
On Folk Epistemology: How We Think and Talk about Knowledge - raleighm
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/on-folk-epistemology-how-we-think-and-talk-about-knowledge/
======
alexpetralia
I really wanted to enjoy this book review, but I could not penetrate the
philosophical jargon and labyrinthine paragraph structure. I suspect it is for
audiences more familiar with the relevant literature.

~~~
whatshisface
> _such as our inclination to deny that someone knows that p in the face of a
> salient alternative, q_

Here is a small gripe with philosophical tradition that I'm sure many of us
share: they easily could have phrased this without symbols[0], but ended up
using them anyway. The only reason science and math papers use letters in body
text is because they are about to be used in equations! After they are
introduced at the expense of using "professional" grammar, _p_ and _q_ never
show up again.

[0] "such as our inclination to deny that someone knows something in the face
of a salient alternative."

~~~
jonnybgood
That’s an odd gripe. It was philosophers who first used logical form going all
the way back to Aristotle.

Also, equations are not only reason symbols/letters are used in math and
science. When speaking of logic, their usage is built on philosophical
foundations. Math also didn’t always use symbols as it does today. Symbolic
math took root sometime in the 14th century.

~~~
whatshisface
There isn't a single reason to use symbols except that they save space. They
aren't a magical spice that turns sentences into true proofs - the best they
can do is let you write text that is already a proof in less space. Logical
form is only worthwhile if you're doing so much logic that you can't print the
word therefore that many times!

------
Gormisdomai
Bounded rationality is very interesting and easy to understand if you have
intuitions about computational complexity.

Breifly, it's the idea that being perfectly rational, is, in practice too
resource intensive for us to do all the time - so the /actually/ rational
thing for us to do is to use heuristics and folk-concepts in our day to day
lives, rather than totally philosophically sound methods of reasoning.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality)

------
teilo
Translated into simple English: For most things, common sense turns out to be
fairly common and reliable.

~~~
mark_edward
That's not what the review says at all. The book maybe, I haven't read it

