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Skepticism, also spelled scepticism in British English, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. [1] For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the person doubts that these claims are accurate.
Some types of philosophical skepticism reject all forms of knowledge while others limit this rejection to certain fields, for example, knowledge about moral doctrines or about the external world. Some theorists criticize philosophical skepticism based on the claim that it is a self-refuting idea since its proponents seem to claim to know that ...
This glossary of biology terms is a list of definitions of fundamental terms and concepts used in biology, the study of life and of living organisms.It is intended as introductory material for novices; for more specific and technical definitions from sub-disciplines and related fields, see Glossary of cell biology, Glossary of genetics, Glossary of evolutionary biology, Glossary of ecology ...
The term predeterminism is also frequently used in the context of biology and heredity, in which case it represents a form of biological determinism, sometimes called genetic determinism. [16] Biological determinism is the idea that all human behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by human genetic nature.
For example, what John Polkinghorne terms 'conceptual' or 'epistemological' reductionism [5] is the definition provided by Simon Blackburn [10] and by Jaegwon Kim: [11] that form of reductionism which concerns a program of replacing the facts or entities involved in one type of discourse with other facts or entities from another type, thereby ...
The root of the words subjectivity and objectivity are subject and object, philosophical terms that mean, respectively, an observer and a thing being observed.The word subjectivity comes from subject in a philosophical sense, meaning an individual who possesses unique conscious experiences, such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires, [1] [3] or who (consciously) acts upon or wields ...
The opposite of reductionism is holism, a word coined by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole.One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail.
In critical race theory, the paradigm is known as the black–white binary. [12] Post-structural criticism of binary oppositions is not simply the reversal of the opposition, but its deconstruction, which is described as apolitical—that is, not intrinsically favoring one arm of a binary opposition over the other. Deconstruction is the "event ...