The general structure for the application of justification in Foundationalism is simple and straightforward. The central concept of this structure is the foundational aspect. To be a Foundationalist a person must base all of her own beliefs on a foundation. This foundation must be of non-inferential justified beliefs and there are various views in existence of what these foundational beliefs may be. These views vary in what makes these foundations justified in being foundational. These foundations are described as innate, infallible, irrefutable, indubitable, and shining unquestionably with the light of reason. For a person to be justified in believing a given proposition that said proposition must eventually be justified by these said foundational beliefs. This results in a uni-directional linear chain of reasoning that has a definite beginning and definite end. An epistemic chain is formed by this path of reasoning. The beginning of this chain would be the initial proposition that arises and the end would be a type of the aforementioned foundational belief. All propositions from the beginning until the end of this chain must be completely justified by one other justified belief.
This study examines human behavior in regards to ethical actions in a social setting. The purpose of this study was to create a greater understanding of how people’s actions are affected by the unethical actions of those around them. In this study, the focus is on unethical behavior in the form of dishonesty. The researchers wanted to answer questions such as, “If a person witnesses a peer being dishonest, will this person be more likely to be dishonest themselves?” or “If someone mentions being dishonest, will this increase or decrease the likelihood of an observer also being dishonest?”. These questions and a few others were answered through the results of this study. Before the study occurred, the researchers established their hypotheses based on several preexisting theories as well as a few previous studies.
The argument: Fodor makes the claim that commonsense belief/desire psychology (or folk psychology) “is worth saving.” i.e. Folk psychology does in fact exist and is a science that is useful for understanding how the mind operates.
The argument: If the particular theory of connectionism defined in Ramsey’s paper is found to correctly model how the human brain undergoes cognitive processes, then the theory of folk psychology will have to be rejected i.e. an eliminativist conclusion must be drawn against folk psychology. This will occur because of the ontologically radical differences in these two theories.
Jackson’s paper presents and clarifies a thought experiment that exemplifies the knowledge argument against physicalism. This paper also provides a rebuttal against some replies to the knowledge argument that intended to defend physicalism. Here physicalism is the belief that everything in existence, when broken down to its most basic properties, is physical. If physicalism is true, anything that can be known can be understood in terms of some set of fundamental physical properties. Jackson argues that there are non-physical properties that arise when analyzing the world that are not explained by physicalism. Therefor physicalism is not true.
V. J. Cook presents many ideas, theories, and research to help us better understand the way children begin to master their language.
