FROLIO – Formalizable Relationship-Oriented Language-Insensitive Ontology

Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.

Highlights from the book A Guide through the Theory of Knowledge by Adam Morton, Blackwell, 3rd edition 2008, ISBN 978-1405100120

Introduction

This is a student textbook on Epistemology. It address everything in a very ordered manner. A lot of terms are defined. It would be useful to read this before Quine's Pursuit of Truth or things by Rorty.

Note: some links have been added, but many others are already included in my highlights of Morton's 'Philosophy in Practice'.

Chapter	Page	Highlight
1 -	2	Coherence: beliefs have to hang together, as well as be sensible individually.
	4	Rational/irrational
	5	True/false; evidence
	6	Justified/unjustified
	7	Knowledge/ignorance
	10	Skepticism
	11	Errors: mistaken reasoning, perceptual illusions (e.g. mirages).
	12	Externalism: there are lots of methods of acquiring knowledge, e.g. evolution, intuition, cooperation - not just rationalizing.
2 -	19	Perception - is it reliable?
	22	Empiricism: perception provides justification for all beliefs that need justification - but maybe the brain has to help.
	24	Foundationalism - see chapter 5.
	25	The 'other minds' problem - what do others perceive?
	28 on	Experiments illustrating problems for pure empiricism, e.g. is a drawing a duck or a rabbit?; in a drawing of a transparent cube, is the 8th vertex in front or behind?; upside down glasses, wise babies, blindsight.
3 -	40	A priori versus a posteriori knowledge - what knowledge can we gain based on reasoning?
	43	Necessary beliefs - are usually a priori, like axioms.
	44	Descartes cogito ergo sum.
	46	Kant's "synthetic a priori beliefs", e.g. arithmetic, geometry, that events have causes, that there are "laws of nature", that people and objects persist over time (these are all assumptions).
	47	Quine - there is no fundamental difference between synthetic and analytical (i.e. deduced) beliefs.
	49	Quine's web of concepts.
	51	Reasoning for destruction, e.g. paradoxes.
	52	Reasoning for exploration - what do we need to ask next? Reasoning for accumulation - to add to what we know.
4 -	57	Simple induction.
	58	Hume's problem - additional evidence may weaken the belief, or evidence may not turn up.
	59	Goodman's problem - we have to assume a pattern to use induction; there may be alternative patterns.
	64	We also use induction against a large background of beliefs.
	66	Justification and safeness of induction.
	67	IBE = Inference to the Best Explanation = Ampliative reasoning = Abduction.
5 -	75	Fallibilism - the idea that whatever we believe, or think we know, could be wrong.
	75-6	Avoiding error versus avoiding ignorance - different policies are needed.
	77	Foundationalism - that there exist basic beliefs that don't require any evidence.
	78	Holist/Coherentist - we can change beliefs when it makes the whole package fit together better.
	80-1	Jungle fallibilism (something amazing may turn up); Boring fallibilism (depends on what you mean by xxxx); Informed fallibilism (as we get better evidence, better instruments, distinguish concepts better etc).
6 -	88-9	Examples of when belief fails to be knowledge: 1) if it was guesswork; 2) if evidence was faked; 3) if evidence was tampered with.
	89	Gettier's counterexamples - where something is justified and true, but it still isn't enough to enable us to say we 'know'.
	91	Lehrer's principle - the chain of reasoning must not have any false steps.
	92	Reliability - there is a good reason why the reasoning gives correct answers.
	95	Tracking (Dretske & Nozick) - belief counts as knowledge when it tracks the fact that makes it true.
	96	Missing information: means things you don't know.
	97-8	Defeaters: things you don't know that cause your beliefs not to be knowledge. (RT: for more see this IEP article.)
	98-9	Trust - on other people for information, on prior "facts" for reliability.
	100	Belief is knowledge when you can take it as something you can trust when forming other beliefs.
7 -	104	Knowledge is not the same as justified belief.
	106	Externalism - many important factors are unknown to the believer (e.g. unconscious, intuition, social norms); as opposed to internalism = you can work it all out yourself rationally.
	108	Knowing how, where, which, who is not the same as knowing that.
	109-10	Knowing that we know, or knowing things without knowing that we know them.
	111 on	Epistemic virtues (some are moral) - intellectual courage, honesty, self control, caution; respect for evidence, recognition that evidence is not enough; ability to keep and organize evidence; ability to think up experiments; ability to make useful hypotheses and gauge which is more likely; knowing when one may be deceiving oneself.
8 -	116	Psychological beliefs - what we think, know, hope, want, love, hate, remember.
	118	There are 3 kinds of psychological beliefs: 1)what we know from our own experience; 2) beliefs about behaviour and action; 3) beliefs about other peoples' perceptions, beliefs, desires and memories.
	118	Argument from analogy - sometimes used for the other minds problem - is really induction.
	119	Behaviourism = arguing FROM behaviour TO our knowledge, rather than vice versa.
	122	Folk psychology - what we pick up from family and social upbringing.
	125	Eliminative materialism - folk psychology is a stop gap, and we will eventually understand the physical processes.
	126-7	Errors due to subconscious and repressed feelings - we misunderstand why we believe things.
	128	Dispositions (of character), occurrences (of events).
	129-30	Ascent routines - establish the truth bit by bit
9 -	136	Emotivism - something as good or bad depending on how we feel emotionally about it (e.g. "rape? - ugh!").
Morals	136	The error theory of morality (Mackie) = right thing to say, but nothing that proves it true.
	137	Moral beliefs aren't much different to any other sort of knowledge.
	137	Thick and non-thick moral beliefs; Thin = whether a given act is wrong (see p141).
	137	Kantian ethics - something is right or wrong if the same rule should apply to everyone. Utilitarianism = greatest good of the greatest number.
	138	Likelihood of reaching consensus: the colour - humour - witches scale - the first has high consensus, the last is largely bogus morality.
	142	Non-cognitivism: moral beliefs aren't really beliefs at all.
	142-3	Reflective equilibrium (J Rawls): holistic view, evolve towards it? Look at related situations, and look for coherence.
10 -	154	Bayesian/conditional probability viewpoint - evidence adjusts perceived probability.
	158-9	Problems with this - difficult to quantify; depends on initial estimate of probability; Bayesians don't all agree.
	161	Background beliefs influence the force of evidence - some make evidence powerless (p 160).
	163	Naturalism - says that knowledge etc is just another phenomenon of the natural world
	165	Framing effects - prior probabilities and judgments depend on how the question is framed
	166-7	Fallacies (e.g. people may confuse a number and a proportion; also the gambler's fallacy = next time it must restore the average).
	169	Naturalism challenges theories that ignore human limitations and their capacity to cope with complexity.
11 -	174	3 issues for the future are: skepticism v common sense; criticism v tolerance; grounds for belief.
	174	Arguments against skepticism (as typified by the brain in a vat possibility) - surely one only needs to rule out the relevant defeaters.
	175	Externalism versus internalism versus naturalism.
	176	Context is often relevant.
	177-8	Rationality: compulsive (no-one should ever believe anything without sufficient evidence) versus voluntarist (rationality can only determine what is irrational to believe).
	178	This is all a lot different from Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume etc, who thought that there were easily grasped principles for knowledge.
	178	"The jury is out - and it all affects religion, science and common sense."

Links

Index to more highlights of interesting books

FROLIO home page

Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.

This version updated on 13^th January 2011

If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .