ environments.
 For example, Armstrong (1973) proposed that a belief of the form ‘This [perceived] object is ‘F’ is [non-inferential] knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F’, that ism, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any subject ‘χ’ and perceived object ‘y’, if ‘χ’ has those properties and believed that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’. (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the belief’s being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F’).
 This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficiently for non-inferential perceptivity, for knowledge is accountable for its compatibility with the belief’s being unjustified, and an unjustified belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your mechanisms for the sensory data of colour as perceived, are working well, but you have been given good reason to think otherwise, to think, say, that the sensory data of things look chartreuse to say, that chartreuse things look magenta, if you fail to heed these reasons you have for thinking that your colour perception is awry and believe of a thing that looks magenta to you that it is magenta, your belief will fail top be justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, even though it is caused by the thing’s being withing the grasp of sensory perceptivity, in such a way as to be a completely reliable sign, or to carry the information that the thing is sufficiently to organize all sensory data as perceived in and of the world, or Holistic view.
 The view that a belief acquires favourable epistemic status by having some kind of reliable linkage to the truth. Variation of this view has been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The fist formulation of a reliable account of knowing is unfolded by its literal notation by F.P. Ramsey (1903-30), whereby much of Ramsey’s work was directed at saving classical mathematics from ‘intuitionism’, or what he called the ‘Bolshevik menace of Brouwer and Weyl’. In the theory of probability he was the first to develop, based on precise behavioural nations of preference and expectation. In the philosophy of language, Ramsey was one of the first thinkers to accept a ‘redundancy theory of truth’, which he combined with radical views of the function of many kinds of propositions. Neither generalizations, nor causal positions, nor those treating probability or ethics, described facts, but each has a different specific function in our intellectual economy. Ramsey was one of the earliest commentators on the early work of Wittgenstein, and his continuing friendship with the later to Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge and to philosophy in 1929. Additionally, Ramsey, who said that a belief was knowledge if it is true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is  of at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case that D.M. Armstrong (1973) drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicate the truth. Armstrong said that a non-inferential belief qualified as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nominally sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth via laws of nature.
 Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account of knowledge, primarily due to F.I. Dretske (1971, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of this approach is that ‘S’s’ belief that ‘p’ qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘S’ believes ‘p’ because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p’ was true, or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p’ if ‘p’ were not true. For example, ‘S’ would not have his current reasons for believing there is a telephone before him, or would not come to believe this in the way he does, unless there was a telephone before him. Thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the belief;’s being true. A variant of the counterfactual approach says that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ only if there is no ‘relevant alternative’ situation in which ‘p’ is false but ‘S’ would still believe that ‘p’ must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives to ‘p’, where an alternative to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’, that is, one’s justification or evidence fort ‘p’ must be sufficient for one to know that every alternative to ‘p’ is false.
 They standardly classify Reliabilism as an ‘externalist’ theory because it invokes some truth-linked factor, and truth is ‘eternal’ to the believer the main argument for externalism derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically, from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexicals, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least to show that the belief or thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment, e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatory criteria employed by the experts in his social group, etc.-Not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain (Burge, 1979.) Virtually all theories of knowledge, of course, share an externalist component in requiring truth as a condition for knowing. Reliabilism goes further, however, in trying to capture additional conditions for knowledge by means of a nomic, counterfactual or other such ‘external’ relations between ‘belief’ and ‘truth’.
 The most influential counterexample to reliabilism is the demon-world and the clairvoyance examples. The demon-world example challenges the necessity of the reliability requirement, in that a possible world in which an evil demon creates deceptive visual experience, the process of vision is not reliable. Still, the visually formed beliefs in this world are intuitively justified. The clairvoyance example challenges the sufficiency of reliability. Suppose a cognitive agent possesses a reliable clairvoyance power, but has no evidence for or against his possessing such a power. Intuitively, his clairvoyantly formed beliefs are unjustifiably unreasoned, but reliabilism declares them justified.
 Another form of reliabilism, ‘normal worlds’, reliabilism (Goldman, 1986), answers the range problem differently, and treats the demon-world problem in the same stroke. Let a ‘normal world’ be one that is consistent with our general beliefs about the actual world. Normal-worlds reliabilism says that a belief, in any possible world is justified just in case its generating processes have high truth ratios in normal worlds. This resolves the demon-world problem because the relevant truth ratio of the visual process is not its truth ratio in the demon world itself, but its ratio in normal worlds. Since this ratio is presumably high, visually formed beliefs in the demon world turn out to be justified.
 Yet, a different version of reliabilism attempts to meet the demon-world and clairvoyance problems without recourse to the questionable notion of ‘normal worlds’. Consider Sosa’s (1992) suggestion that justified beliefs is belief acquired through ‘intellectual virtues’, and not through intellectual ‘vices’, whereby virtues are reliable cognitive faculties or processes. The task is to explain how epistemic evaluators have used the notion of indelible virtues, and vices, to arrive at their judgements, especially in the problematic cases. Goldman (1992) proposes a two-stage reconstruction of an evaluator’s activity. The first stage is a reliability-based acquisition of a ‘list’ of virtues and vices. The second stage is application of this list to queried cases. Determining has executed the second stage whether processes in the queried cases resemble virtues or vices. We have classified visual beliefs in the demon world as justified because visual belief formation is one of the virtues. Clairvoyance formed, beliefs are classified as unjustified because clairvoyance resembles scientifically suspect processes that the evaluator represents as vices e.g., mental telepathy, ESP, and so forth.
 Clearly, there are many forms of reliabilism, just as there are many forms of Foundationalism and coherentism. How is reliabilism related to these other two theories of justification? They have usually regarded it as a rival, and this is apt in as far as foundationalism and coherentism traditionally focussed on purely evidential relations rather than psychological processes. But reliabilism might also to be offered as a deeper-level theory, subsuming some of the precepts of either foundationalism or coherentism. Foundationalism says that there are ‘basic’ beliefs, which acquire justification without dependence on inference. Reliabilism might rationalize this by indicating that reliable non-inferential processes form the basic beliefs. Coherentism stresses the primary of systematicity in all doxastic decision-making. Reliabilism might rationalize this by pointing to increases in reliability that accrue from systematicity. Thus, reliabilism could complement foundationalism and coherentism than complete with them.
 Philosophers often debate the existence of different kinds of tings: Nominalists question the reality of abstract objects like class, numbers, and universals, some positivist doubt the existence of theoretical entities like neutrons or genes, and there are debates over whether there are sense-data, events and so on. Some philosophers my be happy to talk about abstract one is and theoretical entities while denying that they really exist. This requires a ‘metaphysical’ concept of ‘real existence’: We debate whether numbers, neutrons and sense-data really existing things. But it is difficult to see what this concept involves and the rules to be employed in setting such debates are very unclear.
 Questions of existence seem always to involve general kinds of things, do numbers, sense-data or neutrons exist? Some philosophers conclude that existence is not a property of individual things, ‘exists’ is not an ordinary predicate. If I refer to something, and then predicate existence of it, my utterance seems to be tautological, the object must exist for me to be able to refer to it, so predicating for me to be able to refer to it, so predicating existence of it adds nothing. And to say of something that it did not exist would be contradictory.
 More recently, philosophers, notably Quine, have questioned the distinction between linguistic framework and internal questions arising within it. Quine agrees that we have no ‘metaphysical’ concept of existence against which different purported entities can be measured. If quantification of the general theoretical framework which best explains our experience, the claims which there are such things, that they exist, is true. Scruples about admitting the existence of too many different kinds of objects depend b=not on a metaphysical concept of existence but rather on a desire for a simple and economical theoretical framework.
 It is not possible to define experience in an illuminating way, however, what experiences are through acquaintance with some of their own, e.g., a visual experience of a green after-image, a feeling of physical nausea or a tactile experience of an abrasive surface, which an actual surface ~ rough or smooth might cause or which might be part of ca dream, or the product of a vivid sensory imagination. The essential feature of every experience is that it feels a certain way ~. That there is something that it is like to have it. We may refer to this feature of an experience is its ‘character.
