epistemology

The Agrippa Trilemma appears to show that justification must terminate in an arbitrary foundation, become circular, or regress indefinitely. Standard responses — foundationalism, coherentism, infinitism, and pragmatism — typically attempt to make one horn acceptable while retaining the demand for ultimate justification, and each inherits the trilemma's structure at a meta-level. This paper argues…

philosophybits: “The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.” — Charles Sanders Peirce, “On The Algebra of Logic”, The Essential Peirce, vol 1 The post “The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any… appeared first on …

Abstract: Traditional metaphysical investigations into ultimate grounding inevitably confront the Münchhausen Trilemma, leaving inquiry to choose among infinite ontological regress, circular explanation, or brute contingency. This paper presents a foundational rationalist ontology—Stability-Filtered Plenitude—designed to establish an ungrounded, non-dependent, atemporal terminus without relying o…

Scepticism is the view that we know almost nothing. Despite its historical pedigree, and its centrality both as a topic of research and as a staple of undergraduate syllabi, this view has few contemporary defenders. Instead, it is primarily evoked in ways that presuppose its falsity, as when epistemologists… The post Skepticism and Fallibilism, appeared first on Philosophy News .

This paper develops the thesis that nothing cannot exist because “nothing” lacks identity, reference, and meaning, and therefore cannot satisfy the minimal conditions for existence. Using the Identity–Continuity–Determinism–Propagation (ICDP) communication law, I show that meaning is the primordial invariant of reality: when CDP collapses—removing continuity, determinism, and propagation—the univ…

I was recently given the following argument while debating an Idealist friend from the Hindu Trika tradition: Solidifying the epistemological defense by redefining error or confusion (bhrāntiḥ). When ...

This paper defends a conditional, exhaustively disjunctive thesis concerning the epistemic limits surrounding any fundamental reality—an ungrounded entity that partially explains the contingent order without itself being explained. Either its intrinsic character is exhausted by its structural role, leaving nothing further to know, or it has a role transcending character that no contingent inquire…

_Social Epistemology_ 41:1 - 17. 2026Hinge epistemology has recently entered the conversation of social epistemology by offering novel accounts of testimonial justification. If these accounts are to be taken seriously, then they should also be able to address cases of authoritative testimony and present novel benefits. In this article, I test whether social hinge epistemology can provide a framew…

[Revised entry by Jan-Erik Jones on September 1, 2026. Changes to: Bibliography] The technical term ‘real essence’ is heavily utilized by the English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704) in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding[1] (hereafter “Essay”) that was first published in London, in December of 1689. In order to understand a great many […] The post Locke on Real Essence appeared first…