Talk:Justification (epistemology)/Archive 1

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Archive 1

(Supposed relation between "irrationalism" and "Aestheticism")

Talk-page Housekeeping:

- - -
-- Arguably unsigned contrib (Research should be able to resolve it.)
--Jerzyt 22:44, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


Hi, the link for the term "irrationalism" leads to the page on "Aestheticism"...maybe this is a high brow philosophy joke...love, a first time wiki editor


— Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.95.50.125 (talk) 03:58, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

(A hopefully clarifying break distinguishing between a presumably decade-plus-old discussion and the half-decade-old one shoved in on top of it by someone who presumably thinks this page exists bcz we can't support a proper listserve)

Parts of this article are derived from Larry's Text.
- - -unsigned contrib (Research should be able to resolve it.)
--Jerzyt 22:44, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


A discussion relating to an apparently unsigned text by User:Larry Sanger

Larry, I am trying to allow for distinctions between internalism and externalism, and set up an article on Getter problems. I can't do this without radically changing the second half of this article, since externalists generally frame their theories as a critique of the JTB theory of knowledge.

I also think some historical reference to Plato and the notion that knowledge is belief plus logos, or reasons, found in the Thaetetus, would be helpful here.

Anyway, I just wanted to put you on notice that I'm planning to radically alter the rest of this text, so that it only explains one view -- the normative internalist view of justification. I think that's fair, since that is how the term is generally used. I think we can and should cover other views, but that we ought to do it on other pages.

If you have objections to this, please let me know, so I don't waste my time writing something you are going to delete out of hand.
MRC -- Presumably edit-history research will verify that that ref to a user was part of a sig, and provide a time-stamp that will at least hint at its relationship to its surroundings.
--Jerzyt 00:07, 21 June 2018 (UTC)


An attempt to de-larryify the page. Added heading structure. Not happy with the three sugestions for th esort of thing that can be a justifier - does anyone know who proposes each? Copyedit needed. Banno 00:39, Apr 12, 2004 (UTC)

Lots of writers use "warrant"

This mystifies me. "Stephen Pepper (1942), in his 'world hypothesis' theory of the history of epistemology, uses the term warrant."

Pepper, a red link yet, is given special status, which seems to imply that use of the term "warrant" in this context is otherwise rare. It isn't. It would've been easy to come up with (blue link) philosophers names who also use warrant. Like Alvin Plantinga, just for example. Unless we want to make a really long list, though, why is Pepper here? --Christofurio 21:38, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

(A's and B's respective claims & casts)

It looks to me like the following phrase is grammatically incorrect. It is about 4 lines down from the top.

"If A makes a claim, and B the casts"

No Epistemological Theories!

This article opens by stating that it's a subset of epistemology, but links to no epistemological theories of justification (such as Foundationalism, Coherentism, and Internalism and externalism. Since it seems (to me) like such a glaring omission, I threw them in. I think it's probably best to put it right before the section on justification because there are so many different types of justification and the data used for each. Please edit this section up, it needs it, I know; I can't express the ideas particularly clearly. Please just don't remove it. -- I think what MyOwnLittlWorld is trying to communicate is the fact that all of us remotely understand but none of us clearly grasp. it is the fact of impossibility and radiant sub conscience to the extreme ability we begin to detach from our normal states and begin to drift into the unknown dream waking ever sleeping our trigonometric minds begin to form the images wich we confirm as real or even potent.

MyOwnLittlWorld 22:55, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

No Wikipedia article on the commonsense meaning of proof?

According to the dab page for Proof, the term "proof" has technical meanings in an impressive number of areas: formal (mathematical) logic, mathematics, law, computation, printing, firearms, alcohol, and homeopathy. Just now I added epistemology to these areas, by way of a link on the dab page to this article, on the ground that a Wikipedia reader searching for the sort of information in this article might not think to look for it under "justification" instead of "proof."

However it occurs to me that besides all these technical meanings, "proof" also has a commonsense meaning that I don't see treated anywhere in Wikipedia. If your significant other says "Prove that you love me" you don't start out "Well, by Modus Ponens and the Axiom of Choice," you act in a suitably demonstrative way. Likewise when you say "This letter of yours to Mary proves that you don't love me," it is more likely that the letter consists of incriminating endearments than applications of rules of inference. We ask whether evolution has been proved, whether increasing levels of carbon dioxide constitute sufficient proof of global warming, can you prove you own this car, and so on.

It is great that specialties such as mathematical logic and epistemology have defined the notion in the respective contexts of their highly evolved world views. However I don't see how these highly academic treatments, written (hopefully) by specialists with expertise in their respective disciplines, meet the needs of the ordinary Wikipedia reader who simply wants to know what constitutes a proof as the term is used in ordinary everyday discourse without having to first acquire the point of view and technical insights of either logic or epistemology.

Why is there no straightforward Wikipedia article on "proof" as understood in ordinary discourse? --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 18:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

  1. wp:DICT
  2. Bcz in "ordinary discourse" it is measure of alcohol concentration in aqueous mixtures, or a slang expression for a spectrum of legal concepts.
--Jerzyt 00:49, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

This article gets my award for the worst written bit of crap I've yet seen on Wikipedia. It's like a 10 year old's attempt to explain the fundamentals of epistemology. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.70.91.107 (talk) 14:53, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

   Well, we don't have to admit "this" (the accompanying article's talk page) as being "on [WP]", but i'd love to hear any argument you'd make about this (article-talk) page being a less badly written bit of crap. Talk is cheap, practically free.
--Jerzyt 00:49, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Double hedge

   "Loosely speaking, justification is the reason that someone (properly) holds a belief." seems to embody two vague hedges. I'm not gonna try and fix that (and this interface doesn't let me see if and how the page is rated), but my gut tells me that one such hedge in a lead is one too many: more specifically, it suggests that a stub that shows no thot is preferable to an article whose lead is so vague. If ifelt more enegetic i'd nominate any such article for deletion on the grounds that that's more promising than repair attempts would.
--Jerzyt 02:39, 21 June 2018 (UTC)