 Another core feature of the sorts of experience with which our concerns are those that have representational content, unless otherwise indicated, the term ‘experiences; will be reserved for these that we implicate below, that the most obvious cases of experience with content are sense experiences of the kind normally involved I perception? We may describe such experiences by mentioning their sensory modalities and their content’s e. g., a gustatory experience (modality) of chocolate ice cream (content), but do so more commonly by means of perceptual verbs combined with noun phrases specifying their contents, as in ‘Macbeth saw a dagger;’. This is, however, ambiguous between the perceptual claim ‘There was a [material ] dagger in the world which Macbeth perceived visually’ and ‘Macbeth had a visual experience of a dagger’, the reading with which we are concerned.
 As in the case of other mental states nd events with content, it is important to distinguish between the properties which an experience represents and the properties which it possesses. To talk of the representational properties of an experience is to say something about its content, not to attribute those properties to the experience itself. Like every other experience, a visual Esperance of a pink square is a mental event, and it is therefore not itself either oink or square, even though it represents those properties. It is, perhaps, fleeting, pleasant or unusual, even though it does not represent those properties. An experience may represent a property which it possesses, and it may even do so in virtue of possessing that property, as in the case of a rapidly changing [complex] experience representing something as changing rapidly, but this is the exception and not the rule.
 Which properties can be [directly] represented in sense experience is subject to debate. Traditionalists, include only properties whose presence a subject could not doubt having appropriated experiences, e.g., colour and shape in the case of visual experience, i.e., colour and shape in the case of visual experience, surface texture, hardness, etc., in the case of tactile experience. This view s natural to anyone who has to an egocentric Cartesian perspective in epistemology, and who wishes for pure data experience to serve as logically certain foundations for knowledge. The term ‘sense-data’, introduced by More and Russell, refer to the immediate objects of perceptual awareness, such as colour patches and shape, usually supposed distinct from surfaces of physical objects. Qualities of sense-data are supposed to be distinct from physical qualities because their perception is more immediate, and because sense data are private and cannot appear other than they are. They are objects that change in our perceptual fields when conditions of perception change and physical objects remain constant.’
 Critics of the notional questions of whether, just because physical objects can appear other than they are, there must be private, mental objects that have all predispositions for which the physical objects appear to have, there are also problems regarding the individuation and duration of sense-data and their relations ti physical surfaces of an object we perceive. Contemporary proponents counter that speaking only of how things an to appear cannot capture the full structure within perceptual experience captured by talk of apparent objects and their qualities.
 It is, nevertheless, that others who do not think that this wish can be satisfied and they impress who with the role of experience in providing animals with ecological significant information about the world around them, claim that sense experiences represent possession characteristics and kinds which are n=much richer and much more wide-ranging than the traditional sensory qualitites. We do not see only colours and shapes they tell ‘u’ but also, earth, water, men, women and fire, we do not smell only odours, but also food and filth. There is no space here to examine the factors relevant to as choice between these alternatives. In so, that we are to assume and expect when it is incompatibles with a position under discussion.
 Given the modality and content of a sense experience, most of ‘us’ will be aware of its character even though we cannot describe that character directly. This suggests that character and content are not really distinct, and this is a close tie between them. For one thing, the relative complexity of the character of a sense experience places limitation n its possible content, i.e., a tactile experience of something touching one’s left ear is just too simple to carry the same amount of content as a typical every day visual experience. Furthermore, the content of a sense experience of a given character depends on the normal causes of appropriately similar experiences, i.e., the sort of gustatory experience which we have when eating chocolate would not represent chocolate unless chocolate normally caused it, granting a contingently tie between the characters of an experience and its possibility for casual origins, it again, followed its possible content is limited by its character.
 Character and content are none the less irreducible different for the following reasons (I) There are experiences which completely lack content, i.e., certain bodily pleasures (ii) Nit every aspect of the character of an experience which content is relevant to that content, i.e., the unpleasantness of an aural experience of chalk squeaking on a board may have no responsibility significance (iii) Experiences indifferent modalities may overlap in content without a parallel experience in character, i.e., visual and active experiences of circularity feel completely different (iv) The content of an experience with a given character may varyingly differ from an accorded manifestation of background subjectivity, i.e., a certain aural experience may come to have the content ‘singing birds’ only after the subject has learned something about birds.
 According to the act/object analysis of experience, which is a special case of the act/ object analysis of consciousness, every experience involves an object of experience if it has not material object. Two main lines of argument may be offered in supports of this view, one phenomenological and the other semantic.
 In an outline, the phenomenological argument is as follows. Whenever we have an experience answers to it, we seem to be presented with something through the experience which something through the experience, which if in  ourselves diaphanous. The object of the experience is whatever is so presented to us ~. Arising it an individual thing, or some event or a state of affairs.
 The semantic argument is that they require objects of experience in order to make sense of cretin factures of our talk about experience, including, in particular, the following (1) Simple attributions of experience, i.e., ‘Rod is experiencing a pink square’, seem to be relational (2) We appear to refer to objects of experience and to attribute properties to them, i.e., we had been given, in that the after-image with which John experienced had appeared, as (3) To qualify over objects of experience, i.e., Macbeth saw something which his wife did not see.
 The act/object analysis faces several problems concerning the status of objects of experience. Currently the most common view is that they are ‘sense-data’-Private mental entities which actually posses the traditional sensory qualities represented by the experience of which they are the objects. But the very idea of an essentially private entity is suspect. Moreover, since an experience must apparently represent something as having a determinable property, i.e., redness, without representing it as having any subordinate determinate property, i.e., any specific given shade of red, a sense-datum may actually have our determinate property without saving any determinate property subordinate to it. Even more disturbing is that sense-data may contradictory properties, since experience can have properties, since experience can have contradictory contents. A case in point is te water fall illusion: If you stare at a waterfall for a minute and the immediately fixate on a nearby rock, you are likely to are an experience of moving upward while it remains inexactly the same place. The sense-data, . . . private mental entities which actually posses the traditional sensory qualities represented by the experience of which they are te objects. , but te very idea of an essentially private entity is suspect. Moreover, since an experience may apparently represent something other than is apparent, as having some determinable properties, i.e., redness, without representing it as having any subordinate determinate property, i.e., any specific shade of red, a sense-datum may actually have a determinate property without having any determinate property subordinate to it. Even more disturbing is the sense-data may have contradictory properties, since experiences can have contradictory contents.
 Treating objects can avoid these problems of experience as properties, however, fails to do justice to the appearances, for experiences, however complex, but with properties embodied in individuals. The view that objects of experience are that Meinongian objects accommodate this point. It is also attractive, in as far as (1) it allows experiences to represent properties other than traditional sensory qualities, and (2) it allows for the identification of objects of experience and objects of perception in the case of experiences which constitute perceptivity.
 According to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with contentual representation involves an object of experience, an act of awareness has related the subject (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects, whatever is perceived, but also to experiences like hallucinating and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences are, nonetheless, less appearing to represent of something, and their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which we have treated as properties, Meinongian objects, which may not exist or have any form of being, and, more commonly, private mental entities with sensory qualities. We have now usually applied the term ‘sense-data’ to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects f sense experiences, in the work of G.E., Moore. Its terms of representative realism, objects of perceptions, of which we are ‘indirectly aware’ are always distinct from objects of experience, of which we are ‘directly aware’. Meinongian, however, may treat objects of perception as existing objects of perception, least there is mention, Meinong’s most famous doctrine derives from the problem of intentionality, which led him to countenance objects, such as the golden mountain, that is capable of being the object of thought, although they do not actually exist. This doctrine was one of the principle’s targets of Russell’s theory of ‘definitive descriptions’, however, it came as part o a complex and interesting package of concept if the theory of meaning, and scholars are not united in what supposedly that Russell was fair to it.
 A general problem for the act/object analysis is that the question of whether two subjects are experiencing one and the same thing, as opposed to having exactly similar experiences, that it appears to have an answer only, on the assumptions that the experience concerned are perceptions with material objects. But in terms of the act/object analysis the question must have an answer even when conditions are not satisfied. (The answers negative on the sense-datum theory: It could be positive of the versions of the act/object analysis, depending on the facts of the case.)
