Flashcards: Epistemology

Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.

Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context.

The Duck test is a humorous term for a form of abductive reasoning.

Immanence refers to those philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence in which the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world.

Consensus reality is that which is generally agreed to be reality, based on a consensus view.

Social constructionism or the social construction of reality (also social concept) is a theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality.

The term "autopoiesis" (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-), meaning "self", and ποίησις (poiesis), meaning "creation, production") refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself.

In the philosophy of mathematics, constructivism asserts that it is necessary to find (or "construct") a mathematical object to prove that it exists.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference, i.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system containing basic arithmetic.

An object is a technical term in modern philosophy often used in contrast to the term subject.

Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor, and lex parsimoniae in Latin, which means law of parsimony) is a problem-solving principle attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher and theologian.

In many religions, philosophical, and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal and immortal essence of a living being.

Uncertainty is a situation which involves imperfect and/or unknown information.

A comprehensive world view or worldview is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point of view.

Certainty is perfect knowledge that has total security from error, or the mental state of being without doubt.

Critical thinking, also called critical analysis, is clear, rational thinking involving critique.

Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions.

In the sciences, an experimentum crucis (English: crucial experiment or critical experiment) is an experiment capable of decisively determining whether or not a particular hypothesis or theory is superior to all other hypotheses or theories whose acceptance is currently widespread in the scientific community.

Analogy (from Greek ἀναλογία, analogia, "proportion") is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another (the target), or a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process.

Experience is the knowledge or mastery of an event or subject gained through involvement in or exposure to it.

Falsifiability or refutability of a statement, hypothesis, or theory is the inherent possibility that it can be proved false.

Indeterminism is the concept that events (certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or not caused deterministically (cf. causality) by prior events.

A paradigm shift, as identified by American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline.

'Wisdom or sapience is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight.

In metaphysics, the problem of universals refers to the question of whether properties exist, and if so, what they are.

"A subject means subject, but an object means object.

In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning (from Latin), of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages.

Critical rationalism is an epistemological philosophy advanced by Karl Popper.

The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense, since it focuses on the alleged lack of justification for either:

Apperception (from the Latin ad-, "to, toward" and percipere, "to perceive, gain, secure, learn, or feel") is any of several aspects of perception and consciousness in such fields as psychology, philosophy and epistemology.

The dream argument is the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality.

Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.

Knowledge organization (KO) (or "organization of knowledge", "organization of information" or "information organization") is a branch of Library and Information Science (LIS) concerned with activities such as document description, indexing and classification performed in libraries, databases, archives, etc.

In epistemology, the burden of proof (Latin: onus probandi (shorthand for Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat)) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for their position.

The eureka effect (also known as the aha! moment or eureka moment) refers to the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.

Cartesian doubt is a form of methodological skepticism or scepticism associated with the writings and methodology of René Descartes (1596-1650).

Self-consciousness is an acute sense of self-awareness.

Moore's paradox concerns the apparent absurdity involved in asserting a first-person present-tense sentence such as, "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is raining" or "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining.

An information source is a source of information for somebody, i.

Epistemology (from Greek ἐπιστήμη – episteme-, "knowledge, science" + λόγος, "logos") or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.

Visual space is the perceptual space housing the visual world being experienced by an aware observer; it is the subjective counterpart of the space of physical objects before an observer's eyes.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to epistemology: Epistemology or theory of knowledge – branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge.