What is Human Nature?: How Language Makes Human Life Distinctive
If human nature is not different from the rest of the nature, then why is human existence so different? Language. Language allows humans to organize efforts that require social cooperation, book writing, and the passage of history from generation to...
What is Real?: Arguments Against Metaphysical Speculation
Some philosophers object to the idea that there is a spiritual reality different from the physical world as mere metaphysical speculation. As one group contends anything we cannot perceive with our senses or prove scientically should not be conside...
What is Real?: Anti-realists' Thesis
Anti-realists contend that we shape the external world into the reality we know through our conceptual systems, language, and thought processes. Things are as we name them, parts and wholes as we define them. This applies to all reality in the unive...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Conflict Between Consensus Theories of Truth and Popper's Scientific Realism
Agreement in a community of scientists can also be taken as a measure of truth, a human-centered concept that Arthur Fine calls "consensus theories of truth." In looking at the shift from Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity to Albert Einstein's, Ka...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Coherence Theory of Truth, The
A second general theory of truth that arises as part of idealism holds that truth comes from the way our various beliefs, thoughts and judgments cohere with each other. Coherence theory can be accused of leaving out external reality, but it focuses ...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Conceptual Relativism
Conceptual relativism in many ways parallels the coherence theory of truth. The idea is that any representation of reality will always be influenced by the information available. There undoubtedly will be opposing points of view that do not reconcil...
Does the Mind Shape the World?: Does the Mind Shape the World?
Immanuel Kant, born in 1724 sought to resolve a controversy that had been brewing for over a century. Rationalists argued that knowledge is based on reasoning inside our minds. Empirists disagreed saying that all knowledge must come from the senses....
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Pragmatism Theory of Truth, The
A third theory of truth known as pragmatism considers success to be the main marker of truth. In contrast with intellectualists who view truth as a stagnant property, pragmatists test the performance of a belief by seeing if it can sustain an indust...
Pragmatism, Language and Reality
Philosopher Richard Rorty explores the link between language and reality, suggesting that no one language is any closer to reality than any other. Whether it's the language of poetry, the language of physics, the language of theology or any other la...
Is There One Truth?
Philosopher Richard Rorty argues that the notion of there being one truth is "...a bad left-over of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology." Professor Rorty says that there are "lots of descriptions of the universe," and states that "..in the phys...