What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that the distinguished analytic philosopher William P. Alston addresses in this major contribution to the philosophy of language. His answer focuses on the given sentence's potential to play the role that its speaker had in mind, what he terms the usability of the sentence to perform the illocutionary act intended by its speaker.
Alston defines an illocutionary act as an act of saying something with a certain "content." He develops his account of what it is to perform such acts in terms of taking...
What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that the distinguished analytic philosopher William P. Alston addresses i...
Much of the writing in Anglo-American epistemology in the twentieth century focused on the conditions for beliefs being "justified." In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the...
Much of the writing in Anglo-American epistemology in the twentieth century focused on the conditions for beliefs being "justified." In a book that se...
Much of the writing in Anglo-American epistemology in the twentieth century focused on the conditions for beliefs being "justified." In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-long search for a correct account of the nature and conditions of epistemic justification misses the point. Alston calls for that search to be suspended and for talk of epistemic justification to cease. He proposes instead an approach to the epistemology of belief that focuses on the evaluation of various "epistemic desiderata" that may be...
Much of the writing in Anglo-American epistemology in the twentieth century focused on the conditions for beliefs being "justified." In a book that se...
In Perceiving God, William P. Alston offers a clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience. He argues that the "perception of God" his term for direct experiential awareness of God makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God among laypersons and famous mystics, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience. Through the perception that God is sustaining one in being, for example, one can justifiably...
In Perceiving God, William P. Alston offers a clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience. He argues that th...
One of the most important Anglo-American philosophers of our time here joins the current philosophical debate about the nature of truth with a work likely to claim a place at the very center of the contemporary philosophical literature on the subject. William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism (from "aletheia", Greek for "truth"). This idea holds that the truth value of a statement (belief or proposition) depends on whether what the statement is about is as the statement says it is. Although this concept may seem quite obvious,...
One of the most important Anglo-American philosophers of our time here joins the current philosophical debate about the nature of truth with a work li...
Throughout the past century, a debate has raged over the thesis of realism and its alternatives. Realism the seemingly commonsensical view that all or most of what we encounter in the world exists and is what it is independently of human thought has been vigorously denied by such prominent intellectuals as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, and Nelson Goodman. The opponents of realism, among them historians and social scientists who support social constructionism, hold that all or most of reality depends on human conceptual schemes and beliefs. In...
Throughout the past century, a debate has raged over the thesis of realism and its alternatives. Realism the seemingly commonsensical view that all or...
Epistemic Justification collects twelve distinguished and influential essays in epistemology by William P. Alston taken from a body of work spanning almost two decades. They represent the gradual development of Alston's thought in epistemology. He...
Epistemic Justification collects twelve distinguished and influential essays in epistemology by William P. Alston taken from a body of work spanning a...
