خلاصه ماشینی:
"Controversy about the nature of one’s basic beliefs, however, and about their revisability, must not be allowed to obscure the two more important points: (1) that it is often impossible to specify the empirical content of a given statement in isolation from other related statements; and (2) analytic truths together with observation reports are not sufficient to provide a deductive or inductive basis for what is generally considered to be known about the external world, scientific knowledge. While Hume suggested that Locke’s faith could not meet his own evidentialist challenge, Quine argued that the claims of modern science extend way beyond anything that could be constructed from subjective experience and analytic truth. While Aristotle posited a rational faculty, nous, capable of recognizing the basic principles of the sciences, the empiricists tended to restrict the truths known by inner experience to those of logic and mathematics. ”[1] Although Aristotle defines scientific knowledge in terms of deduction and rational intuition, when he himself investigates the basis of any given field of science, he concentrates on the analysis of the most important concepts employed in that area, trying to provide a satisfactory and illuminating conceptual framework rather than premises from which deductions are to be drawn. Let’s begin by pretending that the history of epistemology can be neatly divided into three periods: classical, modern and contemporary, each of which may be represented by the caricature of a single philosopher: Aristotle, Locke and Quine, respectively
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