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The Epistemic Qualities of Foundational Knowledge

It is obvious enough that the mastery of foundational knowledge is a sine qua non to understanding and obtaining advanced knowledge in any given field or discipline. This not only makes foundational knowledge a highly efficient form of knowledge but also makes it indispensably worthy of pursuit. Though this much is intuitive, the significance of foundational knowledge can be better appreciated by an epistemic understanding of its qualitative features. It should first be mentioned that foundational knowledge is highly efficient in the sense that its fundamental principles within any given field are broadly interrelatable to not just other principles within the same field but often also to the fundamental principles of other fields. Naturally, foundational knowledge within a given field will have a great degree of interrelatability within the same field; it will not only be interrelatable to adjacent fundamental principles but in many cases also to intermediate principles within the s
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Knowledge of the Law as Analytic A Priori

The thorough understanding, tactical acquisition, and prudent application of legal knowledge to specific factual instances can be greatly enhanced through even a rudimentary epistemological understanding of the different classes or types of knowledge. Knowledge gained from interpreting legal rules—depending on their verbiage, scope, context, and implication—can be of different types. Much can be made of this topic but for purposes of this post we will limit ourselves to only considering how legal knowledge fits into one such type of knowledge: analytic a priori . Before we delve into any particular type of knowledge, it behooves us to first more precisely define the generic word knowledge within the context of legal interpretation. The classical philosophical definition of knowledge is “justified true belief” (JTB). Though the JTB framework can be used for the purposes of our discussion without any serious distortion in the classification of the type of knowledge we are concerned with
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The Indispensability of the Subjective-Objective Divide

I have a tendency to comprehend most philosophical topics in straightforward and practical ways. This is no different in the case of discerning subjective from objective matters, an issue that philosophers routinely concern themselves with. My basic stance on the subjective-objective divide is that if something is a matter of personal taste, opinion, or preference then it is subjective. As an example, consider the following subjective statement: “Pistachio ice cream tastes better than vanilla ice cream.” The above statement is representative of my personal opinion, based on my taste, and other people are free to, with equal legitimacy, adopt different positions regarding these two popular ice cream flavors. On the other hand, if something is a matter of fact (or dare I use an often-reviled term in informal philosophy circles, truth ) then it is objective (see the example of an objective statement, infra ). This is not to say that I necessarily have a simplistic way of comprehendi
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Elaborateness and Entropy as the Chief Ingredients of Complexity

I don’t think it’s debatable that while most people can accurately identify complexity, they can’t necessarily accurately describe either the phenomenon or the conditions of complexity. In the real world complexity can, of course, manifest in an infinite number of things. As such, there exist in the real world infinite varieties of complexities, the specific elucidation of which requires intimate knowledge of the thing with respect to which the specific sort and stripe of complexity at-hand is an emergent property. For purposes of this blog, we will examine the objective conception of complexity in a most general manner. As it is, a thorough understanding of complexity in general is a prerequisite for understanding a particular or specific form of complexity. My personal definition of complexity is that it is the entropy that accompanies an increasing degree of elaboration. The condition of numerous parts, pieces, elements, variables etc. constituting something is a sine qua non for
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Deconstructing the Subjective Conception of Complexity

Questions such as what is complexity and what contributes to the complexity of something are of interest to philosophers in general and to epistemologists in particular. I came across a fascinating array of answers to questions about the nature and function of complexity at a recent meeting of my philosophy discussion group. The subject was approached from several different angles and many of the propositions shared during the collaborative inquiry can be reconciled and synthesized. Also shared were a number of fascinating propositions that despite being germane and, to a lesser or greater degree, meritorious cannot be reconciled with those that were the most relevant to the topic because they were based on sufficiently different premises. Specifically, the irreconcilable propositions concerned themselves primarily with either the relativity, or the subjective perceptions, of complexity.   Again, though I’m not particularly amendable to this position for reasons I will touch upon lat
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An Inadvertent Lesson in Applied Epistemology Through an Exposition of Judicial Procedure

I recently re-watched a fascinating interview of a fascinating lawyer, James Sexton, on Soft White Underbelly’s YouTube channel. Sexton’s knack for telling a story wrapped around a legal matter immediately struck me upon my first viewing some months back. The entire interview is a tour de force and I highly recommend viewing it if something like that tickles your fancy (accessible via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5z8-9Op2nM&list=LL&t=1155 ). The portion of the interview, the philosophical richness of which I only realized upon a subsequent viewing, where Sexton described judicial procedure to the interviewer made me actively ponder something I intuitively practice but did not hitherto that moment dedicated conscious thought to: the management of costs incurred in shortening one’s inductive leap. In Sexton’s words: “What makes being a… lawyer interesting is that… a lot of what a court has to do is disregard what happened… because the truth is at the bottom of
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An Epistemological Appraisal of Hypotheses and Theories

In common parlance the terms hypothesis and theory are used interchangeably. There is nothing improper about this in everyday usage. However if one is to become philosophically pedantic about such matters, then these terms and their derivatives signify concepts and activities with vastly different epistemic values. Cursory attempts to disambiguate and epistemologically rank these distinct constructs will invariably result in further confusion. The avoidance of such confusion necessitates a thoughtful consideration of the nature of these abstractions and the purpose of their underpinning functions. Consistent with my preferred analytic approach, a semantic inquiry will precede a philosophical one. The Webster’s All-In-One Dictionary & Thesaurus (Second Edition) provides the following definitions for these abstractions: Hypothesis : An assumption made especially in order to test its logical or empirical consequences. Theory : A plausible or scientifically acceptable general p
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