Folk Epistemology as Normative Social Cognition

نویسنده

  • BENOIT HARDY-VALLÉE
چکیده

Epistemology tout court is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge (as a product) and knowing (as a process that produces knowledge). One of the epistemologist’s goals is to separate the epistemic wheat from the doxastic chaff, the knowledge from the mere belief; another one is to describe the very nature of knowledge: its features, conditions, sources, justification and limits. Folk-epistemology is the folksy version of this philosophical investigation. I will here use a definition of folk-epistemology that—I hope—does not specifies in advance what would be a proper characterization of it. Folkepistemology refers to the ordinary, commonsensical, everyday, naïve and intuitive conceptions of knowledge. As Kitchener puts it, it is “our ‘untutored’ views about the nature of knowledge (R. F. Kitchener, 2002, p. 89). Under various labels1 folk-epistemology has been an object of study for many researchers. This research falls in two broad, sometimes overlapping, categories that we might call epistemic theories and epistemic intuitions. Research on the former seeks to elucidate how people think, reason and represent knowledge (a field often referred to as “personal epistemology”).

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Editorial: Folk Epistemology. The Cognitive Bases of Epistemic Evaluation

Folk epistemology refers to a range of cognitive skills that involve epistemic concepts such as knowledge and truth. As human beings we are able to assess the truth of an utterance by another agent or whether an inference someone makes is valid. We can evaluate to what extent sources we acquire information from are reliable and whether new information we acquire should lead to belief revision. ...

متن کامل

The Social Origins of Folk Epistemology

Because reasoning allows us to justify our beliefs and evaluate these justifications it is central to folk epistemology. Following Sperber, and contrary to classical views, it will be argued that reasoning evolved not to complement individual cognition but as an argumentative device. This hypothesis is more consistent with the prevalence of the confirmation and disconfirmation biases. It will b...

متن کامل

Achieving Multiagent Organisation by Organising Agent Experience

There are two contrary types of approaches to multiagent design and modelling, each having its specific shortcomings: first, top-down (normative) approaches that emphasise social level control; and second, bottom-up (constructivist) approaches that emphasise agent autonomy. This paper introduces a “middle way” between these two types. A novel social reasoning architecture called INFFRA is descr...

متن کامل

Demoralizing causation

Introduction There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. writes that " [m]oral considerations actually figure in the fundamental competencies people use to make sense of the world, " while Pettit and Knobe (...

متن کامل

Research Statement Dissertation Description

Broad Research Program My philosophical research aims to develop a general theory of pragmatic embodied epistemology. Pragmatic embodied epistemology is the philosophical investigation of the possibility conditions and normative principles for embodied agents to represent their world and to utilize the representations in their interactions with the world. Pragmatic embodied epistemology differs...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2007