Philosophy A-Level

Philosophy A-Level glossary

459 key terms for Philosophy A-Level, A to Z, each linked to the topic pages that use it.

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A

A posteriori arguments for God's existence: Arguments that begin from features of the world, as Aquinas' three Ways do.AQA
A posteriori knowledge: Knowledge that depends on experience, justified only by observation or empirical evidence.AQA
A priori: Knowledge or justification that does not depend on sense experience but on reason alone.AQA
A priori knowledge: Knowledge that is independent of experience, justified by reason alone, where no observation is needed to see the truth.AQA
A priori knowledge of existence: Descartes' proofs appear to claim this, which the Fork says is impossible because relations of ideas tell us nothing about existence.AQA
A priori reasoning from concept to existence: Anselm reasons from the concept of God alone, not from evidence from the world, so the argument is a priori.AQA
A priori versus a posteriori reasoning: A priori proofs claim to establish existence by pure reason alone, while a posteriori reasoning requires experience.AQA
A priori/a posteriori distinction: A classification of how a proposition is known or justified, concerning justification rather than the origin of the concepts.AQA
Abduction as inference to the best explanation: A form of induction that reasons to the best explanation, inferring a hypothesis that would account for the evidence.AQA
Ability knowledge: Knowing how to do something, shown in successful performance and not needing to be expressible in words.AQA
Absent qualia: The conclusion that a system is a functional duplicate yet intuitively has no experience, so functional role is not sufficient for mentality.AQA
Access objection: The objection that a believer may have no access to the reliability of their own process.AQA
Acquaintance knowledge: Knowledge of a thing gained by direct experiential contact, such as knowing what a colour looks like from seeing it.AQA
Acting from duty: Doing what is right because it is right, from respect for the moral law rather than from inclination or expected advantage.AQA
Actions performed for the right reasons: Actions are virtuous when they express the right disposition, chosen for the right reasons, in the right circumstances.AQA
Actual versus potential infinity: The argument targets a completed actual infinite past, not an indefinitely extendable series, supporting the premise that the universe began to exist.AQA
Agency and causation as the distinguishing criterion: The distinction turns on agency and causation, not on how bad the suffering feels, asking whether a responsible agent's choice is the proximate cause.AQA
Aggregation and the majority-minority problem: Summing welfare can licence sacrificing a minority for a larger majority.AQA
Alleged inference: If existence depends on being perceived, and only one's own perceptions are directly guaranteed, then other minds and a shared world are threatened.AQA
Analogical and inductive reasoning: Reasoning that normally works by comparing many similar cases, so that a conclusion can be checked against repeated experience.AQA
Analysis of concepts: Analysis aims to break a concept into necessary and sufficient conditions.AQA
Analytic/synthetic distinction: A distinction concerning the basis of truth rather than how a proposition is known, kept separate from a priori/a posteriori.AQA
Anselm's argument and its revival by Malcolm: Malcolm revives Anselm's argument by distinguishing two kinds of existence-claim and reworking it around the necessary/contingent distinction and the…AQA
Antecedent: The 'if' clause (P) in a conditional statement.AQA
Application of theory to concrete moral cases: To apply the idea, identify the action, identify the outcome the theory counts, then ask whether that outcome is good.AQA
Arbitrariness of morality: The appearance that morality is arbitrary if things are good only because God commands them, since any cruelty could have been commanded and would then count…AQA
Argument evaluation: Assessing whether the test is applied fairly, since dualists may reply that minds are conceived through mental properties such as thinking rather than imagery.AQA
Argument from analogy: Reasoning from human artefacts to the universe, treating the universe as like a machine made by a human craftsman.AQA
Argument from hallucination: A person hallucinating a dagger has a perceptual experience indistinguishable from genuinely seeing one, yet no object is present, so what is directly…AQA
Argument from illusion: A related argument concerning a single experience misrepresenting an object, distinct from variation, which concerns differing appearances of an unchanged…AQA
Argument from queerness: An argument with two limbs: metaphysically, objective moral properties would be intrinsically prescriptive and unlike anything natural; epistemologically, we…AQA
Argument from relativity: An inference to the best explanation from widespread and persistent moral disagreement, holding that moral codes reflect different ways of life rather than a…AQA
Argument versus assertion and rhetoric: An argument needs explicit inferential support, not just strong wording, so persuasive or opinionated text is not automatically an argument.AQA
Arguments for incoherence: Arguments claiming that the concept of God contains a contradiction, so no such being could exist.AQA
Assertion: A statement put forward as true or false, with truth-evaluable content, such as 'the table is brown'.AQA
Assertion versus argument: A conclusion on its own is assertion, not argument, because no justification is offered in its favour.AQA
Assessment of Descartes' response to scepticism: Questioning the move from the cogito to God or the reliance on clear and distinct ideas, and whether the response actually defeats scepticism.AQA
Atemporal causation: The starting point of the Second Way: every effect has a cause, and causes cannot form an endless series of essentially ordered causes.AQA
Ayer's verification principle: The claim that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable.AQA

