Chapter 7
1. Common sense=good, philosophical=good, and absolute=bad, as there would be no
knowledge at all
2. Pyrrhonian skepticism=can’t know anything at all
3. A self-refuting proposition is one that negates itself based on its own propositions.
Absolute skepticism rests on one.
4. Both base their claim that we can’t really know anything about the world on the
claim that knowledge is relative to the knower.
5. The present-day skeptics are the postmodernists
6. Marxism & postmodernism – interested in power not truth.
7. ^puts classes against each other
8. Relationship of nominalism and postmodernism. Nominalism-Ockham, no objective
natures of things. Postmodernism-denies shared natures as well
9. Have different languages, different concepts, so the world is filtered through our precepts.
No brute facts
10. To state a truth, a proposition must be uttered and to do so you need concepts,
which there are many different ones, so different cultures see things differently so
we utter different truths
11. Rorty’s attitude of the traditional view that the mind is a “mirror of nature”—he thinks
it’s not a mirror of nature, we do not have access to nature as it is. Don’t have access
to the “real”, words get meanings from other words
12. Words gain their vocabularies from the men that use them – Rorty, can describe
reality however we want
13. Postmodernism virtues—tolerance pluralism and diversity.
14. Rorty’s definition – truth is whatever my peers will let me get away with saying
15. Postmodern criterion of truth – consensus
16. Plantinga’s critique – there’s always a group of people who will argue something is
or isn’t true
17. Other criteria – corresponds to the world, can predict unobserved facts, elegance,
coherent
Chapter 8
1. Analytic – A=A what we are knowing is the definitions of our own terms; all
bachelors are unmarried. Synthetic – A=B bachelors are usually young, has to do with
the object known, either the definitions or observed
2. A priori – before experience - analytic. A posteriori – after experience – synthetic
3. Rationalism – at least some of the things we know in the world come from reason.
4. Plato’s epistemology to his metaphysics – the Forms are transcendent, they’re
somewhere else not in things, so we know the Forms by intellectual seeing of the Forms,
not by the senses
5. Plato- reason not the senses confers knowledge – whatever the sensible thing is, it’s
constantly changing in the realm of becoming, not remaining stable long enough to be
known. Things down here imperfectly embody their forms. To become aware of the
forms is an act of intellectual seeing not visual seeing
6. Plato - Knowledge is recollection – all knowing is a kind of remembering, the souls used
to be in the presence of the Forms, when we see things we remember. The ideas are
from before this life
7. The senses serve as an occasion to jog our memories to recall the Forms we knew
8. Mathematics uses deduction. Deduction is more certain, so Descartes likes it better
9. Descartes has an intuition of himself, he proves God’s existence through deduction,
then he can prove there is an external world that his senses are giving him info on
truthfully
10. Descartes attributes our innate ideas to God
11. We have many innate ideas so we can know things for certainty
12. Chomsky is a rationalist
Chapter 9
1. Mind = blank slate upon which experience proceeds to write
2. Aristotle = Forms are in things, so we become aware of the forms through our senses
3. Induction-Aristotle- and Abstraction-Aquinas- all knowledge begins with sensation,
and we then abstract knowledge of the universals
4. Locke’s attack on innate ideas – even if some ideas are universal, it doesn’t mean
they’re innate; we inhabit the same world so we have similar experiences. No universal
ideas anyway – some people don’t know the principle of non-contradiction = all children
and idiots. Latent understanding should imply that ideas should be understood from the
get go, so what’s the point in having them if they can’t be understood
5. Locke’s 2 kinds of experience: sensation (physical) and reflection (mental things).
6. Locke’s representative perception – only have access to the ideas not the things,
which leads to skepticism=how can we know things are as they are themselves
7. British empiricists – Locke, Barkeley, Hume
8. Empiricist Principle = all knowledge comes from experience. Criterion for knowledge
then is no innate ideas, no mental substances
9. Putative knowledge claims they were led to deny because there’s no basis for the above
10. Elements of causality that Hume was able to trace to experience- physical contact,
temporal succession, happens again and again and again. But can’t know there’s a
necessary connection between 1st things motion and 2nd things motion.
11. Hume’s view of metaphysical and theological claims – not math or science, then throw
it away because it’s sophistry and illusion
12. Phenomenalism – all we know are the surface appearances of things
13. Matters of fact = to do with world, synthetic propositions. Relations of ideas = analytic
truths to do with ideas
14. “Relation of ideas” criteria = cannot be denied w/o contradiction
