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with what we ought to do, with what is right and what wrong, what is virtuous and what is vicious, what is good and what bad, and why, The point of contact with Epistemology has been largely with the question, how do we know what is right, wrong, good etc. (if indeed we do know)?

Why is this sad? Because there are very important questions about practical knowledge which are not just questions of ethics (as was rightly recognised by the Stagira-born Athenian philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC). All of you, in your primary field of advanced study, will be concerned with practical as well as propositional knowledge – some in a more obvious way than others. For example, if your field is International Relations, you will be concerned with knowing what to do in a particular international situation. In many fields you will be concerned with policy formulation – some of you will become policy officers holding senior positions (some are in such positions already). You will be concerned with developing policies about what to do. And, like the humanities scholar who is arguing for a particular interpretation of a text, or the research natural scientist who is developing a theory of the transmission of light, you will be required to justify your conclusions. The requirement of justification is with you for life, and not just at essay and examination time. And it applies equally to those components of your work which involve the practical, as much as to those that involve the propositional.

So we will be concerned with practical epistemology and not just propositional (or theoretical) epistemology. But what of the third sort of knowledge, Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance”? We can’t do everything, so we won’t be spending more time on it beyond noting it for the sake of comprehensiveness. (It should also be noted, though the issue is contentious, that many people believe Russell’s knowledge by acquaintance actually dissolves into a cocktail of propositional and practical knowledge. As an interesting exercise, though an idle one for the purposes of this course, you might like to have a go at trying to do this.)

6. Do we REALLY Know ANYTHING?

The work of the university, not to mention many other institutions and individuals, presupposes in a very fundamental and obvious way that knowledge is humanly possible and attainable; in other words that it is possible to escape ignorance, mere opinion, lucky guesses, ineptitude and incompetence. Of course we also recognise – it is just a given part of the human condition – that some at least of our claims to knowledge, including many held with great conviction and a feeling of intense certainty, will turn out to be wrong, i.e. that (at least some of) our claims to knowledge will turn out to be wrong. To express the same point technically, we recognise that claims to knowledge are fallible. Moreover (a related point) we recognise that from time to time such claims will need to be corrected, that – for example – the methods we used to justify those claims were not as reliable as we had thought. Once again, to express the same point technically, we recognise that claims to knowledge are corrigible.

TASK 3: Give two examples of claims to knowledge in the past which have turned out to be wrong (i.e. which illustrate that claims to knowledge are fallible). And give two examples of claims to knowledge in the past that have had to be corrected (i.e. which illustrate that c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。