Abilities and Tryings
I am trying to write a seminar paper about the ability to try (or perhaps the ability to will, or the ability to choose). It seems to me that commonsense recognizes, in at least certain situations, a non-trivial question about whether an agent has the ability to try to perform an action. However, given the close connection between the concepts of ability and trying, there is reason to believe that the question might be trivial, or even incoherent, after all. This is the issue I am investigating, and I'm going to try to do some blogging on the subject in...
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Topic(s):
Abilities
,
Action Theory
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jennifer Hornsby
,
Kadri Vihvelin
,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
,
Metaphysics
,
Michael Fara
,
Paul Grice
,
Philosophy
,
Richard Taylor
,
Trying
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Kenny at
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Three Varieties of Certainty
'Certainty,' whatever that is supposed to be, would certainly (!) seem to be important in epistemology. Like a lot of important words, it frequently gets thrown around without definition. I know of at least three totally distinct ways of using this term, and the only thing they all seem to have in common is 'very high epistemic status' - i.e. something is certain if we really know it, in some way that is 'better' (more certain!) than ordinary knowledge. I'm going to outline here these three different varieties of certainty. Cartesian Certainty (also called 'demon-proof certainty') is attributed to a...
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