n
Alternative form of apriorism [(philosophy) The idea that some knowledge of the physical world can be derived logically from general principles.]
n
(philosophy) In Hegelianism, the spiritual principle of which the reality is the expression.
n
(philosophy) Belief in a metaphysical absolute; belief in Absolute.
n
(philosophy) The belief that actuality and existence are co‐extensive: i.e., that only actual things exist, and merely possible things do not.
n
(philosophy) The belief that spiritual and religious metaphysics is a delusion and pursuing it impedes the advancement of knowledge.
n
(philosophy) The idea that some knowledge of the physical world can be derived logically from general principles.
n
(psychology) The belief that anything that exists must have been made by a conscious entity, such as God or a human being
n
(philosophy) An unfalsifiable belief underpinning a worldview.
v
(philosophy, phenomenology) In the philosophical system of Edmund Husserl and his followers, to set aside metaphysical theories and existential questions concerning what is real in order to focus philosophical attention simply on the actual content of experience.
n
(philosophy) The philosophical idea proposed by Descartes that the world outside the self is subject to uncertainty.
n
(philosophy) Belief in a first cause.
n
(philosophy) One who believes in a first cause.
n
(public policy) The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
n
(philosophy) The view that ethical sentences express propositions and are therefore capable of being true or false.
n
(philosophy) A form of reasoning where the truth or falsehood of a belief is defined by its coherence with the rest of the believer's knowledge and experiences.
n
(philosophy) A philosophy of coincidents
n
(philosophy) A theory of reality based on all the possible combinations of simple objects
n
(philosophy) The analysis of concepts, including, for a given concept, the search for its definition.
n
(philosophy) A theory, intermediate between realism and nominalism, that the mind has the power of forming for itself general conceptions of individual or single objects; the doctrine that universals have an existence in the mind apart from any concrete embodiment.
n
(philosophy) The belief that intentionally supposing that a proposition is true is a good reason to believe that proposition in the absence of evidence of its falsehood.
n
(philosophy) The theory that the grounding conditions for social facts are conjunctive
n
(philosophy, psychology) A psychological epistemology which argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning from their experiences.
n
(philosophy) Any of a group of doctrines that stress the importance of context
n
(philosophy) An epistemological theory suggesting that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form "S knows that p rather than q", in contrast to the traditional view whereby knowledge attributions have a binary structure of the form "S knows that p".
n
(uncountable, philosophy) The doctrine that logical or mathematical principles are simply the expression of conventions.
n
(physics) Belief in the Copenhagen interpretation.
n
(philosophy) The philosophical standpoint, rejected by proponents of speculative realism, that we cannot directly access thinking and being, but only the correlation between them.
n
(philosophy) The proposition that scientific theories, and any other claims to knowledge, can and should be rationally criticized, and, if they have empirical content, can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them.
n
The belief that all knowledge consists of data and that scientific theories should only be the simplest systematizations of that data.
n
(philosophy, metaphilosophy) The school of thought that for a theory to be properly explained it is necessary that all concepts used by the theory be well-defined.
n
(philosophy) The idea that people can only identify what is good by deriving it from human nature; opposed to inclinationism.
n
(philosophy) A doctrine that emphasizes empiricism and positivism; a philosophical focus on material and worldly matters.
adj
(philosophy) Regarding utterances as primarily descriptive rather than as rigidly specifying a particular thing or kind of thing.
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that all actions are determined by the current state and immutable laws of the universe, with no possibility of choice.
n
(philosophy) The concept of reality in which material things are in the constant process of change brought about by the tension between conflicting or interacting forces, elements, or ideas.
n
(philosophy) A school of thought that rejects the existence of sense data in certain cases, believing that a hallucination differs from a veridical experience in that the latter is the experience of an actual external entity.
n
(economics) Synonym of economic determinism
adj
Relating to empiriocriticism.
n
(philosophy) A philosophy based on knowledge and experience without any metaphysics
n
(philosophy) A specific form of rationality focusing on coming to accurate beliefs about the world based on available evidence.
n
(philosophy) The view that objects have properties that are essential to them.
n
(epistemology) The belief that certain disagreements (even about facts) ultimately stem from differing values, and therefore cannot be resolved as factual disagreements.
n
(philosophy) The theory that the justification of a belief depends solely on the evidence for it.
n
(philosophy, countable) The philosophical views of a particular thinker associated with the existentialist movement.
n
(philosophy) One who exists.
n
(philosophy) A philosophical system where beliefs are justified by their usefulness in explaining.
n
(philosophy, ethics) The doctrine that moral statements such as "this is wrong" express a moral evaluation rather than a statement of fact
n
(philosophy) The belief in extensionality.
n
The belief that only things that can be observed by senses are real.
n
(philosophy of science) The view that scientific facts about the world are not absolute, but are relative to historical eras and to evolving scientific theories.
