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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
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Heraclitus
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Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
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Joseph Levine
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C. Lloyd Morgan
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Michael Lockwood
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James Martineau
Storrs McCall
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Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
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Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
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H.A.Prichard
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Paul Russell
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Kenneth Sayre
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Moritz Schlick
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Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
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Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
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Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
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Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
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R. Jay Wallace
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Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Gregory Bateson
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gilbert Lewis
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Josef Loschmidt
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Owen Maroney
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Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
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Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
Tilman Sauer
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Dean Keith Simonton
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Giulio Tononi
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John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
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Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
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Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky
 
David M. Armstrong

David Malet Armstrong's book Knowledge, Truth and Belief (1973, pp.150-61) contains an important analysis of the infinite regress of inferences - "reasons behind the reasons" - first noticed by Plato in the Theatetus (200D-201C).

Knowledge traditionally entails true belief, but true belief does not entail knowledge.

Knowledge is true belief plus some justification in the form of reasons or evidence. But that evidence must itself be knowledge, which in turn must be justified, leading to a regress.

Following some unpublished work of Gregory O'Hair, Armstrong identifies and diagrams several possible ways to escape Plato's regress, including:

  • Skepticism - knowledge is impossible

  • The regress is infinite but virtuous

  • The regress is finite, but has no end (Coherence view)

  • The regress ends in self-evident truths (Foundationalist view)

  • Non-inferential credibility, such as direct sense perceptions

  • Externalist theories (O'Hair is the source of the term "externalist")

  • Causal view (Ramsey)

  • Reliability view (Ramsey)

Armstrong is cited by Hilary Kornblith and other epistemologists as restoring interest in "externalist" justification of knowledge. Since Descartes, epistemology had been focused on "internalist" justifications.

Armstrong does not subscribe to traditional views of justifying true beliefs, but he cited "causal" and "reliabilist" theories as direct non-inferential validation of knowledge. Direct validation or justification avoids the problem of the infinite regress of inferences.

Causality and reliabilism also were not original with Armstrong. He referred to the 1929 work of Frank Ramsey. Today these ideas are primarily associated with the name of Alvin Goldman, who put forward both "causal" (in 1967) and "reliabilist" (in 1969) theories of justification for true beliefs (apparently not being familiar with the earlier Ramsey work, since it is not mentioned in the early Goldman papers?

Here is how Armstrong described "causal" and "reliabilist" views:

According to "Externalist" accounts of non-inferential knowledge, what makes a true non-inferential belief a case of knowledge is some natural relation which holds between the belief-state, Bap ['a believes p'], and the situation which makes the belief true. It is a matter of a certain relation holding between the believer and the world. It is important to notice that, unlike "Cartesian" and "Initial Credibility" theories, Externalist theories are regularly developed as theories of the nature of knowledge generally and not simply as theories of non-inferential knowledge. But they still have a peculiar importance in the case of non-inferential knowledge because they serve to solve the problem of the infinite regress.

Externalist theories may be further sub-divided into 'Causal' and `Reliability' theories.

6 (i) Causal theories. The central notion in causal theories may be illustrated by the simplest case. The suggestion is that Bap ['a believes p'] is a case of Kap ['a knows p'] if 'p' is true and, furthermore, the situation that makes 'p' true is causally responsible for the existence of the belief-state Bap. I not only believe, but know, that the room is rather hot. Now it is certainly the excessive heat of the room which has caused me to have this belief. This causal relation, it may then be suggested, is what makes my belief a case of knowledge.

the source for causal theories is Frank Ramsey (1929)
Ramsey's brief note on 'Knowledge', to be found among his 'Last Papers' in The Foundations of Mathematics, puts forward a causal view. A sophisticated recent version of a causal theory is to be found in 'A Causal Theory of Knowing' by Alvin I. Goldman (Goldman 1967).

Causal theories face two main types of difficulty. In the first place, even if we restrict ourselves to knowledge of particular matters of fact, not every case of knowledge is a case where the situation known is causally responsible for the existence of the belief. For instance, we appear to have some knowledge of the future. And even if all such knowledge is in practice inferential, non-inferential knowledge of the future (for example, that I will be ill tomorrow) seems to be an intelligible possibility. Yet it could hardly be held that my illness tomorrow causes my belief today that I will be ill tomorrow. Such cases can perhaps be dealt with by sophisticating the Causal analysis. In such a case, one could say, both the illness tomorrow and today's belief that I will be ill tomorrow have a common cause, for instance some condition of my body today which not only leads to illness but casts its shadow before by giving rise to the belief. (An 'early-warning' system.)