 In view of the above problems, we should reassess the case of act/object analysis. The phenomenological argument is not, on reflection, convincing, for it is easy enough to grant that any experience appears to present ’us’ with an object without accepting that it actually does. The semantic argument is more impressive, but is nonetheless, answerable. The seemingly relational structure of attributions of experiences is a challenge dealt with below in connection with the adverbial theory. Apparent reference to and we can handle quantification over objects of experience themselves and quantification over experience tacitly according to content, thus, ‘the after-image which John experienced was an experience of green’ and ‘Macbeth saw something which his wife did not see’ becomes ‘Macbeth had a visual experience which his wife did not have’.
 Nonetheless, pure cognitivism attempts to avoid the problems facing the act/object analysis by reducing experiences to cognitive events or associated dispositions, i.e., ‘We might identify Susy’s experience of a rough surface beneath her hand with the event of her acquiring the belief that there is a rough surface beneath her hand, or, if she does not acquire this belief, with a disposition to acquire it which we have somehow blocked.
 This position has attractions. It does full justice. And to the important role of experience as a source of belief acquisition. It would also help clear the say for a naturalistic theory of mind, since there seems to be some prospect of a physical/functionalist account of belief and other intentional states. But its failure has completely undermined pure cognitivism to accommodate the fact that experiences have a felt character which cannot be reduced to their content.
 The relearnt intuitions are as, (I) that when we say that someone is experiencing an ‘A’, this has an experience ‘of ‘A’, we are using this content-expression to specify the type of thing which the experience is especially apt to fit, (ii) that doing this is a matter of saying something about the experience itself (and maybe also about the normal causes of like experiences), and (iii) that there is no-good reason to suppose that it involves the description of an object which the experience is ‘of’. Thus, the effective role of the content-expression is a statement of experience is to modify the verb it compliments, not to introduce a special type of object.
 A final position which we should mention is the state theory, according to which a sense experience of an ‘A’ is an occurrent, non-relational state of the kind which the subject would be in when perceiving an ‘A’. Suitably qualified, this claim is no doubt truer, but its significance is subject to debate. Here it is enough to remark that the claim is compactable with both pure cognitivism and the adverbial theory, and that we have probably best advised state theorists to adopt adverbials as a means of developing their intuition.
 Perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses, this includes most of what we know. We cross intersections when everything we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm ring. In each case we come to know something-that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up  by some sensory means. Seeing that the light has turned green is learning something-that the light has turned green-by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe is coming to know a fact that the melon is overripe by one’s sense of touch. In each case we have somehow based on the resulting knowledge, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
 Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this I mean that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, another fact, in a more direct way. We see, by newspapers, that our team has lost again, see, by her expression, that she is nervous. This dived or dependent sort of knowledge is particularly prevalent in the case of vision, but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other sound makers so that we can, for example, hear (by the alarm) that someone is at the door and (by the bell) that its time to get up. When we obtain knowledge in this way, it is clear that unless one sees-hence, comes to know something about the gauge that it reads ‘empty’, the newspaper (what it says) and the person’s expression, one would not see, hence, we know, that what one perceptual representation means have described as coming to know. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot  ‒not, at least, in this way hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees, hears, smells, etc., that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing, hearing etc., we have derived from that come other condition, ‘b’s being ‘G’, that ‘a’ is ‘F’, or dependent on, the more basic perceptivities that of its being attributive to knowledge that of ‘b’ is ‘G’.
 Though perceptual knowledge about objects is often, in this way, dependent on knowledge of facts about different objects, the derived knowledge is something about the same object. That is, we see that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing, not that another object is ‘G’, but that, ‘a’ itself is ‘G’. We see, by her expression, that she is nervous. She tells that the fabric is silk (not polyester) by the characteristic ‘greasy’ feel of the fabric itself (not, as I do, by what is printed on the label). We tell whether it is an oak tree, a Porsche convertible, a geranium, an ingenious rock or a misprint by its shape, colour, texture, size, behaviour and distinctive markings. Perceptual knowledge of this sort is also derived ~. Derived from the more facts (about ‘a’) we use to make the identification. In this case, the perceptual knowledge is still indirect because, although the same object is involved, the facts we come to know about it are different from the facts that enable ‘us’ to know it.
 We sometimes describe derived knowledge as inferential, but this is misleading. At the conscious level there is no passage of the mind from premised to conclusion, no reason-sensitivity of mind from problem-solving. The observer, the one who sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ (or, ‘a’ in itself) is ‘G’, need not be and typically is not aware of any process of inference, any passage of the mind from one belief to another. The resulting knowledge, though logically derivative, is psychologically immediate. I could see that she was getting angry, so I moved my hand. I did not, at least not at any conscious level, infer (from her expression and behaviour) that she was getting angry. I could (or, it seems to me) see that she was getting angry, it is this psychological immediacy that makes indirect perceptual knowledge a species of perceptual knowledge.
 The psychological immediacy that characterizes so much of our perceptual knowledge -even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived informatics, such if it does not mean that no one requires learning to know in this way. One is not born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such things. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference, they recognize relevant features of trees, birds, and flowers, features they already know how to identify perceptually, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that it is an oak, a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and wee are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that it is an oak, a finch or a geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert cannot see what kind of flower it is if she cannot first see its colour and shape, but it is to say that the expert has developed identificatory skills that no longer require the sort of conscious self-inferential process that characterize the beginner’s efforts.
 It would seem, moreover, that these background assumptions, if they are to yield knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, as they must if the observer is to see (by b’s being G) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, must themselves qualify as knowledge. For if no one has known this background fact, if no one knows it whether ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’, then the knowledge of ‘b’s’ bing ‘G’ is taken by itself, powerless to generate the knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If the conclusion is to be known to be true, both the premises used to reach that conclusion must be known to be truer, or so it would seem.
 Externalists, however, argue that the indirect knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, though it may depend on the knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’, does not require knowledge of the connecting fact, the fact that ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’. Simple belief (or, perhaps, justified beliefs, there are stronger and weaker versions of externalism) in the connecting fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge of the connected fact. Even if, strictly speaking, I do not know she is nervous whenever she fidgets like that, I can none the less see (hence, recognized, or know) that she is nervous (by the way she fidgets) if I am [correctly] to assume that this behaviour is a reliable expression of nervousness. One need not know the gauge is working well to make observations (acquire observational knowledge) with it. All that we require, besides the observer believing that the gauge is reliable, is that the gauge, in fact, be reliable, i.e., that the observers background beliefs be true. Critics of externalism have been quick to point out that this theory has the unpalatable consequence-can make that knowledge possible and, in this sense, be made to rest on lucky hunches (that turn out true) and unsupported (even irrational) beliefs. Surely, internalists argue if one is going to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ on the basis of ‘b’s’ being ‘G’, one should have (as a bare minimum) some justification for thinking that ‘a’ is ‘F’, or is probably ‘F’, when ‘b’ is ‘G’.
 Whatever view one takes about these matters (with the possible exception of extreme externalism), indirect perception obviously requires some understanding (knowledge? Justification? Belief? Of the general relationship between the fact one comes to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) and the facts (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enable one to know it. And it is this requirement on background knowledge or understanding that leads to questions about the possibility of indirect perceptual knowledge. Is it really knowledge? Sceptical doubts have inspired the first question about whether we can ever know the connecting facts in question. How is it possible to learn, to acquire knowledge of, the connecting fact’s knowledge of which is necessary to see (by b’s being ‘G’) that ‘a’ is ‘F’? These connecting facts do not appear to be perceptually knowable. Quite the contrary, they appear to be general truths knowable (if knowable at all) by inductive inference from past observations. And if one is sceptical about obtaining knowledge in this indirect, inductive as, one is, perforced, indirect knowledge, including indirect perceptivity, where we have described knowledge of a sort openly as above, that depends on in it.
 Even if one puts aside such sceptical questions, least of mention, there remains a legitimate concern about the perceptual character of this kind of knowledge. If one sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’, is one really seeing that ‘a’ is ‘F’? Isn’t perception merely a part ~? And, indeed, from an epistemological standpoint, whereby one comes to know that ‘a’ is ‘F?’. One must, it is true, see that ‘b’ is ‘G’, but this is only one of the premises needed to reach the conclusion (knowledge) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. There is also the background knowledge that is essential to te process. If we think of a theory as any factual proposition, or set of factual propositions, that cannot itself be known in some direct observational way, we can express this worry by saying that indirect perception is always theory-loaded: Seeing (indirectly) that ‘a’ is ‘F’ is only possible if the observer already has knowledge of justifications for, belief in some theory, for which the theory of ‘connecting’ the fact by one that comes to know (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) with the fact (that ‘b’ is ‘G’) that enables one to know it.
