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Epistemology is the study of knowledge, acquisition thereof, and the justification of belief in a given claim.

3 votes

What is the precise definition of perfection

You can of course define "perfection"--consult a dictionary for an example. And it is easy enough to come up with an example of perfection: a "perfect square" has four sides of exactly equal length w …
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6 votes

Why don't color blind people have a different theory of physics?

Your numerous sources are wrong. Senses can be relied upon to a large extent (fortunately). Otherwise you would have been unable to write your question. Also, you can verify colors--that a flower i …
Rex Kerr's user avatar
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3 votes

Would repeated coin flips change the answer in the sleeping beauty problem?

As stated, this is not any different from the original problem: you've just added irrelevant stuff (that happens to be coin flips) as a premise in addition to the flip that actually determines whether …
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3 votes
Accepted

What could we call as mathematical intelligence?

Can it be? Of course! Counting falls under the sphere of skills and knowledge that we typically call "mathematics". A number of animals have rudimentary skills of this sort (even pigeons; this is a …
Rex Kerr's user avatar
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3 votes
Accepted

To what extent are the various methods of science rationalist rather than empirical?

You're not doing empirical science if the objects postulated by your models are beyond hard to measure or observe, even indirectly. Given all the layers of indirection between e.g. a chair and your a …
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1 vote

By what criteria would we recognise a theory of AI?

It is hard to say for sure, since we generally don't set goals for what an understanding looks like, but instead say in retrospect whether we've got a good enough one to satisfy us. (This may involve …
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2 votes

Do humans have skills we haven't discovered yet?

Brains are powerful information computation engines. Although they are specialized for certain tasks (vision, language, etc.), they also are flexible enough to take over the roles of other parts of t …
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3 votes

What is the purpose of learning?

The purpose of learning is, minimally, to survive. The world is so complex that we as individuals cannot be specified de novo to operate in it. Rather, even during development there are massive amou …
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1 vote

What epistemic principle allows us to be certain that highly improbable events will never oc...

One shouldn't be completely certain. That's irrational. If you pick out a tiny subset S of a universe of possibilities U then it simply isn't the case that elements in S certainly will never happen. …
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3 votes
Accepted

Should a skeptic consider anecdote as evidence?

You probably really ought to ask somewhere that deals with statistics. But the brief answer is as follows: yes, anecdotes can be informative. They can't be tested since there's only one of them, but …
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2 votes

Meaning is in the brain, where else?

If you are asking is the meaning in your head all in your head, then of course the answer is yes. (I'm going to leave aside the details of your formulation, because it is specific to a degree that go …
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2 votes

How does the Twin Earth illustration show that "meanings just aren't in the head?"

The conclusion is that Oscar's "water" is not Twin-Oscar's "water", but you can only know that by looking outside their heads, because they don't know it (at least not yet); yet you know that they mea …
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0 votes

If you're the smartest person on earth, how do you know if you're making logic errors?

It is a logic error to assume that people who are "smarter" always detect logic errors that those "less smart" will overlook. Therefore, you know the same way as always: you catch yourself, or someon …
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5 votes

How should science approach non-empirical phenomena?

So while I am not sufficiently familiar with the tenets of naturalized epistemology to be sure about what they say, the answer from those fields where naturalized epistemology is supposed to draw inspiration …
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2 votes

To which extent can we understand the brain?

We do not yet know whether the brain is "understandable" in the sense that we accept now. If the brain operates mostly on the basis of several dozen key principles that can be expressed mathematicall …
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