Individual Belief And Objective Knowledge

Epistemology is an important field of contemporary analytical philosophy.The Gettier’s problem has made the confirmation of knowledge the core issue in contemporary western epistemological research.In this regard,the well-known scholar Chisholm put forward his own unique philosophical thought with obvious characteristics of internalism.This paper tries to explain his epistemological thought in combination with this feature,so that we can better grasp the answer given by the mainstream school of epistemology.This paper is to study Chisholm’s epistemological thought from three parts:The first part clarifies the meaning,property and application rules of the concept of confirmation.As the main factor of knowledge,the confirmation is interpreted by Chisholm as a normative concept of ought,its object is belief and its goal is truth.Confirmation is the inner mental activity of the cognitive subject,and its process has the inherent characteristics that can be grasped.In the concrete application of confirmation,he first finds the proposition with characteristic of Self-Presenting as an example.By constructing the evaluation system of cognition and drawing on the topic of "evidence of the senses" of Graneades of Cyrene,he put forward nine rules of proof to clarify the principle of indirect evidence,so as to establish his theory of empirical evidence.The second part discusses the "Standard problem" of confirmation.This is a philosophical conundrum,and any argument for it could lead to "the vicious circle".Chisholm carefully analyzed the causes of the "standard problem".Through diagnosis of methodology and skepticism and based on the viewpoint of Particularism,he believed that we can start from specific examples of knowledge,and then deduce cognitive standards based on these examples to answer the common question of "how do we understand things?".The third part expounds the concept of knowledge confirmation of Chisholm.Based on the view of Foundationalism,he argues that some directly proven foundationalism can provide the basis for our belief system,thus denying the existence of non-foundational Coherentism.By examining the various possible definitions of confirmation in Externalism,Chisholm points out that they are “unreliable”.Finally,in response to the question of Gettier’s counterexamples,he firmly defended the traditional triple definition of knowledge and revised it again.