Epistemology
“Epistemology” is the subject matter that deals with truth on a meta level: e.g., questions such as “What is truth?” and “What methods of reasoning are most likely to lead to true beliefs?” Epistemology can be considered as a child subject of Rationality. Many Arbital Discussion Practices have their roots in a thesis about epistemology—about what forms of reasoning are most likely to lead to true beliefs—and you may have ended up looking at this subject after trying to track down how a Discussion Practice is justified.
Children:
- Central examples
- The empiricist-theorist false dichotomy
- Intension vs. extension
“Red is a light with a wavelength of 700 nm” vs. “Look at this red apple, red car, and red cup.”
- Guarded definition
- Strained argument
- Perfect rolling sphere
If you don’t understand something, start by assuming it’s a perfect rolling sphere.
- Strictly factual question
A “question of strict fact” is one which is true or false about the material universe (and maybe some math) without introducing any issues of values, perspectives, etcetera.
- Fallacies
To call something a fallacy is to assert that you think people shouldn’t think like that.
- Psychologizing
It’s sometimes important to consider how other people might be led into error. But psychoanalyzing them is also dangerous! Arbital discussion norms say to explicitly note this as “psychologizing”.
- Conceivability
Parents:
I’m noticing a trend of pages with titles that start with a lower case letter. Is that on purpose? Should I add a line of code to always capitalize the first letter?
I think my intent was something like, “lowercase things are simple concepts, capitalized things are more complicated theories or propositions”.
Okay. I hope to do that with meta tags in the future, e.g. “stub”.