Epistemological idealism
Encyclopedia
Epistemological idealism is a subjectivist position in epistemology that holds that what one knows about an object exists only in one's mind. It is opposed to epistemological realism
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Epistemological idealism can mean one of two unrelated positions:
Epistemological realism
Epistemological realism is a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind. It opposes epistemological idealism....
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Epistemological idealism can mean one of two unrelated positions:
- Everything we experience and know is of a mental nature, sense dataSense dataIn the philosophy of perception, the theory of sense data was a popular view held the early 20th century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, A.J. Ayer and G.E. Moore, among others. Sense data are supposedly mind-dependent objects whose existence and properties are...
in philosophical jargon. Although it is sometimes employed to argue in favor of metaphysical idealism, in principle epistemological idealism makes no claim about whether or not sense data are grounded in reality. As such, it is a container for both indirect realism and idealismIdealismIn philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. - Knowledge is of a mental nature. That is: ideas, concepts and propositions (and perhaps logic) exist only in the mind and have no extra-mental existence. See psychologismPsychologismPsychologism is a generic type of position in philosophy according to which psychology plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law...
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