adj
(epistemology) The demarcation criterion between scientific and non-scientific statements proposed by Karl Popper. In order to be ranked as scientific, statements or systems of statements must be contradicted by an intersubjective singular existential statement, also called a basic statement, and not be contradicted by another, that is, they must also be logically possible.
n
(epistemology) A scientific philosophy based on the requirement that hypotheses must be falsifiable in order to be scientific; if a claim is not able to be refuted it is not a scientific claim.
n
(metaphysics, philosophy) The doctrine that all events are subject to fate or inevitable necessity, or determined in advance in such a way that human beings cannot alter them.
n
(theology, philosophy, sometimes capitalized) An initial cause from which all other causes and effects follow.
n
(philosophy) The initial agent that is the cause of all things; the prime mover.
n
(philosophy) A theory of justification that combines elements from the two rival theories addressing infinite regress: foundationalism and coherentism.
n
(philosophy) A case where an individual has a justified true belief of something but does not know it to be true, i.e. one that illustrates the Gettier problem.
n
(philosophy) The intuitive judgment that the individual in a Gettier case does not know the thing of which he/she has a justified true belief.
n
(philosophy) The epistemological problem that a description of knowledge as "justified true belief" is not adequate: there are counterexamples where an individual has justified true belief of something and yet does not know it to be true.
adj
(philosophy) Of a belief: falling short of actual knowledge in the way illustrated by the Gettier problem.
n
(philosophy) Plato's metaprinciple of proper systemic function between principles; the fundamental Platonic form which enables knowledge and metacognition, and from which other concepts such as truth, justice and virtue derive meaning.
n
(epistemology) A tenet asserting that all statements are exclusively either "analytic a priori" (universally true by mere definition) or "synthetic a posteriori" (unknowable without exact experience).
n
(philosophy) An approach to philosophical enquiry, which asserts that direct and immediate knowledge can only be had of ideas or mental pictures.
n
(philosophy) A relation between incomplete and complete objects which seems to be very close to what is often called “instantiation”, i.e., a relation between universals and particulars. Incomplete objects are “implected” in complete ones.
n
(philosophy) The idea that people can innately identify what is good; opposed to derivationism.
n
(philosophy) A philosophy of indexicality
n
(philosophy) The doctrine of absolute identity, i.e. that to be in thought and to exist are one and the same thing.
n
(logic) The doctrine that only individual things are real.
n
The scientific method of developing theories and systems by generalising from meticulously analysed data (i.e., by induction).
n
(epistemology) The theory that belief in a true proposition counts as knowledge only if the proposition is necessarily entailed by the evidence or reasoning that supports this belief.
n
(philosophy) The view that knowledge may be justified by an infinitely long chain of reasoning.
n
(philosophy) The view that the mind is born with certain ideas or knowledge, as opposed to the idea of the "blank slate" or tabula rasa.
n
(philosophy) A specific form of rationality focusing on the most efficient or cost-effective means to achieve a specific end, but not in itself reflecting on the value of that end.
n
(philosophy) In the philosophy of science, the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments whose worth is measured not by whether the concepts and theories are true or false (or correctly depict reality), but how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena.
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that knowledge is derived from pure reason.
n
The doctrine that a particular mental phenomenon, such as motivation or justification, has an internal rather than external basis
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that the perception or recognition of primary truth is intuitive, or direct and immediate.
n
(philosophy) A philosophy of invariants, holding that knowledge is not context-sensitive.
n
(philosophy) An approach that regards the justification of a claim as primary, while the claim itself is secondary; thus, criticism consists of trying to show that a claim cannot be reduced to the authority or criteria that it appeals to.
n
(philosophy) A 20th-century school of philosophy which held that all knowledge is based on logical inferences from empirical observations.
n
(philosophy) The view that the observable world is material with certain elements of mathematics needed to describe and explain it.
n
One who studies metempiricism.
n
(philosophy, metaphysics, theology) An extreme form of determinism that holds that all phenomena, including the will, are subject to immutable rules of cause and effect; necessitarianism.
n
(philosophy) That which is perceived in the noesis/noema duality
n
(philosophy) A doctrine that universals do not have an existence except as names for classes of concrete objects.
n
(logic, metaphysics) The theory that some things do not exist, and it is possible to quantify over non-existent things using the particular or existential quantifier.
n
(ethics) The metaethical view that (i) ethical sentences express propositions; (ii) some such propositions are true; (iii) those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion; and (iv) these moral features of the world are not reducible to any set of non-moral features.
n
(philosophy) Any of several doctrines that holds that all of reality is objective and exists outside of the mind.
n
(philosophy, uncountable) A metaphysical doctrine that holds that all events are occasioned (caused) by God.
adj
Of or relating to the doctrine of occasionalism.
n
(philosophy) A form of agential realism that is at once an epistemology (theory of knowing), an ontology (theory of being), and an ethics.
n
A philosophy of existence that emphasizes the harmonious coexistence of nonuniform entities.
