Knowledge is important for us, human beings, for a variety of reasons,
starting with trivial but necessary reasons to live your life (knowing not
to cross the street when the traffic light is red, knowing that water
quenches thirst, knowing where you left your bicycle last night,
knowing how to buy a train ticket, knowing how to brush your teeth,
etc. etc.). Western man also has a collective project that is constitutive
of its culture: science; and the aim of science is to gather knowledge
about the world in its broadest meaning: from the origin of a particular
disease to the origin of man, life, planet Earth and the universe, from
why the orbits move as they do to why a mass of people behaves
differently from individuals, from why the sky is blue to why the sea is
salty, from why the climate seems to change to why rainbows appear,
etc. etc. The quest to understand what knowledge is, is as old as
philosophy itself, and the philosophy 

Vasiliauskaitė, G. (Giedrė)

Vasiliauskaite, G (Giedr?)

EUR Research Repository

English

Epistemic compatibilism

Knowledge is important for us, human beings, for a variety of reasons,
starting with trivial but necessary reasons to live your life (knowing not
to cross the street when the traffic light is red, knowing that water
quenches thirst, knowing where you left your bicycle last night,
knowing how to buy a train ticket, knowing how to brush your teeth,
etc. etc.). Western man also has a collective project that is constitutive
of its culture: science; and the aim of science is to gather knowledge
about the world in its broadest meaning: from the origin of a particular
disease to the origin of man, life, planet Earth and the universe, from
why the orbits move as they do to why a mass of people behaves
differently from individuals, from why the sky is blue to why the sea is
salty, from why the climate seems to change to why rainbows appear,
etc. etc. The quest to understand what knowledge is, is as old as
philosophy itself, and the philosophy of knowledge is called
epistemology.
The substantive ‘knowledge’ and the verb ‘to know’ are used in a
variety of manners: we can know a person, we can know how to ride a
bicycle and we can know that snow is white. The last-mentioned use,
propositional knowledge (knowing that p, where p is proposition), is the
most pervasive use and has been the main focus of philosophers.
Already in the Meno, Plato raises a question how someone knowing that
p differs from thinking that p is true when p is true. In this thesis I am
also going to focus exclusively on propositional knowledge

Erasmus University Digital Repository

  Propositions   1. Internalism expresses a valuable intuition that humans are intellectually autonomous and possess a unique capacity to reflect on the reasons of their beliefs.   2. Externalism is based on a valuable intuition that a lot of our everyday knowledge is acquired without consciously reflecting on the belief-grounding reasons, thanks to reliable cognitive processes.   3. Epistemology would be impoverished if any of the above-mentioned propositions were neglected. There is more to human knowledge than either one or the other.   4. The concept of “compatibility” implies not only the lack of contradiction but also the presence of shared concepts. Only the latter is worth investigating.   5. Epistemic compatibilism should strive to accomodate internalist and externalist intuitions into one account of knowledge, instead of just juxtaposing the concepts.  6. To study the applicability of the most general epistemological principles is as important as the study of the principles themselves.   7. Critical thinking is primarily related to the word “criteria”, and not to a negative judgmental attitude.  8. There are three possible styles of argumentation: destructive, seductive and constructive. The latter is the proper style for a critical thinker.   9. Critical thinking consists of two major parts: on the one hand it concerns the principles of correct thinking and elimination of logical fallacies; on the other hand it concerns the very process of inquiry, creativity and the generation of new ideas.  10. One of the most important skills of a critical thinker is to reveal the implicit parts of an argument, because these are often the weak parts in reasoning.   11. Dancing in its essence is compatibilistic: it connects body and mind, fantasy and reality, inner experience and outer movement; elements which often are considered as opposites.  

Epistemic Compatibilism

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Epistemic Compatibilism

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