The Problem of the Criterion

What is the POC?
1. Issue regarding the starting point of knowledge
2. 2 Questions:
  1. 1. What do we know? What is the extent of our knowledge?
    1. Particularism
      1. Have an Answer to 1 so can have an answer to 2
  2. 2. How do we know? What is the criterion for knowing?
    1. Methodism
      1. Have an answer to 1
  3. 3rd Option = Skepticism: no answers
    1. No prospect for agreement
    2. Can't have an Answer to 1, without an Answer to 2, and vice versa
Sextus Empiricus
1. Pyrrhonist
  1. suspend judgment (practice epochē) and take no part in the controversy regarding the possibility of certain knowledge.
  2. reserves judgement about certain knowledge and practise epoche
  3. Academic skeptic says there is no such thing as truth which is paradoxical
    1. Sextus knows he cannot advance towards tranquility if he goes down this line
2. no knowledge as to many different possibilities
  1. Difference in perceptions and sensations
    1. Honey: Sweet if healthy, bitter if jaundiced
3. we should suspend our judgement
  1. Not discuss external objects
    1. End result = tranquility
      1. You do not know you will come upon tranquility, but you may come upon it by chance if you lead your life in this way
  2. Gives us a training manual/new training in skepticism to give us an ability to oppose the dogmatist: dialectical ability
Cicero
1. "Any sense experience that we think represents the world correctly, exactly resembles one that does not"
2. No certainty, but probability is a way forward
3. Arguments of 4 parts
  1. 1. There is such a thing as a false presentation
  2. 2. A false presentation cannot be percieved
  3. 3. Where there is no difference between some presentation it is impossible for one to be percieved and the other not
  4. 4. There is no true presentation orginating from sensation which there is not another presentation that is the same as it (corresponds to it) but cannot be percieved.
    1. This is what Cicero is concerned with
Chisholm
1. Need to distinguish between truth and falsehood
2. Criterion of truth should be "internal, objective and immediate"
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The Problem of the Criterion

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	Created by Lauren Diffey over 11 years ago