n
(philosophy) The unique human position in Spinozan philosophy, where humans are simultaneously (i) 'finite modalities' as 'contingent' beings and (ii) because of human potential through the development and maturation of the intellect, a part of the 'infinite modalites' and hence a metaphysical part of the 'real'.
n
(philosophy) The philosophy that reality is based on our sense of perception
n
(philosophy) The theory that material objects have distinct temporal parts throughout their existence, rather than being persistent individuals that move through time.
n
(philosophy) A theory of epistemology denoting a rejection of an assumed or given authority for a specific action or belief, but arguing, in dialectical fashion, for a rationale for action or belief.
n
A worldview based on things that might be possible rather than the actual facts.
n
(philosophy, logic) A philosophical position that definitions of concepts can only use other concepts that don't depend on the concept being defined.
n
(philosophy) Gottfried Leibniz's philosophical theory of causation, according to which every substance affects only itself, but all the substances in the world (both bodies and minds) nevertheless seem to interact with each other causally because they have been programmed in advance by God to harmonize with each other.
n
(philosophy) The view that neither the future nor the past exist (events and entities that are wholly past or wholly future do not exist at all).
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that, in the absence of certainty, probability is the best criterion.
n
(philosophy) A branch of philosophy that considers existence to be a constant evaluation of problems
n
(philosophy) The idea that individuals form an idea of the external world by projecting their own internal beliefs onto it.
n
A theory in ethics, lying between consequentialism and deontology, holding that it is never right to go against a principle unless there is a proportionate reason to justify doing so.
n
(semantics) The view all intentionality is propositional; the belief that there can be no meaning without a proposition.
n
(philosophy) A theory of knowledge championed by William James which contested that the relations between objects are as real as the objects themselves and values experience as a way of knowing.
n
(philosophy, logic) the formal grounds for something; the essential attributes of matter as they appear in the mind or in a definition.
n
(philosophy) The theory that knowledge may be derived by deductions from a priori concepts (such as axioms, postulates or earlier deductions).
n
(preceded with the) An online community of individuals, centered around the forum LessWrong and the blog Slate Star Codex, who discuss philosophy, psychology, and futurism through the lens of Bayesianism and rationality.
n
(philosophy) A doctrine that universals are real—they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them.
n
(philosophy, phenomenology) A philosophical procedure intended to reveal the objects of consciousness as pure phenomena. (See phenomenological reduction.)
n
(philosophy) A philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. In a reductionist framework, the phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called "epiphenomena".
n
(epistemology) A scientific philosophy based on the requirement that hypotheses must be falsifiable in order to be scientific; if a claim is not able to be refuted it is not a scientific claim.
n
(philosophy) A form of concretism stating that (i) every object is a body and (ii) no object is a state or relation, or property.
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that relations between things have a real existence.
n
(uncountable, philosophy) The theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.
n
(epistemology) Any of a group of related doctrines holding that knowledge or justified belief must be the result of a reliable process
n
(philosophy) The belief that the conscious perception of the world is actually an internal replica of the world in the mind of the beholder.
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that thoughts are representations of real, external objects
n
(philosophy) The paradoxical situation whereby, if one accepts the cognitivist theory that every action is preceded by a thought, each thought must also be preceded by another thought, and so thinking could apparently never begin.
n
The philosophical belief that nothing exists or occurs that does not have a scientific explanation (even if that scientific explanation is not yet known).
n
(philosophy) A theory of philosophy that all knowledge is ultimately derived from the senses.
n
(epistemology) The doctrine that all knowledge not only originates in sensation, but are transformed sensations, copies or relics of sensations; sensationalism.
n
(epistemology) In popperian epistemology, a singular existential statement is a statement that contains the equivalent of an existential quantifier and one or more proper names.
n
(philosophy) The idea that the self is all that exists or that can be proven to exist.
n
(philosophy) A type of universal that defines a particular sort of object
n
(logic) The doctrine of the elementary requisites of mere thought.
n
(metaphysics) The doctrine that reality is created or shaped by the mind.
n
(philosophy) In Hegelian philosophy, the situation where a thesis and antithesis interact.
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that substantial reality is the basis of all phenomena
n
(philosophy) The doctrine that space and time have an existence independent of physical things.
n
(philosophy) Theory in medieval Europe to explain then-modern events from an Aristotelian context.
n
(philosophy) A school of philosophy first proposed by Immanuel Kant. It can be juxtaposed with transcendental realism in that it views things in terms of how they appear to the actor rather than how they actually are.
n
(philosophy) A school of philosophy that can be juxtaposed with transcendental idealism in that it views things in terms of how they actually are rather than how they appear to the actor.
n
(philosophy) The principle, especially in 20th-century empiricism, that a statement has meaning if, and only if, either it can be verified by means of empirical observations or it is logically true by definition.
n
(philosophy) Belief in the verification principle.
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