 This of course, reverses the standard foundationalist pictures of human knowledge. Instead of theoretical knowledge depending on, and being derived from, perception, perception of the indirect sort, presupposes a prior knowledge of theories.
 Foundationalist’s are quick to point out that this apparent reversal in the structure of human knowledge is only apparent. Our indirect perceptions of facts depend on theory, yes, but this merely shows that indirect perceptional knowledge is not part of the foundation. To reach the kind of perceptual knowledge that lies at the foundation, we need to look at a form of perception that is purified of all theoretical elements. This, then, will be perceptual knowledge, pure and direct. We have needed no background knowledge or assumptions about connecting regularities in direct perception because the known facts are presented directly and immediately and not (as, in direct perception) on the basis of some other facts. In direct perception all the justification (needed for knowledge) is right there in the experience itself.
 What, then, about the possibility of perceptual knowledge pure and direct, the possibility of coming to know, on the basis of sensory experience, that ‘a’ is ‘F’ where this does not require, and in no way presupposes, backgrounds assumptions or knowledge that has a source outside the experience itself? Where is this epistemological ‘pure gold’ to be found?
 There are, basically, two views about the nature of direct perceptual knowledge (Coherentists would deny that any of our knowledge is basic in this sense). We can call these views (following traditional nomenclature) direct realism and representationalism or representative realism. A representationalist restricts direct perceptual knowledge to objects of a very special sort: Ideas, impressions, or sensations (sometimes called sense-data) -entities in the mind of the observer. One directly perceives a fact, i.e., that ‘b’ is ‘G’, only when ‘b’ is a mental entity of some sort  a subjective appearance or sense-data -and ‘G’ is a property of this datum. Knowledge of these sensory states is supposed to be certain and infallible. These sensory facts are, so to speak, right upon against the mind’s eye. One cannot be mistaken about these facts for these facts are, in really, facts about the way things appear to be, one cannot be mistaken about the way things appear to be. Normal perception of external conditions, then, turns out to be (always) a type of indirect perception. One ‘sees’ that there is a tomato in front of one by seeing that the appearances (of the tomato) have a certain quality (reddish and bulgy) and inferring (this is typically said to be atomistic and unconscious), on the basis of certain background assumptions, i.e., that there typically is a tomato in front of one when one has experiences of this sort, that there is a tomato in front of one. All knowledge of objective reality, then, even what commonsense regards as the most direct perceptual knowledge, is based on an even more direct knowledge of the appearances.
 For the representationalist, then, perceptual knowledge of our physical surroundings is always theory-loaded and indirect. Such perception is ‘loaded’ with the theory that there is some regular, some uniform, correlations between the way things appear (known in a perceptually direct way) and the way things actually are (known, if known at all, in a perceptually indirect way).
 The second view, direct realism, refuses to restrict direct perceptual knowledge to an inner world of subjective experience. Though the direct realist is willing to concede that much of our knowledge of the physical world is indirect, however, direct and immediate it may sometimes feel, some perceptual knowledge of physical reality is direct. What makes it direct is that such knowledge is not based on, nor in any way dependent on, other knowledge and belief. The justification needed for the knowledge is right in the experience itself.
 To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example. ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour-perhaps even tasting and smelling it (to make sure it’s not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that it is a banana is (the direct realist admits, indirect on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is not direct. ‘S’ does not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing (knowing, believing) anything more basic either about the banana or anything e. g., his own sensation of the banana. ‘S’ has learned to identify to do is not make an inference, even a unconscious inference, from other things he believes. What ‘S’ acquired as a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that they were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way depends on having any unfolding beliefs thereof, where ‘S’ has the identificatory success will depend on his operating in certain special conditions, of course. ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able visually to identify yellow objects in dramatically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angled, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way depends on a belief (let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, an identificatory skill, that like any skill, requires certain conditions for its successful exercise. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also with individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They needed normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions too sere, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.
 This means, of course, that for the direct realist direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ‘a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t, he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then, not on what else (if anything) ‘S’ believes, but on the circumstances in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realist is a form of externalism. Direct perception of objective facts, pure perpetual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed by way of justification for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge ~ is not needed.
 This means that the origination, or it foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived, that is, what makes them foundations. Even if they are brittle, as foundations are sometimes, everything else upon them.
 Epistemology, in Greek represents its term as epistēmē, and is meant to mean of a well-balanced form of ‘knowledge’, which is the theory of knowledge, and its fundamental questions include the origin of knowledge, the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so; the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error, the possibility of universal scepticism, and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from, a new conceptualized world. All these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the nature of truth and the nature of experience and meaning. Seeing epistemology is possible as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the job of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, so that they can show the resulting edifice to be sound. This metaphor favours some idea of the ‘given’ as a basis of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference for construction. The other metaphor is that of a boat or fuselage, which has no foundation but owes its strength to the stability given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea of a basis in the ‘given’, favours ideas of coherence and ‘holism’, but finds it harder to ward off scepticism. The problem of defining knowledge as to true belief plus some favoured relations between the believer and the facts began with Plato’s view in the “Theaetetus” that knowledge is true belief plus some ‘logos’.
 Philosophical knowledge is approximate and contrasting philosophically can formulate a traditional view of philosophical knowledge and scientific investigations, as follows: The two types of investigations differ both in their methods (the former is intuitively deductive, and the latter empirical) and in the metaphysical status of their results (the former yields facts that are metaphysically necessary and the latter yields facts that is metaphysically contingent). Yet, the two types of investigations resemble each other in that both, if successful, uncover new facts, and these facts, although expressed in language, are generally not about language, except investigations in such specialized areas as philosophy of language and empirical linguistics.
 This view of philosophical knowledge has considerable appeal, but it faces problems. First, the conclusions of some common philosophical arguments seem preposterous. Such positions as that it is no more reasonable to ear bread than arsenic (because it is only in the past that arsenic poisoned people), or that one can never know he is not dreaming, may seem to go so far against commonsense as to be for that an unacceptable reason seems much as to displeasing of issues. Second, philosophical investigation does not lead to a consensus among philosophers. Philosophy, unlike the sciences, lacks an established body of generally-agreed-upon truths. Moreover, philosophy lacks an unequivocally applicable method of setting disagreements. (The qualifier ‘unequivocally applicable’ is to forestall the objection that the method has settled philosophical disagreements of intuitive deductive argumentation, which is often unresolved disagreement about which side has won a philosophical argument.)
 In the face of these and other considerations, various philosophical movements have revoked the above traditional view of philosophical knowledge. Thus, verificationism responds to the unresolvability of traditional philosophical disagreements by putting forth a criterion of literal meaningfulness. ‘A statement is held to be literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable (Ayer, 1952), where a statement is analytic if it is just a matter of definition. Traditional controversial philosophical views, such as that having knowledge of the world outside one’s own mind is metaphysically impossible, would count as neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.
 Various objections have been raised to this verification principle. The most important is that the principle is self-refuting, i.e., that when one attempts to apply the verification principle to itself, the result is that the principle comes out as literally meaningless, therefore not true because it is empirically neither verifiable nor analytic. This move may seem verifiable nor analytic. This move may seem like a trick, but it reveals a deep methodological problem with the verificationist approach. The verification principle is determined to delegitimize all controversy that is neither nor resolvable empirically or expending a recourse to definition. The principle itself, however, releases neither of the established nor empirically a recourse to definition. The principle is an attempt to rule out synthetic deductivity as a controversial issue, of debate, yet the principle itself is both synthetic deductivity and controversial. It is ironic that the self-refutingness of the verification principle is one of the very few points on which philosophers nowadays approach consensuses.
