Rationality As The Effortful Way To Knowledge

Although we intuitively understand the meaning of such terms as 'reason' and 'rationality', these concepts are not unequivocal (e.g. this SEP article on bounded rationality lists at least 7 accounts of rationality and says that the list is not exhaustive). Moreover, these concepts often have a normative connotation where being rational and reasonable is considered good, valuable, …

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Self-Knowledge Through Justification

How do you know that you know something? When does a belief or opinion become knowledge? Often an intuitive response to this is - when I can offer justification, proof, for my belief. Justification seems to play a silent but crucial role in our understanding of what counts as knowledge. However, there is more.  When you justify …

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Be Ready to Drop Your Assumptions

This last weekend I was working on my first academic philosophy writing, an essay on Hume's views of the "self". He was a convinced empiricist and was sceptical about rationalism and its assumption that we can know things based on and thanks to our reason alone. Hume thought that the only way we can develop …

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Getting Our Assumptions Clear

Recently I had an interesting conversation over lunch with a few colleagues, all of us with many years of experience in the same industry. Initially it all went the usual way - we complained about the lack of demand for our products and how the clients didn't understand the real value of these products. The …

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