Cameroon GCE A-Level Philosophy flashcards

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

Validity

A property of arguments where it is impossible for all premises to be true while the conclusion is false. It concerns logical form, not the actual truth of premises.

Soundness

An argument is sound when it is valid and all its premises are actually true. Soundness therefore guarantees a true conclusion, whereas mere validity does not.

Modus tollens

A valid inference form: if P then Q; not Q; therefore not P. Denying the consequent forces denial of the antecedent, since the consequent follows from it.

Affirming the consequent

The formal fallacy: if P then Q; Q; therefore P. The consequent can have other sufficient causes, so the conclusion does not follow from the premises.

Undistributed middle

A syllogistic fallacy in which the middle term is not distributed in either premise, so the premises cannot connect the subject and predicate.

Gettier problem

Cases of justified true belief that fail to be knowledge because the belief is true only by luck or rests on a false lemma. Shows JTB is insufficient.

Tabula rasa

Empiricist claim, associated with Locke, that the mind begins as a blank slate and all its ideas derive from sensation and reflection on experience.

Synthetic a priori

A Kantian category for judgments that are informative about the world yet known independently of experience, such as arithmetic and the causal principle.

Correspondence theory

The theory that a proposition is true when it corresponds to or agrees with an actual state of affairs in the world, independent of belief.

Foundationalism

Epistemic view that knowledge rests on basic beliefs justified without inference, and non-basic beliefs are justified by deriving support from these foundations.

Cartesian doubt

Descartes's method of suspending belief in anything that can possibly be doubted, including the senses, to find an indubitable foundation for knowledge.

Nominalism

The ontological position that only particular things exist and universals are mere names or words, not mind-independent entities shared by many objects.

Aristotle's four causes

Material (what it is made of), formal (its essence), efficient (what produced it), and final (its purpose) explanations of why a thing is what it is.

Humean causation

Hume's analysis of causation as constant conjunction plus customary expectation, denying any observable necessary connection between cause and effect in experience.

Compatibilism

The view that free will is compatible with determinism, since freedom means acting on one's own desires without external coercion, not being uncaused.

Possible worlds

A modal framework in which necessary truths hold in all possible worlds and contingent truths hold in some but not all, grounding possibility and necessity.

Categorical imperative

Kant's unconditional moral law: act only on maxims you could will as universal law, and treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.

Utilitarianism

Consequentialist theory, from Bentham and Mill, that an action is right when it maximises overall welfare, with Mill ranking higher and lower pleasures.

Is–ought gap

Hume's point that purely descriptive premises about what is cannot by themselves entail a prescriptive conclusion about what ought to be.

Veil of ignorance

Rawls's device for choosing principles of justice without knowing one's talents, wealth, or social position, ensuring impartiality in the choice.

Euthyphro dilemma

The question whether actions are good because God commands them, or commanded because they are already good, challenging divine command theory of morality.

Allegory of the cave

Plato's image of prisoners mistaking shadows for reality, illustrating ascent from opinion through the senses to knowledge of the Forms.

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes's first indubitable truth: even while doubting everything, the doubter cannot doubt that he is thinking and therefore exists.

Esse est percipi

Berkeley's idealist thesis that to be is to be perceived, so physical objects exist only as collections of ideas in perceiving minds.

Hegelian dialectic

Hegel's account of development through contradiction, where a position generates its opposite and is resolved in a higher unity that preserves both.

Ethnophilosophy

The approach treating African communal worldviews and proverbs as philosophy, criticised by Hountondji for lacking critical, individual argument.

Sage philosophy

Odera Oruka's category of philosophic sagacity: individual critical thinkers within African traditions who reason independently rather than merely repeating communal beliefs.

Ubuntu

Southern African relational ethic holding that a person is a person through other persons, grounding personhood and morality in community rather than isolation.

Negritude

Cultural and literary movement, associated with Senghor and Césaire, affirming black identity and values against colonial denigration and assimilation.

Multiple realisability

The claim that one mental state can be realised by different physical states across organisms, challenging the identity theory of mind and brain.

Chinese room

Searle's thought experiment arguing that following syntactic rules to manipulate symbols does not produce semantic understanding or genuine thought.

Hard problem of consciousness

Chalmers's problem of explaining why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience, not merely which processes produce which functions.

Positive and negative liberty

Berlin's distinction between freedom as absence of external interference (negative) and freedom as self-mastery or self-realisation (positive).

General will

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

Nozick's entitlement theory

A historical, non-patterned account of justice holding that a distribution is just if holdings arose through just acquisition and just transfer.