 Ordinary language philosophy, another twentieth-century attempt to delegitimize traditional philosophical problems, faces a parallel but an unrecognized problem of self-refutingness. Just as they can characterize verificationism as reacting against unresolvable deductivity, ordinary language philosophy can so be characterized as reacting against deductivity as an acceding of counterintuitiveness. The ordinary language philosopher rejected counterintuitive philosophical positions (such as the view that time is unreal or that one can never know anything about other minds) by saying that these views ‘go against ordinary language’, Malcolm and in Rorty, (1970), i.e., that these views go against the way the ordinary person uses such terms as ‘know’ and ‘unreal’, since the ordinary person would reject the above counterintuitive statements about knowledge and time. On the ordinary language view, it follows that the sceptic does not mean the same thing by ‘know’ as does the non-philosopher, since they use the terms differently and meaning is use. Thus, on this view, sceptics and anti-sceptics no more disagreement about knowledge than someone who says ‘Banks are financial institutions’ and someone who say ‘Banks are the shores of rivers: is the disagreement about banks?
 An obvious objection here is that many factors besides meaning help to decide use. For example, two people who disagree about whether the world is round use the word ‘round’ differently in that one applies it to the world while the other does not, yet they do not by that mean different things by ‘world’ or ‘round’. Ordinary language philosophy allows that this aspect of use is not part of the meaning, since it rests on a disagreement about empirical facts. Only in relegating all non-empirical disagreements to differences in linguistic meaning, the ordinary language philosopher denies the possibility of substantive, non-linguistic disagreement over deductively, non-linguistic disagreement over a speculative assertion of facts and thus, like the verificationist, disallows that ‘if a child that was learning the language were to say, in a situation where we were sitting in a room with chairs about, that it was; highly probable’ that were chairs there, we should smile and correct his chairs there, we should smile and correct his language. Malcolm may be right about this case, since it is so unlikely that children would have independently developed a scientific philosophy. Nevertheless, a parallel response seems obviously inappropriate as a reply to a philosopher who says ‘One can never know that one is not dreaming’, or for that matter, as a reply to an inept arithmetic student who says,
‘33 =12 + 19'. If it were true that some philosophers uttering the first of these sentences were not using ‘know’ in the usual sense, he could not convey his philosophical views to a French speaker by uttering the sentence’s French translation (‘On ne peut jamais savoir qu’ on ne rêve pas’), any more than one can convey his eight-year-old cousin Mary’s opinion that her teacher is vicious by saying ‘Mary’s teacher is viscous’ if Mary wrongly thinks ‘viscous’ demands ‘vicious’ and continues using it that way. However, failures obviously to translate ‘know’ or its cognates into their French synonyms would prevent an English-speaking sceptic from accurately representing his views in French at all. The ordinary language view that all non-empirical disagreements are linguistic disagreements entails that if someone believes the sentence ‘a being’s F’ when this sentence expresses the deductive proposition that ‘a being’s F’, then including to that in what property he takes as ‘F’ to express was part of what he means by ‘a’. However, this obviously goes against the Malcolmian ‘ordinary use’ of the term ‘meaning’, i.e., what ordinary people, once they understand the term ‘meaning’, believe on deductivity as a grounding about the extension of the term ‘meaning’. For example, the ordinary man would deny that the inept student mentioned above cannot be using his words with our usual meaning when he says ‘33 = 12 + 19'. Like the earlier objection of self-refutingness to verificationism, this objection reveals a deep methodological problem. Just as synthetic deductivity may elicit a controversy that cannot be ruled out by a principle that is both synthetic deductively and controversial, deductive counter-intuitiveness cannot be ruled out by a principle that is both deductive and counterintuitive.
 Although verificationist and ordinary language philosophy thus are both self-refuting, the problems that helped motivate these positions need to be addressed. What are we to say about the fact (a) many philosophical conclusions seem wildly counterintuitive and (b) many investigations do no lead to philosophical consensuses?
 To put the first problem in perspective, it is important to see that even highly counterintuitive philosophical views generally have arguments behind them-arguments that ‘start with something so simple is not to seem with surprising.  Proceed by steps do obvious as not to seem worth taking, before ‘[ending] with, no one will believe it’. But since repeated applications of commonsense can thus lead to philosophical conclusions that conflict with commonsense, commonsense is a problematic criterion for assessing philosophical views. It is true that, once we have weighted the relevant argument, we must ultimately rely on our judgement about whether, in the light of these arguments, it just seems reasonable to accept a given philosophical view. But this truism should not be confused with certain sorts of claims that are unknowable or non-conformably on the sole ground that it would therefore be meaningless or unintelligible. Only if meaningfulness or intelligibility is a guarantee of knowability or confirmability is the position sound, if it is, nothing we understand would be unknowable or unconfirmable by us.
 Criteria and knowledge, except for alleged cases that things that are evident for one just by being true, it has often been thought, anything that is known must satisfy certain ‘criteria’ as well for being true. It is also thought that anything that is known must satisfy certain criteria or standards. These criteria are general principles specifying the sorts of considerations that will make some propositions evident or just make accepting it warranted to some degree. Common suggestions for this character encompass one clearly and distinctly conceive a proposition ‘p’, e.g., that 2 + 2 =4, ‘p’ is evident: Or, if ‘p’ coheres with the bulk of one’s beliefs, ‘p’ is warranted. These might be criteria under which putative self-evident truths, e.g., that one clearly and distinctly conceive ‘p’. ‘Transmit’ the status as evident they already have without criteria to other propositions like ‘p’, or they might be criteria by which purely non-epistemic considerations, e.g., facts about logical connections or about conception that need not be already evident or warranted, originally create ‘p’s’ upon an epistemic status. If that in turn, can be; transmitted’ to other propositions, e.g., by deduction or induction, criteria will be specifying when it is. These criteria are general principles specifying what sort of consideration ‘C’ will make a proposition ‘p’ evident to ‘us’.
 Traditionally, suggestions contain: (a) if a proposition ‘p’, e.g., 2 + 2 = 4, is clearly and distinctly conceived, then ‘p’ is evident, or simply, (b) if we cannot conceive ‘p’ to be false, then ‘p’ is evident: Or, whatever we are immediately conscious of in thought or experience, e.g., that we seem to see red, is evident. These might be criteria under which putative self-evident truths, e.g., that one clearly and distinctly conceive ‘p’, transmits the status as evident they already have for one without criteria to other propositions like ‘p’. Alternatively, they might be criteria under which epistemic status, e.g., p being evident, is ‘originally created’ by purely non-epistemic considerations, e.g., facts about how ‘p’ arises to initiate that which carry on of neither self-renewal nor what is already confronting its own criterion’s unquestionability.
 However, it is ‘originally created’, presumably epistemic status, including degrees of warranted acceptance or probability, can be ‘transmitted’ deductively from premises to conclusions. Criteria then must say when and to what degree, e.g., ‘p’ and ‘q’ are warranted, given the epistemic considerations that ‘p’ is warranted and so is ‘q’. (Must the logical connection itself be evident?) It is usually inductively, as when evidence that observed type ‘Some’ things have regularly been ‘F’ warrants acceptance, without undermining (overriding) evidence, of an unobserved ‘A’ as ‘F’. Such warrant is defeasible. Thus, despite regular observations of black crows, thinking an unobserved crow black might not be very warranted if there have recently been radiation changes potentially affecting bird colour.
 Traditionally, criteria do not seem to make evident propositions about anything beyond our own thoughts, experiences and necessary truths, to which deductively or inductive criteria may be applied. Moreover, arguably, inductive criteria, including criteria warranting the best explanations of data, never make things evident or warrant their acceptance enough to count as knowledge.
 Contemporary philosophers, however, have defended criteria by which, e.g., considerations concerning a person’s facial expression, may (defeasibly) make her pain or anguish (Lycan, 1971). More often, they have argued for criteria by which some propositions about perceived reality can be made evident by sense experience itself by evident propositions about it. For instance, without relevant evidence that perception is currently unreliable, it is evident we actually see a pink square if we have sense experience of seeming to see a pink square (Pollock, 1986): Or, if it is evident we have such experience, or if in sense experience we spontaneously think we see a pink square. The experiential consideration allegedly can be enough to make reality evident, although defeasibly. It can do this on its own, and does not b=need support from further considerations such as the absence of undermining evidence or inductive evidence for a general link between experience and reality. Of course, there can be undermining evidence. So we need criteria that determine when evidence undermines and ceases to undermine.
