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Idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846 - 1924) dealt with the ethical question, Why should I be moral? Notice he does not mean, Why should I do what other people think is moral? He means this question: Having come to the conclusion that a particular form of conduct is the moral thing for me to do, why should I do it? And, according to Bradley, this question contains its own answer. To judge that something is the moral thing for me to do is to judge that it is what I should do. To demand a further justification (e.g. that it is in my interest, or it will make me respected by others, or it will make me happy etc. etc.) at best shows you do not understand what you have just judged in judging it to be the moral thing for you to do, or at worst that you are quite simply wicked. That something is the moral thing for me to do is a logically sufficient reason for doing it, and always overrides any reason whatsoever you may have for not doing it.

Can we defend inductive reasoning in a similar way? That something embodies what is accepted as a standard pattern of reasonably reliable inductive reasoning is just what we mean by a rational way of proceeding. It is a paradigm of rationality. The questioner is demanding to know why it is rational to be rational? And, so it is argued, this question contains its own answer.

Do you consider that the case of induction is really similar to what Bradley says about morality? Or is this approach, in the case of induction, just a copout?

WEEK 5 EPISTEMOLOGY AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
HUMR71-110 EPISTEMOLOGY AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

Week 5.

Reading:
Feldman, R., Epistemology Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall-Pearson, 2003.   pp. 157 – 166.

1. Sociological and Philosophical (Normative) Epistemology.

We can distinguish two different modes of enquiry into knowledge. One, known as the sociology of knowledge, is an inquiry into what people in fact know, how they came to know it, and what are the circumstances in which there are major expansions or transformations of knowledge. It is, in essence, a descriptive discipline. It attempts to answer these questions with descriptions of patterns and hypotheses about causal relationships.

It should be said at the outset that the name “sociology of knowledge” is in fact a misnomer. It should be called “sociology of belief”. The reason for this is that what it really studies is not knowledge but, what people in different places and times take to be knowledge, or regard (then and there) as knowledge. Much of it is of course simply wrong, and therefore not knowledge at all. The danger of the name “sociology of knowledge” is that it harbours an incoherent relativism that effectively disallows going behind claims to knowledge to see if they are in fact true. This is reflected in a trashy pop multiculturalism in which, for example, the tribal beliefs of primitive communities are described as their “knowledges” (an illiterate description as “knowledge” is a definite singular term and accordingly cannot have a grammatical plural). It also has the rhetorical effect of inhibiting criticism of knowledge claims which may be widespread within and/or typical of an alien culture, on the spurious ground that “attacking their knowledge is culturally insensitive”. Knowledge, unlike intellectual property, is not something that can be privatised. There is no such thing as their knowledge, any more than there 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。