If evidence is what makes the difference between mere belief and real knowledge, then it is important to discover what kind(s) of evidence work. What kinds of evidence might promote disbelief to belief or belief to knowledge?
Reason is an important component of evidence, but without something to reason about, it is sterile. Reason is often used in the context of the construction and testing of hypotheses.
Appeals to authority of one sort or another play a frequent role. Evidentially legitimate authority (that is expertise) is nothing more than "secondhand" reason and experience.
Intuition is sometimes offered as evidence, but except in cases where it amounts to quick or quirky reason, it requires justification rather than providing it.
- There is a Philosophy TV program and one episode is called, "In the Pit." Someone defends the use of intuitions as evidence in philosophy, particularly in epistemology. At one point in the conversation there is an argument made that goes like this -- the “We Don’t Have to Sterilize the Tools before We Use Them” Argument --
- For any method M1 used in field F, if we do not have an alternative method M2 for F, then we are justified in using M1 for F even if we do not have good reasons to believe that M1 is a good method for F.
- We do not have a method other than the method of cases (or appealing to intuitions) for epistemology.
- Therefore, we are justified in using the method of cases (or appealing to intuitions) for epistemology.
Revelation is frequently offered as evidence for knowledge claims in religious contexts, though is unfamiliar elsewhere.
Those who claim to know by faith are simply misusing language.- In Die Philosophie des Judentums, Guttmann contended that Maimonides approached revelation as an epistemological question: how or to what extent do we know revelation to be true? Strauss responded that Guttmann had missed the point. For Maimonides, the significance of revelation rested on its status as legislation. Rather than a source of knowledge, Strauss argued, Maimonides saw revelation as the basis for an authoritative political order. The task for philosophy, then, would be the articulation of Law and questioning within its boundaries, rather than the pursuit of a foundation for certainty.
The bottom line is that moving from disbelief to belief or from belief to knowledge is a testable process of someone's reason exploiting someone's experiential input.
Considering the fact that there are some things that people in different parts of the world claim to know (about medicine, for instance) that seem to contradict each other, what would it mean to say that perhaps all of them are right?
- If a relativist catches you audaciously suggesting that there is such a thing as (absolute) truth, then you are bound to be asked the rhetorical question: "But who is to decide what the truth is?" Apparently the relativist thinks that if you hold that there is an absolute, objective truth, then you have to believe there is some authority whose word on that truth must not be questioned. The rhetorical question appears to be meant as a challenge to your presumed right to set yourself up as such an authority. It is supposed to make you either abandon the whole idea of absolute truth or else reveal yourself for the arrogant dogmatist you are. But the possibility of skepticism shows very graphically that this is a false dilemma. Skeptics don't deny that there is an absolute truth, but they are as far from dogmatism as it is possible to be, since they deny absolutely that anyone (least of all themselves) could ever be in a position to say with certainty what the truth is. Even if you aren’t a skeptic, you can believe there is an (absolute) truth without thinking that anyone counts as an infallible authority about what it is.
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