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Philosophical or normative epistemology is concerned with when people ought to make a claim to know something, or under what conditions they are justified in claiming to know something, as opposed to descriptive epistemology which is concerned with when people in fact make a claim to know something, or under what conditions or in what circumstances they claim to be justified in knowing something.

Both sorts of enquiries, provided terminology is used accurately, are perfectly legitimate and very useful in relation to their, again perfectly legitimate, respective purposes. The danger lies in confusing them. And when modes of enquiry are confused, then – inevitably – no matter how long and comprehensive the enquiry, the output will be at least as confused. The moral? The same advice that your mother used to give you – be careful that you know what you are doing.

Now that we’ve got all that, it is time to muddy the waters! There are some epistemologists who, sensing what they take to be the inevitability of scepticism when one pushes really hard and long on the questions of normative epistemology (e.g. Under what conditions is a claim to know something justified?), believe that the discipline of normative epistemology should be abandoned, leaving only questions of descriptive epistemology. Notice they are careful not to say (as they are often wrongly misunderstood as saying) that descriptive epistemology answers the questions of normative epistemology. On the contrary, they are saying that their despair with normative epistemology does not extend to descriptive epistemology.

See: Feldman, op.cit. , pp. 166 – 175.

This is not all that different from the way in which some moral philosophers have responded to a comparable drift (inevitable, as they see it, though as in epistemology this is highly controversial) to moral scepticism. They push long and hard on such questions as what makes an action right or wrong, good or bad, and find that all the answers that people have come up with lead to (as they see it) absurd or sceptical consequences. So they despair of the entire enterprise, noting however that this still leaves the discipline of descriptive ethics unscathed.

2. Reason, Rhetoric, and Sophistry.

We often hear of things being condemned as rhetoric, as if rhetoric were in some way something improper. This is a common mistake. Rhetoric was once a major discipline of study, a standard offering in any liberal arts degree. Over two millennia ago, Aristotle recognised that there were two elements involved in using reasoning to persuade someone of something – whether in conversation, a major address or, in recent times, a newspaper column or a thesis for examiners; indeed anywhere persuading is the objective. One is logic, the other is rhetoric. The finest persuasive efforts, i.e. the ones that most deserve to be effective, involve sound logic and high quality rhetoric. But although these two elements coalesce in the text of the speech or written piece, they are very different in character. For Aristotle, logic is a science and rhetoric is an art. If we think of some of the greatest speeches we have heard or read, such as some of those of Martin Luther King Jr., or Abraham Lincoln, or Oliver Wendell Holmes we find that it is not just the logic of the argument that they were presenting, but the manner in which it was presented, that was important. Even a fictional speech can be a source of gr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。