Mystical Experience and Non–Basically Justified Belief

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic Warrant ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Basic Beliefs

Two theses are central to foundationalism. First, the foundationalist claims that there is a class of propositions, a class of empirical contingent beliefs, that are ‘immediately justified’. Alternatively, one can describe these beliefs as ‘self–evident’, ‘non–inferentially justified’, or ‘self–warranted’, though these are not always regarded as entailing one another. The justification or epistemic warrant for these beliefs is not derived from other justified beliefs through inductive evidential support or deductive methods of inference. These ‘basic beliefs’ constitute the foundations of empirical knowledge. One can give a reason for the justification of a basic belief even though the justification for that belief is not based on other beliefs. Thus, according to Chisholm, if asked what one's justification was for thinking that one knew, presently, that one is thinking about a city one takes to be Albuquerque, one could simply say ‘what justifies me…is simply the fact that I am thinking about a city I take to be Albuquerque’.

Evidence and Its Limits

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton Littlejohn
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Way Of Thinking

On a standard way of thinking about the relationships between evidence, reasons, and epistemic justification, a subject’s evidence consists of her potential reasons for her beliefs, these reasons constitute the normative reasons that bear on whether to believe, and justification is taken to result from relations between a subject’s potential reasons for her beliefs and those beliefs. This chapter argues that this view makes a number of mistakes about the rational roles of reasons and evidence and explores some parallels between practical and theoretical reasons. Just as justified action is unobjectionable action, justified belief is unobjectionable belief. Just as you cannot object to someone deciding to do something simply on the grounds that their reasons for acting didn’t give them strong reason to act, you cannot object to someone believing something simply on the grounds that they didn’t believe for reasons that gave their beliefs strong evidential support.

The Crucial Disanalogies Between Properly Basic Belief and Belief in God

1990 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Grigg
Keyword(s):  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Classical Foundationalism ◽  
Basic Beliefs

The antifoundationalist defence of belief in God set forth by Alvin Plantinga has been widely discussed in recent years. Classical foundationalism assumes that there are two kinds of beliefs that we are justified in holding: beliefs supported by evidence, and basic beliefs. Our basic beliefs are those bedrock beliefs that need no evidence to support them and upon which our other beliefs must rest. For the foundationalist, the only beliefs that can be properly basic are either self-evident, or incorrigible, or evident to the senses. Belief in God is none of these. Thus, says the foundationalist, belief in God is justified only if there is sufficient evidence to back it up.

Basic beliefs and Christian faith

2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
GREGORY W. DAWES
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Argument From Evil ◽  
Reformed Epistemology ◽  
Basic Beliefs ◽  
Christian Beliefs

AbstractIn rejecting Plantinga's ‘reformed epistemology’, Jeremy Koons has argued that no beliefs are epistemically basic, since even perceptual beliefs arise from observations that are theory-dependent. But even if all observations are theory-dependent, not all theories are alike. Beliefs that are dependent on uncontroversial bodies of theory may be ‘basic’ in the sense that they play a foundational role in the acquisition of knowledge. There is, however, another problem with reformed epistemology. It is that even if Christian beliefs were basic in this sense, they could face evidential challenge, for the epistemic status of a ‘basic’ belief depends, in part, on its probabilistic or explanatory relations to our other beliefs. It follows that Christian faith remains vulnerable to evidential arguments, such as Paul Draper's argument from evil.

scholarly journals Swinburne and Plantinga on internal rationality

2001 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-358
Author(s):  
RICHARD SWINBURNE
Keyword(s):  
Posterior Probability ◽  
Prior Probability ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Degree Of Confidence ◽  
Basic Beliefs ◽  
Public Evidence ◽  
Internal Rationality

