Wednesday, February 11, 2009

well that section will need some explaining in class

Foundationalism- the belief in basing our body of knowledge on a foundation which is a priori true. All our epistemic knowledge is based on other knowledge to know it is true, this other knowledge is our foundation which we just know is true. It is not based on each other,, thus not circular, it is just the base. The problem here is that we end up with not really having good reason for making these base claims of knowledge.
Pure Proceduralism- The rules will bring about the conclusion that is correct thus if we know the rules and follow them to their conclusion then we will know the truth. The problem is that the set of rules are socially established and gain authority from being accepted by the community rather than having some connection to reality.
For Wittgenstien he tries to explain pure proceduralism with his analogy of a game. In the end we are basing our inquiry on a set of rules chosen through agreement because we like them, nothing more. Kuhn I think gets stuck in a problem of arguing that the only problems that can be solved are the ones that we have set for yourselves within the guidelines of the method we have created. If I understand this at a level that is even close to accurately then I think what is being argued here is that we have found methods which we claim give us truth and try to show that by setting problems which can be solved through the method and then accepting this as proof. So here our justification is that we can apply what we have come to claim as knowledge within a field, thus counting it as true. But this does not really work because the knowledge is not really about reality just about the system we have created. Thus knowledge here is not knowledge it is just the agreed upon correct use of a theory within a system. I don't know if that is actually close to right at all.

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