BCS Written Philosophy flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes's foundational claim that the very act of doubting proves the existence of a thinking self, providing an indubitable starting point for knowledge.

Platonic Forms

Eternal, perfect, immaterial paradigms existing separately from sensible things; particular objects are imperfect copies participating in them, grounding objective knowledge and value.

Aristotelian four causes

Material (what it is made of), formal (its essence or structure), efficient (what produces it), and final (its purpose or end) explanations of a thing.

Hume's is-ought gap

The claim that descriptive statements about what is the case cannot by themselves logically entail prescriptive statements about what ought to be, so moral conclusions need independent justification.

Kant's synthetic a priori

Judgments that are informative about the world yet independent of experience, such as arithmetic and causal principles, made possible by the mind's structuring categories.

Ontological pluralism

The view that there are multiple legitimate ways of being or multiple fundamental categories of existence, rather than one uniform sense in which things exist.

Endurantism vs perdurantism

Endurantism holds objects are wholly present at each moment; perdurantism holds they persist by having distinct temporal parts at different times.

Possible worlds

Maximal consistent ways things could have been; used to analyze modality: necessary truths hold in all worlds, possible truths in at least one.

Bundle theory

The view that an object is nothing over and above a bundle of properties or tropes, denying any underlying substratum that bears them.

Gettier problem

Cases where a person has justified true belief that is true only by luck, showing that justification, truth, and belief are jointly insufficient for knowledge.

Reliabilism

An externalist theory holding that a belief is justified if produced by a cognitive process that reliably yields true beliefs, regardless of the subject's access to reasons.

Foundationalism

The view that justified beliefs rest on a base of non-inferentially justified basic beliefs, avoiding infinite regress or circularity in the chain of justification.

Epistemic closure

The principle that if one knows a proposition and knows it entails another, one can thereby know the entailed proposition; used in skeptical arguments and responses.

Modus tollens

A valid argument form: if P then Q; not Q; therefore not P. It denies the consequent to infer the denial of the antecedent.

Affirming the consequent

A formal fallacy: if P then Q; Q; therefore P. The truth of the consequent does not establish the truth of the antecedent.

Soundness

A property of arguments that are both valid and have all true premises; soundness guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

Square of opposition

A diagram relating categorical propositions: A and O are contradictories, E and I contradictories, A and E contraries, I and O subcontraries, with subalternation from universals to particulars.

Categorical imperative

Kant's supreme moral principle: act only on maxims that could be willed as universal laws, and treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.

Utilitarianism

A consequentialist theory holding that the right action maximizes overall well-being or utility, impartially considering all affected parties.

Virtue ethics

An approach focusing on character traits and flourishing rather than rules or consequences; Aristotle locates virtue in a mean guided by practical wisdom.

Doctrine of double effect

The principle that an action with both good and bad foreseen effects may be permissible if the bad effect is unintended and not a means to the good.

Rawls's original position

A hypothetical choice situation behind a veil of ignorance, where impartial principles of justice are selected without knowledge of one's social position or talents.

Negative liberty

Freedom as the absence of interference or coercion by others, contrasted with positive liberty as self-mastery or effective capacity to act.

Mill's harm principle

The view that the only legitimate ground for coercing an adult against their will is to prevent harm to others, not to enforce their own good.

General will

Rousseau's concept of the collective will aimed at the common good, distinct from the sum of private wills, and the basis of legitimate popular sovereignty.

Functionalism

A theory of mind holding that mental states are defined by their causal roles or functional relations among inputs, outputs, and other states, not by underlying physical material.

Hard problem of consciousness

Chalmers's question of why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience, as opposed to the easier problem of explaining cognitive functions.

Sense and reference

Frege's distinction between a term's mode of presentation (sense) and the object it denotes (reference), explaining how identity statements can be informative.

Falsifiability

Popper's criterion that a scientific hypothesis must make predictions that could be shown false by observation, distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

Paradigm shift

Kuhn's term for a revolutionary change in the dominant framework of assumptions and methods within a scientific community, altering standards of problems and solutions.

Inference to best explanation

An ampliative reasoning pattern that accepts a hypothesis because it best explains the available evidence by criteria such as simplicity, scope, and predictive power.

Qualia

The intrinsic, subjective, felt qualities of conscious experience, such as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain, often cited against physicalist reduction.