 Warrant might also be increased than just ‘passed on’. The coherence of probable propositions with other probable propositions might (feasiblely) make then all more evident (Firth, 1964). Thus even if seeming to see a chair initially made a chair’s presence only probable, its presence might eventually become evident by cohering with claims about chair perception in other cases (Chisholm, 1989). The latter may be warranted in turn by ‘memory’ and ‘introspection’ criteria, as often suggested, by which recalling or introspecting ‘p’ defeasibly warrant ‘p’s’ acceptance. Some philosophers argue further that coherence does not just increase warrant, and defend an overall coherence criterion: Excluding perhaps initial warrant for propositions concerning our beliefs and their logical interrelations, what warrants any proposition to any degree for ‘u’; is its coherence with the most coherent system of belief available (BonJour, 1985?).
 Contemporary epistemologists thus suggest the traditional picture of criteria may need alteration in three ways. Additionally, evidence may subject even our most basic judgements too rational. Correction, though they count as evident on the basis of our criteria. Warrant may be transmitted other than through deductive and inductive relations between propositions. Transmission criteria might not simply ‘pass’ evidence on linearly from a foundation of highly evident ‘premisses’ to ‘conclusions’ that are never more evident.
 Criteria then standards take the form: ‘If ‘C’, then (without undermining evidence) ‘p’ is evident or warranted to degree ‘d’. Arguably, a criterion does not play to the greater of parts to some function of its own initially forming of our beliefs (Pollock, 1986.) For them to be the standards of epistemic status for ‘u’, however, its typically thought criterial considerations must be omnes in the light of which we can at least check, and perhaps correct our judgements. As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalized in character. Similarly, a coherentists view could also be internalized, if both the belief and other states with which a justificantum belief is required to cohere and the coherence relations themselves are reflectively accessible. Remaining still, what makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified have cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be truer, but will, on such an account, nor the less, be epistemically justified in accepting it. Which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason, for thinking that a belief is true? An epistemologist working within this tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, than offering a competing account of the same concept of epistemic justification with which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
 Traditionally, the epistemologists have therefore thought criterial considerations must be at least discoverable through reflection or introspection and thus ultimately concern internal factors about our conception, thoughts or experience. However, others think objective checks must be publically recognizable checks. Nevertheless, argument in Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations,” which is concerned with the concepts or, and relations manifestations (the inner as in and of itself with and the outer), self-states, avowals of experiences and descriptions of experiences. It is sometimes used narrowly to refer to a single chain of argument in which Wittgenstein demonstrates the incoherence of the idea that sensation-names.  Names of experiences are given meaning by association with a mental ‘object’, i.e., the word ‘pain’ by association with the sensation of pain, or by mental (private) ostensive definition in which a mental ‘entity’ supposedly functions as a sample, e.g., a mental image, stored in memory, is conceived as providing a paradigm for the application of a name.
 A ‘private language’ is not a private code, which could be cracked by another person, nor a language spoken by only one person, which could be taught to others, but rather a putative language, the individual words of which refer to what can (apparently) are known only be the speaker, i.e., to this empiricist jargon, to the ‘ideas’ in his mind. It has been a presupposition of the mainstream of modern philosophy, empiricist, rationalist and Kantian alike, of representational idealism, and of contemporary cognitive representationalism that the languages we speak are such private languages, that the foundations of language no less than the foundations of knowledge in private experience. To undermine this picture with all its complex ramifications is the purpose of Wittgenstein’s private language argument.
 The idea that the language each of ‘us’ speaks is essentially private, which learning a language is a matter of associating words with, or ostensively defending words by reference to, subjective experience (the ‘given’).  The communication is a matter of stimulating a pattern of associations in the mind of the hearer qualitatively identical with that in the mind of the speakers is linked with multiple mutually supporting misconceptions about language, experiences and their identity, the mental and its relation to behaviour, self-knowledge and knowledge if the states of the mind of others, and thus that for criterial considerations we must ultimately concern those of public factors, e.g., that standard conditions (daylight, eye open, etc. (for reliable perceptual reports obtain.
 It remains, nonetheless, what makes criteria correct? For many epistemologists, their correctness is an irreducible necessary truth, a matter of a lout metaphysical or of our lexical conventions, concerning epistemic status and the considerations that determine it. Others object that it remains mysterious why particular considerations are criterial unless notions of the evident or warranted or correct are further defined in non-epistemic terms. Criteria might be defined, for example, as principles reflecting our deepest self-critical thoughts about what considerations yield truth, or as norms of thought that practical rationality demands we adopt is we are to be effective agents. However, many will further objective satisfactions that criteria must yield truth or be prone to. They insist that necessarily (1) whatever is warranted has an objectively good chance of truth, and (2) whatever is evident is true or-almost invariably true. Epistemic notions allegedly lose their point unless they somehow measure a proposition’s actual prospects for truth for ‘us’.
 Against (1) and (2), a common objection is that no considerations relevantly guarantee truth, even for the most part, or in the; long run (BonJour, 1985). This is not obvious with traditional putative criterial considerations like clear and distinct conception or immediate awareness. Nevertheless, critics argue, when talk of such considerations is unambiguously construed as talk of mental activity, and is not just synonymous with talk of clearly and distinctly or immediately knowing, there is no necessary connection between being criterially evident on the basis of such considerations and being true (Sellars, 1979). The mere coincidence in some cases that the proposition we conceive is true cannot be what makes the proposition evident.
 Still, (1) and (2) might be necessary, while the correctness of putative criteria is a contingent fact, given various facts about ‘u’ and our world: It is no coincidence that adhering to these criteria leads to truth, almost invariably or frequently. Given our need to survive with limited intellectual resources and time, perhaps it is not as surprising that in judging issues we only demand criterial considerations that are fallible, checkable, corrective and contingently lead to truth. Nonetheless, specifying the relevant truth, connection is highly problematic. Moreover, reliability considerations now seem to be criterial for criteria although reliability, e.g., concerning perception, are not always accessible to introspection and reelection. Perhaps, traditional accessibility requirements may be rejected. Possibly, instead, what makes putative criterions correct can differ from the criterial considerations that make its correctness evident. Thus, there might be criteria for (defeasibly) identifying criteria, e.g., whether propositions ‘feel right’, or are considered warranted, in ‘thought experiments’ where we imagine various putative considerations present and absent. Later reflection and inquiry might reveal what makes them all correct, e.g., reliability, or being designed by God or nature for our reliable use, etc.
 In any case, if criterial considerations do not guarantee truth, knowledge will require more than truth and satisfying even the most demanding. Whether we know new say, a pink cube on a particular occasion may also require that there fortunately be no discernable facts, e.g., of our presence in a hologram gallery, to undermine the experiment basis for our judgement -or, perhaps instead, that it is no accident our judgement is true than merely probably true, given the criteria we adhere to and the circumstance, e.g., our presence in a normal room. Claims that truths that satisfy the relevant criteria are known can clearly be given many interpretations.
 Many contemporary philosophers address these issued criteria with untraditional approaches to meaning and truth. Pollock (1974), for example, argues that learning ordinary concepts like ‘bird’ or ‘red’ involves learning to make judgements with them in condition, e.g., perpetual experiences, which warrant them. Though defeasibly, inasmuch as, we also learn to correct the judgements despite the presence of such conditions. These conditions are not logically necessary or sufficient for the truth of judgements. Nonetheless, the identity of our ordinary concepts makes the criteria we learn for making judgements necessarily correct. Although not all warranted assertions are true, there is no idea of their truths completely divorced from what undefeated criterial considerations allow ‘us’ to assert. However, satisfying criteria still in some way compatible with future defeat, even frequent, and with not knowing, just as it was with error and defeat in more traditional accounts.
