We quickly encounter an error with this initial account: among the true statements will be "Joseph Swan did invent the modern incandescent light bulb."
Nelson Goodman takes up this and related issues in his seminal Fact, Fiction, and Forecast; and David Lewis's influential articulation of possible world theory is popularly applied in efforts to solve it.
The interventionist account, developed by philosophers like James Woodward, solves the problem by defining counterfactuals in terms of specific physical interventions on causal systems.
[2] It resolves the initial problem by replacing abstract possible worlds with concrete physical probabilities, thereby avoiding logical contradictions within a physicalist framework.
[4] Physicalist and materialist approaches to the Gettier problem generally attempt to ground knowledge in causal or reliabilist terms, avoiding appeal to abstract justification.
[8] This perspective offers a Marxist materialist solution to the Gettier problem, emphasizing the social nature of knowledge over individual belief states.
Developed by philosophers like Alvin Goldman, reliabilism suggests that beliefs can be justified if they are produced by reliable cognitive processes, potentially avoiding the need for infinite justification.
[13] Some philosophers, like Nelson Goodman, have attempted to solve the problem by appealing to the notion of entrenchment or the natural kinds that form the basis of our inductive practices.
[15] This perspective aligns with observations of both human cognition and artificial intelligence systems, such as large language models, which demonstrate inductive-like capabilities without explicitly following inductive rules.
It suggests that the problem of induction might be reframed as a question of how general intelligence processes information and makes predictions based on past experiences.
The problem raises fundamental issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and was widely discussed after Locke included it in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
The landmark 2011 study by Held et al.[19] demonstrated that subjects were unable to immediately link objects known by touch to their visual appearance.
[21] In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without appealing to accepted assumptions.
[30] While philosophers agree that human beings talk and think about properties, they disagree on whether these universals exist in reality or merely in thought, speech and sight.
The brain essentially stops generating conscious thought during deep sleep; the ability to restore such a pattern remains a mystery to science and is a subject of current research (see also neurophilosophy).
Ned Block believes that there also exists a "Harder Problem of Consciousness", due to the possibility of different physical and functional neurological systems potentially having phenomenal overlap.
This raises the corollary question of whether it is possible to artificially create consciousness (usually in the context of computers or machines), and of how to tell a well-trained mimic from a sentient entity.
Important thought in this area includes most notably: John Searle's Chinese Room, Hubert Dreyfus' non-cognitivist critique, as well as Hilary Putnam's work on functionalism.
)[34] Hellie's argument is closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.
In Buddhism, the term anattā (Pali: 𑀅𑀦𑀢𑁆𑀢𑀸) or anātman (Sanskrit: अनात्मन्) is the doctrine of "non-self" – that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon.
[41][42] In contrast, dominant schools of Hinduism assert the existence of Ātman as pure awareness or witness-consciousness,[43][44][45] "reify[ing] consciousness as an eternal self.
Philosophers like Kant, Kierkegaard, William James, and Alvin Plantinga have debated stances towards the epistemic status of religious belief like reformed epistemology, fideism, and evidentialism.
Rightness and wrongness seem to be strange kinds of entities, and different from the usual properties of things in the world, such as wetness, redness, or solidity.
[53] In particular, he considers three alternative explanations of moral facts as: theological, (supernatural, the commands of God); non-natural (based on intuitions); or simply natural properties (such as leading to pleasure or to happiness).
"I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:—"Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere.
"—I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt.
This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them.
And the rather, because this observing gentleman further adds, that "having, upon the occasion of my book, proposed this to divers very ingenious men, he hardly ever met with one that at first gave the answer to it which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were convinced.
""If you want a comparison that will make you clearly grasp the difference between the perception, such as it is understood by that sect [the Sufis] and the perception as others understand it, imagine a person born blind, endowed however with a happy natural temperament, with a lively and firm intelligence, a sure memory, a straight sprite, who grew up from the time he was an infant in a city where he never stopped learning, by means of the senses he did dispose of, to know the inhabitants individually, the numerous species of beings, living as well as non-living, there, the streets and sidestreets, the houses, the steps, in such a manner as to be able to cross the city without a guide, and to recognize immediately those he met; the colors alone would not be known to him except by the names they bore, and by certain definitions that designated them.
Suppose that he had arrived at this point and suddenly, his eyes were opened, he recovered his view, and he crosses the entire city, making a tour of it.