In the second place, and much more seriously, cases can be envisaged where the situation that makes 'p' true gives rise to Bap, but we would not want to say that A knew that p. Suppose, for instance, that A is in a hypersensitive and deranged state, so that almost any considerable sensory stimulus causes him to believe that there is a sound of a certain sort in his immediate environment. Now suppose that, on a particular occasion, the considerable sensory stimulus which produces that belief is, in fact, a sound of just that sort in his immediate environment. Here the p-situation produces Bap, but we would not want to say that it was a case of knowledge.

I believe that such cases can be excluded only by filling out the Causal Analysis with a Reliability condition. But once this is done, I think it turns out that the Causal part of the analysis becomes redundant, and that the Reliability condition is sufficient by itself for giving an account of non-inferential (and inferential) knowledge.

6 (ii) Reliability theories. The second 'Externalist' approach is in terms of the empirical reliability of the belief involved. Knowledge is empirically reliable belief. Since the next chapter will be devoted to a defence of a form of the Reliability view, it will be only courteous to indicate the major precursors of this sort of view which I am acquainted with.

Ramsey is the source for reliabilist views as well
Once again, Ramsey is the pioneer. The paper 'Knowledge', already mentioned, combines elements of the Causal and the Reliability view. There followed John Watling's 'Inference from the Known to the Unknown' (Watling 1954), which first converted me to a Reliability view. Since then there has been Brian Skyrms' very difficult paper 'The Explication of "X knows that p" ' (Skyrms 1967), and Peter Unger's 'An Analysis of Factual Knowledge' (Unger 1968), both of which appear to defend versions of the Reliability view. There is also my own first version in Chapter Nine of A Materialist Theory of the Mind. A still more recent paper, which I think can be said to put forward a Reliability view, and which in any case anticipates a number of the results I arrive at in this Part, is Fred Dretske's 'Conclusive Reasons' (Dretske 1971).
Hilary Kornblith on Armstrong
The Terms "Internalism" and "Externalism"
The terms "internalism" and "externalism" are used in philosophy in a variety of different senses, but their use in epistemology for anything like the positions which are the focus of this book dates to 1973. More precisely, the word "externalism" was introduced in print by David Armstrong' in his book Belief; Truth and Knowledge' in the following way:
According to "Externalist" accounts of non-inferential knowledge, what makes a true non-inferential belief a case of knowledge is some natural relation which holds between the belief-state, Bap ['a believes p'], and the situation which makes the belief true. It is a matter of a certain relation holding between the believer and the world. It is important to notice that, unlike "Cartesian" and "Initial Credibility" theories, Externalist theories are regularly developed as theories of the nature of knowledge generally and not simply as theories of non-inferential knowledge. (Belief, Truth and Knowledge, p.157)
So in Armstrong's usage, "externalism" is a view about knowledge, and it is the view that when a person knows that a particular claim p is true, there is some sort of "natural relation" which holds between that person's belief that p and the world. One such view, suggested in 1967 by Alvin Goldman, was the Causal Theory of Knowledge. On this view, a person knows that p (for example, that it's raining) when that person's belief that p was caused by the fact that p. A related view, championed by Armstrong and later by Goldman as well, is the Reliability Account of Knowledge, according to which a person knows that p when that person's belief is both true and, in some sense, reliable: on some views, the belief must be a reliable indicator that p; on others, the belief must be produced by a reliable process, that is, one that tends to produce true beliefs. Frank Ramsey was a pioneer in defending a reliability account of knowledge. Particularly influential work in developing such an account was also done by Brian Skyrms, Peter Unger, and Fred Dretske.

Accounts of knowledge which are externalist in Armstrong's sense mark an important break with tradition, according to which knowledge is a kind of justified, true belief. On traditional accounts, in part because justification is an essential ingredient in knowledge, a central task of epistemology is to give an account of what justification consists in. And, according to tradition, what is required for a person to be justified in holding a belief is for that person to have a certain justification for the belief, where having a justification is typically identified with being in a position, in some relevant sense, to produce an appropriate argument for the belief in question. What is distinctive about externalist accounts of knowledge, as Armstrong saw it, was that they do not require justification, at least in the traditional sense. Knowledge merely requires having a true belief which is appropriately connected with the world.

But while Armstrong's way of viewing reliability accounts of knowledge has them rejecting the view that knowledge requires justified true belief, Alvin Goldman came to offer quite a different way of viewing the import of reliability theories: in 1979, Goldman suggested that instead of seeing reliability accounts as rejecting the claim that knowledge requires justified true belief, we should instead embrace an account which identifies justified belief with reliably produced belief. Reliability theories of knowledge, on this way of understanding them, offer a non-traditional account of what is required for a belief to be justified. This paper of Goldman's, and his subsequent extended development of the idea, have been at the center of epistemological discussion ever since.

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