 By appealing to defeasibly warranting criteria then, it seems we cannot show we know ‘p’ rather than merely satisfy the criteria. Worse, critics argue that we cannot even have knowledge by satisfying such criteria. Knowing ‘p’ allegedly requires more, but what evidence, besides that entitling ‘us’ to claim the currently undefeated satisfaction of criteria, could entitle ‘us’ to claim more, e.g., that ‘p’ would not be defeated? Yet, Knower, at least of reflection, must be entitled to give assurances concerning these further conditions (Wright, 1984). Otherwise, we would not be interested in a concept of knowledge as opposed to the evident or warranted. These contentions might be disputed to save a role for defeasibly warranting criteria. Yet why bother? Why can we not absorb of any depictions, as a pint cube manifests itself in visual experience, in that are essentially different from those where it merely appears present (McDowell, 1982)? We thereby know objective facts through experiences tat are criterial for them and make them indefeasibly evident. Nevertheless, to many, this requires a seamless mystified, fusion of appearance and reality. Alternatively, perhaps knowledge requires exercising an ability to judge accurately in specific relevant circumstances, but does not require criterial considerations that, as a matter of general principle, make propositions evident, even if only without undermining evidence or contingently, no matter what the context. Arguably, however, our position for giving relevant assurances does not improve with these new conditions for knowing.
 Formulating general principles determining when criterial warrant is difficult and is not undermined (Pollock, 1974). So one might think that warrant in general depends just on what is presupposed as true and relevant in a potentially shifting context of thought or conversation, not on general criteria. However, defenders of criteria may protest that coherence, at least, remains as a criterion applicable across contexts.
 It is often felt that ‘p’ cannot be evident by satisfying criteria unless (a) criterial considerations evidently obtain, and evident either that (b) the criteria have certain correctness-masking features, e.g., leading to truth, or must that © the criteria are correct. Otherwise any conformity to pertinent standards is in a relevant sense only accidental (BonJour, 1985). Yet vicious regress or circularity looms, unless in supporting propositions are evident without criteria. At worst, as sceptics argue, nothing can be warranted: At best, a consistent role for criteria is limited. A common reply is that being criterially warranted, by definition, just requires the adequate (checkable) criterial considerations in fact obtain, i.e., in that there is no need to demand further cognitive achievements for which one or more must also be evident, e.g., actually checking that criterial considerations obtain, proving truth or likelihood of truth on the basis of these considerations, or proving warrant on their basis.
 Even so, how can propositions state which putative criteria are correct, be warranted? Any proposal for criterial warrant invokes the classic sceptical change of vicious regress or circularity. Yet, again, it may arguably, as with ‘p’ above, correct criteria must in fact be satisfied, but this fact itself need not be already confronting ‘us’ as warranted. So, one might argue there is no debilitating regress or circle of warrant, even when, as may happen with some criterion, its correctness is warranted ultimately only because it itself is satisfied (van Cleve, 1979). Independent, ultimately non-criterial, evidence is not needed. Nonetheless, suppose we argue that our criteria are correct, because, e.g., they led to truth, are confirmed by thought experiments, or are clearly and distinctly conceived as correct, etc. however, we develop our arguments, they would not persuade those who, doubting the criteria we conform to, doubt our premises or their relevancy, dismissing our failures as merely conversational and irrelevant to our warrant, moreover, may strike sceptics and non-skeptics alike as question-begging or as arbitrarily altering what warrant requires. For the charge of ungrounded dogmatism it is inappropriate, more than the consistency of criterial warrant, including warrant about warrant, may be required, no matter what putative criteria we conform to.
 It is nevertheless, a problem of the criterion that lay upon the difficulty of how both to formulate the criteria, and to determine the extent, of knowledge and justified belief. The problem arises from the seeming justification of which is proven plausible of the following two propositions:
  (1) I can identify instances (and thus determiners the
  extent) of justified  belief only if I already know the criteria
  of it.
  (2) I can know the criteria of justified belief only if I can
  already identify the instances of it.
If both (1) and (2) were true, I would be caught in a circle: I could know neither the criteria nor the extent of justified belief. In order to show that both can be known after all, a way out of the circle must be found. The nature of this task is best illustrated by considering the four positions that may be taken concerning the truth-values of (1) and (2):
  (a) Scepticism as to the possibility of constructing a
  theory of justification:
Both (1) and (2) are true, consequently, I can know neither the criteria nor the extent of justified belief. This kind of scepticism is restricted in its scope to epistemic propositions. While it allows for the possibility of justified beliefs, it denies that we can know which beliefs are justified and which are not (b) is true but (1) is false: I can identify instances of justification  without applying a criterion.
  (1) is true but (2) is false? I can identify the criteria of justified belief without prior knowledge of its instances.
  (d) Both (1) and (2) are false: I can know the extent of
  justified beliefs without applying criteria, and vice versa.
The problem of a criterion may be seen as the problem of providing a rationale for a non-sceptical response.
 Roderick Chisholm, who has devoted particular attention to this problem, calls the second response ‘particularism’, and of acclimatising the third periodicity of  ‘Methodism’. Hume, who draws a sceptical conclusion as to the extent of empirical knowledge using, deductibility from sense-experience, as the criterion of justification, was a Methodist. Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore were particularists, in rejecting Hume’s criterion on the grounds that it turns obvious cases of knowledge into the cease of ignorance. Chisholm advocates particularism as the correct response. His view, which has also become known a ‘critical cognitivism’ may be summarized as follows. Criteria for the application of epistemic concepts are expressed by epistemic principles. The antecedent of such a principal states the non-normative ground on which the epistemic status ascribed by the consequent supervenes (Chisholm, 1957). An example is the following:
  If ‘S’ is appeared to ‘F-ly’, then ‘S’ is justified in believing that there is an ‘F’ in front of ‘S’.
According to this principle, a criterion for justifiable believing that there is something red in front of me is ‘being appeared too redly’. In constructing the theory of knowledge Chisholm coincides various principles of this kind, accepting or rejecting them depending on whether or not they fit wheat he identifies, without using any criterion, as the instances of justified belief. As the result of using this method, he rejects the principle above as too broad, and Hume’s an empiricist criterion (which, unlike the criteria Chisholm tries to formulate, states a necessary condition).
  If ‘S’ is justified in believing that there is an ‘F’ I front of ‘S’, then ‘S’s’ belief is deducible form ‘S’s’ sense-experience
  as to barrow. (Chisholm, 1982).
 Regarding the viability of particularism, this approach raises the question of how identifying instances of justified belief without applying any criteria is possible. Chisholm’s answer rests on the premise that, in order to know, no criterion of knowledge or justification is needed (1982). He claims that this hold also for knowledge of epistemic facts. Supposing I am justified that I am justified in believing that ‘p’ is the same body of evidence that justifies me in believing that ‘p’. Put differently, both JJp and Jp supervene on the same non-epistemic ground. (Chisholm 1982). Thus, in order to become justified in believing myself to be justified in believing that ‘p’, I need not apply any criterion of justified belief, but I need only consider the evidence supporting ‘p’. The key assumption of particularism, then, is that in order to acquire knowledge of an epistemic fact, one need not apply, but only satisfy the antecedent condition of, the epistemic principle that governs the fact in question. Hence having knowledge of epistemic facts is possible such as ‘I am justified in believing that there is an ‘F’ in front of me’ without applying epistemic principles, and to use this knowledge in order to reject those principles that ae either too broad or too narrow.
 According to Methodism, the correct solution to the problem proceeds the opposite way: Epistemic principles are to be formulated without using knowledge of epistemic facts. However, how could Methodism distinguish between correct and incorrect principles, given that an appeal to instances of epistemic knowledge is illegitimate? Against what could they check the correctness of a putative principle? Unless the correct criteria are immediately obvious which is doubtful, it remains unclear how Methodists could rationally prefer one principle to another. Thus Chisholm rejects Hume’s criterion not because of its sceptical implications but also on grounds of its arbitrariness: Hume ‘leaves ‘us’ completely in the dark as far as adopting this particular criterion that another’ (1982). Particularists, then, accept the proposition (2), and thus reject responses for both of which affirm that (2) is false.
 One problem for particularism is that it appears to beg the question against scepticism (BonJour, 1985). In order to evaluate this criticism, it must be kept in mind that particularists reject criteria with sceptical consequences on the basis of instances, whereas septics reject instances of justification on the basis of criteria. This difference in methodology is illustrated by the following two arguments:
An Anti-Sceptical Argument
 (1) If the ‘reducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is correct, then I am not justified in believing that these are my hands.
 (2) I am justified in believing that these are my hands
Therefore:
 (2) The ‘reducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is not correct.
