Some Remarks on Truth and Justification
The notion of truth is probably one of the most central notions in science and philosophy, if not in humanityโs engagement with the world in general, but it is also a somewhat problematic notion that is prone to confusion. And consequently, not all talk about โtruthโ is really about truth. A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper titled โRecognizing โTruthโ in Chinese Philosophyโ on the difficulty of recognizing concepts of โtruthโ and philosophical theories about truth in non-Western philosophy, focusing on ancient Chinese philosophy. I argued there and elsewhere that the ancient Chinese didnโt have theories of truth,...
Skepticism, Pragmatism, and Zebras
In 1970 Fred Dretske published a paper about a fairly technical issue in epistemology, In that paper he gave a โsilly exampleโ (his words) to illustrate some point about skepticism. Imagine that you take your kid to the zoo to see the zebras. Now, how do you know that the animals you are looking at are zebras? Dretske points out that most of us wouldnโt hesitate to say that those animals are zebras: We know what zebras look like, and, besides, this is the city zoo and the animals are in a pen clearly marked โZebras.โ Yet, somethingโs being a...