Plantinga defines S's belief as ‘privately rational if and only if it is probable on S's evidence’, and ‘publicly rational if and only if it is probable with respect to public evidence’, and he claims that ‘it is an immediate consequence of these definitions that all my basic beliefs are privately rational’. I made it explicitly clear in my review that on my account of a person's evidence (quoted and used by Plantinga) as ‘the content of his basic beliefs (weighted by his degree of confidence in them)’, that is not the case. I emphasize ‘weighted by his degree of confidence in them’. I wrote explicitly: ‘for more or less any belief, however convinced you are of it initially, other evidence of which you are equally convinced could rend it overall improbable’. Put technically, in probabilistic terms, basic beliefs come to us with different degrees of prior probability varying with our degree of confidence in them, but a belief with a high prior probability can in the light of other beliefs of our current set have a lower posterior probability. If you continue to hold on to a basic belief when its probability on the total evidence is below half, that belief is not privately rational.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Sarah McGrath
Keyword(s):  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Relative Priority ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Working Hypothesis ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter contains a brief overview of the topics the book addresses, together with a discussion of the working hypothesis: that moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge, and that our efforts to acquire and preserve such knowledge are subject to frustration in all of the same ways that our efforts to acquire and preserve ordinary empirical knowledge are. Section 1.2 discusses methodological preliminaries and assumptions concerning the relative priority of moral epistemology (as opposed to metaphysics or semantics), the standards of moral vs. non-moral knowledge, and the relationship between moral knowledge and justified belief. Section 1.3 introduces another theme that unifies many of the arguments and views presented in this book, namely that our access to moral knowledge has an important social dimension.

Three Arguments Against Foundationalism: Arbitrariness, Epistemic Regress, and Existential Support

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Howard-Snyder ◽  
E.J. Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Ernest Sosa ◽  
Peter Klein ◽  
Basic Beliefs

A particular belief of a person is basic just in case it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other beliefs or the interrelations of their contents; a person's belief is nonbasic just in case it is epistemically justified but not basic. Traditional Foundationalism says that, first, if a human being has a nonbasic belief, then, at bottom, it owes its justification to at least one basic belief, and second, there are basic beliefs. Call the second thesis Minimal Foundationalism. In this essay, we assess three arguments against Minimal Foundationalism which we find in recent work of Peter Klein and Ernest Sosa.

PROPERLY BASIC THEISTIC BELIEF: A SESAME STREET OBJECTION

Think ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (47) ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Ken Nickel
Keyword(s):  
Sesame Street ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Theistic Belief ◽  
Basic Beliefs

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga wants everyone to agree that while sceptics will always be with us, no one is irrational in accepting what only the stubborn sceptic denies. Plantinga claims no one should be considered irrational for accepting what the religious sceptic denies either. Rather, the claim goes, belief in God should be as uncontroversial as any other properly basic belief sensible people happily hold without absolute proof sufficient to silence the sceptic. The legitimacy of placing theistic belief alongside other properly basic beliefs is challenged by the Sesame Street Objection: ‘one of these things is not like the others’.

scholarly journals An Empirical Study of Personality Values and Their Influence on Personalitys Virtual Image: Component of Basic Beliefs

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruslan Zekeryaev
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Internet User ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Virtual Image ◽  
Level Of Involvement ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Person ◽  
Image Component ◽  
Basic Beliefs

The article provides a critical analysis of the literature on the researches of the sphere of personality values in the Internet space. Also, in the course of the study, it was determined that the sphere of personality values is a complex dynamic construct of the personality, which determines its inner world and outlines the vector of its activity. It was also revealed that the virtual personality of an Internet user is a complex formation that is formed during the transition of a real person to the socio-cultural space of the Internet, with subsequent integration into it and the internalization of the values and meanings of the virtual society. The virtual personality of an Internet user as a psychological phenomenon was analyzed; such properties of a virtual personality as virtuality (the degree of acceptance of virtual reality as a social environment), involvement (the level of information and computer technologies awareness and a sense of belonging to a virtual society) and orientation (the presence or absence of ideas about socially approved behavior in Internet society) are described. The article analyzes the results of an empirical study of the influence of the component of basic beliefs in the value-semantic sphere of a person on the properties of their virtual image. It was revealed that there is a correlation between the indicator of the basic belief in the benevolence of the world and the level of virtual personality (people with the belief in the benevolence of the world in the Internet space have developed motivation for creative activity), as well as a correlation between the indicator of the basic belief in the controllability of the world and the level of involvement of the virtual personality (people with a conviction of the controllability of the world in the Internet space tend to perceive themselves as a significant part of it).

scholarly journals BEST EXPLANATIONISM AND JUSTIFICATION FOR BELIEFS ABOUT THE FUTURE

Episteme ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Stoutenburg
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Explanatory Coherence ◽  
The Future ◽  
Promising Solution ◽  
Beliefs About The Future ◽  
Support Relation

AbstractEarl Conee and Richard Feldman have recently argued that the evidential support relation should be understood in terms of explanatory coherence: roughly, one's evidence supports a proposition if and only if that proposition is part of the best available explanation of the evidence (2008). Their thesis has been criticized through alleged counterexamples, perhaps the most important of which are cases where a subject has a justified belief about the future (Byerly 2013; Byerly and Martin forthcoming). Kevin McCain has defended the thesis against Byerly's counterexample (2013, 2014a). I argue that McCain's defense is inadequate before pointing toward a more promising solution for explanationism. The Byerly–McCain exchange is important because it casts light on the difficult issues of the standards for justification and the nature of epistemic support. Furthermore, McCain's defense of explanationism about epistemic support represents an important recent development of the burgeoning explanationist program in epistemology and philosophy of science.

scholarly journals ETHNOPSYCHOLOGICAL AND PERSONAL DETERMINANTS OF YOUTH AUTHORITATIVENESS

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-174
Author(s):  
Т.В. Корнеева ◽  
С.Е. Поддубный
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Tolerance Index ◽  
Social Tolerance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Minorities ◽  
High Level ◽  
Basic Beliefs

В статье представлены результаты эмпирического исследования этнопсихологических и личностных детерминант авторитарности молодежи. Использованы следующие методики: «F-шкала» Т. Адорно, «Типы этнической идентичности» Г.У. Солдатовой, С.В. Рыжовой, «Индекс толерантности» Г.У. Солдатовой, «Акцентуации личности» К. Леонгарда (модификация Г. Шмишека), «Шкала базисных убеждений» Р. Янофф-Бульман (адаптация М.А. Падун и А.В. Котельниковой), «Ценностные портреты» Ш. Шварца. Согласно полученным данным, для молодежи характерен низкий уровень Авторитарности , Позитивной этнической идентичности и Этнической толерантности в сочетании с высоким уровнем дискриминационных форм межэтнических отношений ( Этнонигилизмом , Этнофанатизмом , Этноэгоизмом ) и выраженной Социальной толерантностью . Подтверждена гипотеза о том, что Этническая идентичность , Толерантность , Акцентуации характера , Ценностные ориентации и Базисные убеждения являются детерминантами Авторитарности . Наибольший вклад в эту личностную черту вносят показатели, характеризующие отношение личности к своей этнической группе - Позитивная этническая идентичность и Этнонигилизм . Второе место по совокупному влиянию занимает характеристика терпимого отношения к социальным меньшинствам. Примерно равный вклад в Авторитарность молодежи вносят характеристики ценностно-смысловой сферы личности - ценность Доброты и базисного убеждения в том, что миру можно доверять, а также акцентуация характера - Гипертимность . Наибольшее положительное влияние на Авторитарность оказывает Позитивная этническая идентичность , а наибольшее отрицательное - Социальная толерантность . The paper considers the results of an empirical study of the ethnopsychological and personal determinants of youth authoritativeness. The following methods were used: "F-scale" by T. Adorno, "Types of ethnic identity" by G. U. Soldatova, S. V. Ryzhova, "Tolerance Index" by G.U. Soldatova, "Accentuations of personality" by K. Leonhard (modification by G. Shmishek), "Scale of basic beliefs" by Yanoff Bulman in the adaptation of M. A. Padun and A.V. Kotelnikova, “Value Portraits” by S. Schwartz. According to the obtained results, young people are characterized by low level of Authoritarianism. Positive ethnic identity and Ethnic tolerance, combined with a high level of discriminatory forms of interethnic relations (ethnonigilism, ethnophanatism) and expressed Social tolerance. The hypothesis that ethnic identity, tolerance, character accentuations, value orientation and basic beliefs are determinants of authoritarianism is confirmed. The greatest contribution into the authoritarianism of the individual is made by indicators, which characterize the attitude of the individual to the ethnic group - positive ethnic identity and Ethnonigilism. The second place in terms of overall influence occupies characteristic of tolerant attitude to social minorities. Approximately equal contribution to the Authoritarianism of youth is made by the characteristics of the value-semantic sphere of the individual - the value of Kindness and the basic belief that the world can be trusted, as well as the accentuation of character - Hyperthymia. Positive ethnic identity has the greatest positive influence on Authoritarianism, and Social tolerance has the greatest negative influence.

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