A Sceptical Argument
 (1) If the ‘reducibility from sense-experience’ criterion is correct, then I am not justified in believing that these are my hands
 (2) The ‘deducible from sense-experience’ criterion is correct.
Therefore:
 (3) I am not justified in believing that these are my hands.
The problematic premises are (3) and (2) Particularists reject © on the basis of (B), and sceptics (3) on the basis of (2). Regarding question-begging, then, the situation is asymmetrical: Both beg the question against each other. Who, though, has the better argument? Particularists would say that accepting (3) is more reasonable than accepting,  because the risk of making an error in accepting a general criterion is greater than in taking a specific belief to be justified.
 The problem of the criterion is not restricted to epistemic justification and knowledge but is posed by any attempt to formulate general principles of philosophy or logic. In response to the problems of induction, Nelson Goodman has proposed bringing the principles of inductive inference into agreement with the instances of inductive inference. John Rawls (1921-) his major “A Theory of Justice” (1971), in it Rawls considers the basic institutions of a society that could be chosen by rational people under conditions that censure impartiality. These contusions arc dramatized as an original position, characterized so that it is as if the participants are contracting into a basic social structure from behind, a veil ignorance, leaving them unable to deploy selfish considerations, or ones favouring particular kinds of people. Rawls arousement tat both a basic framework of liberties and a concern for the clearest and comfortably fitting would be characterized by any society that it would be rational to choose. Goodman and Rawls believe that in order to denitrify the principles they seek theory instancies must be known to begin with, but they also that in the precess of bringing principles and instancies into agreement, principles many have been to serve instancies. These may, therefore considered advocates of a new analogous to response, a hybrid of particularism and methods.
 To put the first problem in perspective, seeing that even highly counterintuitive philosophical views generally have arguments behind them are important-arguments that ‘start with something so simply as not to seem worth stating’, and proceed by steps so obvious as not to seem worth taking, before ‘ [ending] with something so paradoxically that no one will believe it’ (Russell, 1956). Nevertheless, since repeated applications of commonsense can thus lead to philosophical conclusions that conflict with commonsense, commonsense is a problematic criterion for assessing philosophical views. It is true that, arguments, once we have weighed the relevant arguments, we must ultimately rely on our judgement about whether, in the light of these arguments, accepting a given philosophical view just seems reasonable. Still, this truism should not be confused with the problematic position that our considered philosophical judgement in the light of philosophical arguments must not conflict with our commonsense pre-philosophical views.
 As for philosophers’ inability to reach consensuses, seeing that this in effect does not embody of what there is, but no longer is it a fact of the matter of any importance, as to who is right. There are other possible explanations for this inability (Rescher, 1978). Moreover, supposing that the existence of unresolvable deductivity disagreements over the truth of ‘p’ shows that ‘p’ lacks a truth-value would make the matter of whether ‘p’ has a truth-value too dependent on which people happen to exist and what they can be persuaded to believe.
 Both verificationism and ordinary language philosophy deny the synthetic deductivity. Quine goes further.  He denies the analytic deductivity as well: He denies both the analytic-synthetic distinction and the deductive-inductive distinction. In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine considers several reductive definitions of analyticity synonymy, argues that all are inadequate, and concludes that there is no analytic and synthetic distinction. Nevertheless, clearly there is a substantial gap in this argument. One would not conclude from the absence of adequate reductive definition of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ that there is no red-blue distinction, or no such thing as redness. Instead, one would hold that such terms as ‘red’ and ‘blue’ are defined by example. However, this also seems plausible for such terms as ‘synonymous’ and ‘analytic’ (Grice and Strawson, 1956).
 On Quine’s view, the distinction between philosophical and scientific inquiry is a matter of degree. His later writings indicate that the sort of account he would require to make analyticity, necessary, or an acceptable priority is one that confirmed by the implicated notions, in terms of ‘people’s dispositions to overt behaviour’ in response to socially observable stimuli (Quine, 1969).
 Theories, in philosophy of science, are generalizations or set of generalizations purportedly referring to observable entities, e.g., atoms, genes, quarks, unconscious wishes. The ideal gas law, for example, points only too such observably as pressure, temperature, and volume; the molecular-kinetic theory refers to molecules and their properties. Although, an older usage suggests a lack of adequate evidence in playing a subordinate role of this (‘merely a theory’), current philosophical usage that does not carry that connotation. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, for example, is considered extremely well founded.
 There are two main views on the nature of theories. According to the ‘received view’ theories are partially interpreted axiomatic systems, according to the semantic view, a theory is a collection of models (Suppe, 1974).
 Axiomatic methods . . . as, . . . a proposition laid down as one from which we may begin, an assertion that we have taken as fundamental, at least for the branch of enquiry in hand. The axiomatic method is that of defining as set of such propositions, and the ‘proof’ procedures or ‘rules of inference’ that are permissible, and then deriving the theorems that result.
 Theory itself, is consistent with fact or reality, not false or wrong, but truthful, it is sincerely felt or expressed unforeignedly to the essential and exact confronting of rules and senses a governing standard, as stapled or fitted in sensing the definitive criteria of narrowedly particularized possibilities in value as taken by a variable accord with reality. To position of something, as to make it balanced, level or square, that we may think of a proper alignment as something, in so, that one is certain, like trust, another derivation of the same appears on the name is etymologically, or ‘strong seers’. Conformity of fact or actuality of a statement been or accepted as true to an original or standard set theory of which is considered the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning, and value of existence. Nonetheless, a compound position, such as a conjunction or negation, whose they the truth-values always determined by the truth-values of the component thesis.
 Furthermore, science, unswerving correlates to positions of something very well hidden, its nature in so that to make it believed, is quickly and imposes on sensing and responding to the definitive qualities or state of being actual or true, such that as a person, an entity, or an event, that might be gainfully to employ all things possessing actuality, existence, or essence. In other words, in that which objectively and in fact do seem as to be about reality, in fact, to the satisfying factions of instinctual needs through awareness of and adjustment to environmental demands. Thus, the act of realizing or the condition of being realized is first, and utmost the resulting infraction of realizing.
 Nonetheless, a declaration made to explain or justify action, or its believing desire upon which it is to act, by which the conviction underlying fact or cause, that provide logical sense for a premise or occurrence for logical, rational. Analytic mental stars have long lost in reason. Yet, the premise usually the minor premises, of an argument, use the faculty of reason that arises to engage in conversation or discussion. To determining or conclude by logical thinking out a solution to the problem, would therefore persuade or dissuade someone with reason that posits of itself with the good sense or justification of reasonability. In which, good causes are simply justifiably to be considered as to think. By which humans seek or attain knowledge or truth. Mere reason is insufficient to convince ‘us’ of its veracity. Still, intuitively we are to accede of some perceptively welcomed comprehension, as the truth or fact, without the use of the rational process, as one comes to assessing someone’s character, it sublimely configures one consideration, and often with resulting comprehensions, in which it is assessing situations or circumstances and draw sound conclusions into the reign of judgement.
 Governing by or being by reason or sound thinking, in that a reasonable solution to the problem, may as well, in being without bounds of common sense and arriving to a reasonable and fair use of reason, especially to form conclusions, inferences or judgements. In that, all by express of a confronting argument, within the usage of thinking or thought out response to issuing the furthering argumentation to fit or join in the sum parts that are composite to the intellectual faculties, by which case human understanding or the attemptive grasp to its thought, are the resulting liberty encroaching men of fervidness, well-meaningly, but without understanding.
 Being or occurring in fact or as having verifiable existence. Real objects, a real illness . . . ‘as, true and not imaginary, alleged, or ideal, as people and not ghosts, fro which are we to find on practical matters and concerns of experiencing the real world. The surrounding surfaces, might we, as, perhaps attest to this for the first time. Being no less than what they state, we have not taken its free pretence, or affections for a real experience highly, as many may encounter real trouble. This, nonetheless, projects of an existing objectivity in which the world despite subjectivity or conventions of thought or language is or have valuing representation, reckoned by actual power, in that of relating to, or being an image formed by light or another identifiable simulation, that converge in space, the stationary or fixed properties, such as a thing or whole having actual existence. We have accorded all of which, a truly factual experience into which the actual confirmation has brought you the afforded efforts of our very own imaginations.

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