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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analytic philosophy | 7/18 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:19:43.103246+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Theories of justification === American philosopher Roderick Chisholm defended foundationalism. Michael Huemer defends a type of foundationalism called phenomenal conservatism. Quine defended coherentism, a "web of belief", and thought all beliefs are open to revision; some are just held stronger than others, and so hold come what may. Ernest Sosa proposed virtue epistemology in "The Raft and the Pyramid" (1980). Alvin Goldman developed a causal theory of knowledge. The debate between internalism and externalism still exists in analytic philosophy. Huemer is an internalist. Goldman is an externalist known for developing a popular form of externalism called reliabilism. Most externalists reject the KK thesis, which has been disputed since the introduction of epistemic logic by Jaakko Hintikka in 1962. Fallibilists also often reject the KK thesis.
=== Problem of the criterion === Discussed since antiquity, Chisholm, in his Theory of Knowledge (1966), details the problem of the criterion with two sets of questions:
What do we know? or What is the extent of our knowledge? How do we know? or What is the criterion for deciding whether we have knowledge in any particular case? Answering the former question first is called particularism, whereas answering the latter first is called methodism. A third solution is skepticism, or doubting there is such a thing as knowledge.
=== Closure === Epistemic closure is the claim that knowledge is closed under entailment; in other words, epistemic closure is a property or the principle that if a subject
S
{\displaystyle S}
knows
p
{\displaystyle p}
, and
S
{\displaystyle S}
knows that
p
{\displaystyle p}
entails
q
{\displaystyle q}
, then
S
{\displaystyle S}
can thereby come to know
q
{\displaystyle q}
. Most epistemological theories involve a closure principle, as do many skeptical arguments (e. g. the dream argument). In Proof of An External World (1939), G. E. Moore uses closure in his famous anti-skeptical "here is one hand" argument. Shortly before his death, Wittgenstein wrote the posthumously published On Certainty (1969) in response to Moore. While the closure principle is generally regarded as intuitive, philosophers, such as Fred Dretske with relevant alternatives theory and Robert Nozick's truth tracking theory of knowledge in Philosophical Explanations (1981), have argued against it. Others argue it is true but only given a specific context.
=== Induction ===
In his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955), Nelson Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy with Hume's classical problem of induction. Goodman's famous example was to introduce the predicates grue and bleen. "Grue" applies to all things before a certain arbitrary time t, just in case they are green, but also just in case they are blue after time t; and "bleen" applies to all things before time t, just in the case they are blue, but also just in case they are green after time t. So the inductive inference "All emeralds are grue" will be true before time t but "All emeralds are bleen" will be true after t.
=== Other topics === Other, related topics of research include debates over cases of knowledge, the value of knowledge, the nature of evidence, the role of intuitions in justification, and abduction.
== Ethics == Early analytic philosophers often thought ethics could not be made rigorous enough to merit any attention. It was only with the emergence of ordinary-language philosophers that ethics started to become acceptable. Analytic philosophers have gradually come to distinguish three major types of moral philosophy.
Meta-ethics, which investigates moral terms and concepts; Normative ethics, which examines and produces ethical judgments; Applied ethics, which applies normative principles to specific, practical issues.
=== Meta-ethics === As well as Hume's famous is–ought problem, twentieth-century meta-ethics has two original strains.
==== Principia Ethica ==== The first strain is based on G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), which advances non-naturalist moral realism. The work is known for the open question argument and identifying the naturalistic fallacy, major topics for analytic philosophers. According to Moore, goodness is sui generis, a simple (undefinable), non-natural property. Contemporary philosophers, such as Russ Shafer-Landau in Moral Realism: A Defence (2003), still defend ethical non-naturalism. After Moore's work, not much was done in analytic philosophy with ethics until the 1950s and 1960s, when there was a renewed interest in traditional moral philosophy. Philippa Foot defended naturalist moral realism and contributed several essays attacking other theories. Foot introduced the famous "trolley problem" into the ethical discourse. A student and friend of Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, wrote a monograph Intention (1957) with an influential treatment of action. Her article "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) called the is–ought problem into question. J. O. Urmson's article "On Grading" also did so.
==== Emotivism ==== The second strain is founded on logical positivism and its attitude that unverifiable statements are meaningless. As a result, they avoided normative ethics and instead pursued meta-ethics. The logical positivists thought statements about value—including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—are non-cognitive. As a result, they adopted an emotivist theory, also known as the hurrah/boo theory, valuing judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker. On this view, saying, "Murder is wrong", is equivalent to saying, "Boo to murder", or saying the word "murder" with a particular tone of disapproval. Emotivism evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist theories, such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson in Ethics and Language (1944), and the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which was based on Austin's philosophy of speech acts. Other anti-realist moral theorists include Australian John Mackie, who in Ethics: Inventing Right And Wrong (1977) defended error theory and the argument from queerness. Bernard Williams also influenced ethics by advocating a kind of moral relativism and rejecting all other theories.
=== Normative ethics ===