Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.730

   It had not been made clear whether the ‘method of verification’ was intended to be neutral between people employing the sentences in question, and so provide a standard meaning for these sentences, or whether such a method could provide an idiosyncratic meaning for one individual’s use of the sentence, the method of verification being peculiar to that person. In his discussion of mental experiences, Ayer had implicitly taken the second route, and so sentences attributing such experiences to himself were given a ‘mentalistic’ analysis, and those attributing experiences to others were given a be…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/alfred-jules-ayer.md

2. 02 · blog0.729

   This has, however, been attempted by Schaffer (2008), Kölbel (2011: 68–70), and Stokke (2013). [ 15 ] Another cognitive account is offered by Pagin (2011, 2020). The account is summarized by the phrase: “an assertion is an utterance that is prima facie informative”. For an utterance to be informative is for it to be made in part “because it is true”. What this amounts to is different, but complementary, for speaker and hearer. For the speaker, part of the reason for using a particular sentence is that it is true (in context); that is, the speaker believes, with a sufficient strength, that the …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/assertion.md

3. 03 · blog0.717

   They decide to check with the airline agent. ( Ibid ., 58) Once again, contextualists claim that regarding the truth conditions of sentences using ‘know’ as context-dependent makes best sense of the flexibility in our “knowledge”-attributing behaviour. While, as we have seen, different specific versions of EC are possible, contextualists tend to agree that, in everyday cases, such as that just described, the increased practical importance of the subjects’ “getting it right” tends to raise the standards for the truth of a sentence of the form ‘ S knows that p ’. (Keep in mind, though, a point s…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/epistemic-contextualism.md

4. 04 · blog0.713

   (9) Smith: “Mary is a philosopher.” Jones: “Smith said that Mary is a philosopher.” (10) Smith: “I am hungry.” Jones: “Smith said that I am hungry.” Jones disquotes Smith in both of these cases: that is, Jones utters a says-that ascription whose embedded clause contains the very sentence that Smith utters. But Jones’s says-ascription in (9) is true (in Jones’s context), whereas Jones’s says-ascriptions in (10) is false (in Jones’s context). So, disquotation can fail when the subject of the ascription utters a context-sensitive sentence. Thus, Cappelen and Lepore propose roughly the following t…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/indexicals.md

5. 05 · blog0.712

   A variant of psychologism avoids this objection by claiming that motivating reasons are “psychological facts”—that is, facts about the agent’s mental states. For instance, on this view, Jo’s reason for running is the (psychological) fact that she believes that she’s late. This position appears to meet Dancy’s constraint, at least formally: psychological facts are facts. But the view is unsatisfactory because, although we are occasionally motivated by facts about our psychology—as when someone decides to see his doctor because he is convinced he’s being pursued by the Security Services (Hyman 1…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/reasons-for-action-justification-motivation-explanation.md

6. 06 · _intake0.712

   That is what differentiates Dr. Kruse—he is the most curious person I know — and in fact the answers that he has found weave a truth that is both discomforting and yet provides enormous hope. No matter how inconvenient that truth may be, we can’t solve our problems and improve our situations without it, and half-truths can be dangerous when they lead to dogmatism (and “whole lies” – as Dr. Kruse says.) If he hears something he doesn’t know about he seems to note it and actually later researches it – always asking “why” and trying to understand the heart of the matter. He has a prodigious (I su…

   _intake/kruse-blog-corpus/articles/physician-guest-blog-2-the-invisible-sun-and-purple-light.md

7. 07 · blog0.709

   Take assertion, which, especially amongst philosophers, remains the archetypical speech act (Pagin & Marsili 2021). Suppose that Wilma says to Betty, “Fred snores”, and as a consequence it becomes common ground between Wilma and Betty that Fred snores. How can that be? In outline, a mentalist explanation might go as follows. By saying that Fred snores, Wilma expresses the belief that Fred snores and that she intends Betty to adopt that belief, too. Betty trusts Wilma to be truthful and therefore comes to believe that Fred snores. All this is common ground between Wilma and Betty, and therefore…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/common-ground-in-pragmatics.md

8. 08 · yt0.709

   [MUSIC PLAYING] >> I'm Jonathan Young. I'm a psychologist and founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archive. My area of study is the mythic imagination, both in ancient cultures and contemporary times. I had been studying the connection between psychological experience and the mythological texts for some time. My teacher was Rollo May, who is well known in this area. And a friend was bringing Joseph Campbell to Santa Barbara, where I lived, to present workshops and asked me to help. And once I got into conversation with Joseph Campbell, it changed everything. Joseph Campbell gave me a …

   yt/9PL3M_t7Drs-the-hero-s-journey-of-self-discovery/transcript.txt

9. 09 · blog0.708

   Whereas, if we take John and Mary’s stricter standard to be too demanding—if their denial of “knowledge” to Smith is false—then, not only must we reject the feeling that what they are saying is in some sense correct, but it is “hard to see how Mary and John should describe their situation”: Certainly they are being prudent in refusing to rely on the itinerary. They have a very important meeting in Chicago. Yet if Smith knows on the basis of the itinerary that the flight stops in Chicago, what should they have said? ‘Okay, Smith knows that the flight stops in Chicago, but still, we need to chec…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/epistemic-contextualism.md

10. 10 · blog0.708

    Although, once again, when the relevant skeptical possibilities are not raised, those experiences qualify as evidence sufficient for truthful ascriptions of “knowledge” that I have hands. Finally, some theorists have suggested that the context-sensitivity of sentences involving ‘know’ is owing to a more general context-sensitivity in certain explanatory relations and claims. For example, Steven Rieber (1998) has proposed that, in general, S knows that P iff “ the fact that P explains why S believes that P ” (1998, 194). According to Rieber, however, explanations are always at least implicitly …

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/epistemic-contextualism.md