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    Beginning philosophy with a definition cannot provide a b... — Carmelics
    Home/Skepticism
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Beginning philosophy with a definition cannot provide a basis for unanimity in knowledge.

    Skepticism
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Mathematical definitions can construct their objects in intuition, but philosophical definitions cannot.
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    • 2.What we derive from a definition depends on how we interpret it and what we read into it.
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    • 3.There are many possible interpretations of the same definition, no matter how simple.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Stipulative definitions in philosophy can bracket interpretive disputes by explicitly fixing meaning for a given inquiry.
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    • 2.Frege's logicist program demonstrated that rigorous definitions of number yielded intersubjective agreement among trained reasoners.
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    • 3.Unanimity in knowledge requires only shared inferential commitments from definitions, not metaphysical certainty about essences.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Spinoza's Ethics proceeds from definitions and axioms to theorems accepted by readers across centuries as validly derived, showing definitional unanimity is achievable.
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    • 2.The claim conflates disagreement about which definitions to adopt with disagreement about what follows once definitions are fixed—these are distinct epistemic problems.
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    Topics

    SkepticismTruth & Knowledge

    Key Terms

    knowledge(Distinguished from mere true belief, which may be the product of indoctrination and need not exercise deliberative capacities.)
    Justified true belief — true belief that has been arrived at through the exercise of deliberative capacities, including comparison of and deliberation among alternatives.

    Connections

    2 topics

    Philosophy of Language2 linkedModality & Possibility1 linked

    Related

    Frege's logicist program demonstrated that rigorous definitions of number yielde...Mathematical definitions can construct their objects in intuition, but philosoph...Spinoza's Ethics proceeds from definitions and axioms to theorems accepted by re...Stipulative definitions in philosophy can bracket interpretive disputes by expli...
    +4 moreShow less
    The claim conflates disagreement about which definitions to adopt with disagreem...There are many possible interpretations of the same definition, no matter how si...

    Similar

    Mathematical definitions can construct their objects in intuition, but...80%Traditional metaphysics as the study of pure being is impossible becau...79%There exist beliefs that pure philosophy cannot claim as true.77%A discipline free of unresolvable contradictions and meaninglessness i...77%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: august-rehberg
    View source passageHide passage
    After participating in the pantheism controversy, Rehberg made his mark in other philosophical controversies of his day. In the early 1790s he wrote several reviews for the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung of Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, which had been at the centre stage of the new debates surrounding Kant's critical philosophy.[27] Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie was a radical form of foundationalism, whose basic aim was to derive all the results of Kant's philosophy from a si
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Unanimity in knowledge requires only shared inferential commitments from definit...
    What we derive from a definition depends on how we interpret it and what we read...
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit