Psychology 2800E Lecture Notes - Determinism, Stomach Cancer, Shark Attack
3 Apr 2013
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Charles peirce (1877) asked this question in his essay the fixation of belief which talked about how we come to know things. One method of knowing": authority (i. e. , as children as believe most of the things our parents tell us, as students we accept the textbooks that our teachers prescribe us). Although authorities can often be right, they can also be wrong: logical discourse (the a priori method) Example, use of deductive logic (syllogisms); we begin with general premises (believed, a priori, to be true). Then we deduce specific conclusions leading us to new knowledge through the syllogistic reasoning process. Problem #1: the premises might not be true. If the premises are false, then the conclusion will not be true. P1: socrates was a dog p2: dogs are not human c: socrates was not human. We can see that the syllogism is not true, and therefore the conclusion is not true.