B

Behavioural dispositions: A tendency to behave in certain ways under certain conditions, not a guaranteed occurrence or simple reflex.AQA
Belief and assertion: Assertion presupposes belief, so the eliminativist who asserts the theory must believe it, which the theory denies.AQA
Belief and truth conditions retained: The revision targets only the third condition, so the belief and truth conditions are kept unchanged.AQA
Belief versus desire/passion: Beliefs are inert representations of how things are, while motivation requires a passion or sentiment, a desire-like state.AQA
Beliefs versus attitudes in moral utterances: Whether a moral utterance expresses a belief or instead expresses an attitude, emotion or prescription.AQA
Berkeley's reply: God perceives everything and causes our ideas, so the world is public and other finite spirits exist.AQA
Best explanation reasoning: Justifying acceptance of the external world because positing it explains the order, coherence and independence of our sensations better than alternatives.AQA
Blank slate: Locke's alternative that the mind is like a blank slate, with ideas coming from sensation and reflection.AQA
Block's China thought experiment: A scenario in which a population is organised so that its interactions mirror the functional organisation of a brain.AQA

C

Causal role: The typical inputs, outputs and relations to other states that constitute a mental state.AQA
Certainty and foundationalism: The status of the cogito as a priori and foundational, which empiricists dispute rather than deny the occurrence of thought.AQA
Certainty versus necessity: Necessity concerns whether a claim could be false at all, not confidence, universal agreement or being well supported by evidence.AQA
Churchland: Patricia Churchland and Paul Churchland defend the view that common-sense psychology is radically mistaken.AQA
Circularity: Reasoning in which the conclusion is assumed in the premises, so the argument moves in a loop and gives no independent support.AQA
Claim type versus truth value: The distinction concerns the kind of claim being made, not how confident the speaker is; an objective claim may be false and a subjective report may be…AQA
Clarity: An idea is clear when it is present and open to an attentive mind, as something seen plainly in good light.AQA
Cleanthes's design inference: The order and adjustment of parts in nature resemble the products of intelligent design, so a designing intelligence is inferred.AQA
Clear and distinct perceptions: These can be trusted because God's perfection is used to guarantee that they are true, defeating the demon.AQA
Cognitivism: The view that religious utterances express beliefs and therefore make truth-claims, purporting to describe reality and being capable of truth or falsehood.AQA
Cognitivism and truth-aptness: Moral statements express beliefs and so can be true or false, which is what makes error theory cognitivist.AQA
Competent judges: Those who have experienced both kinds of pleasure decide which is higher.AQA
Complete physical information: Every physical fact about colour vision, including wavelengths and retinal and neural processes, which Mary learns while confined.AQA
Conceivability and possibility: The key premise that whatever is conceivable is possible, so zombies being conceivable means they are possible; the key reply is that it may not.AQA
Concept versus instantiation: Denying that God exists does not contradict the concept of God; it denies that the concept is instantiated.AQA
Concept-to-existence inference: Moving from a definition or idea to existence, which Gaunilo argues cannot be done.AQA
Conclusion versus premise: The conclusion is what is being claimed, while the premise or premises are the reasons offered in its support.AQA
Conditional statements: A statement that has the form 'if P then Q'.AQA
Conditional versus unconditional commands: A hypothetical imperative is conditional, telling you to do something as a means to a desired end, while a categorical imperative is unconditional, commanding…AQA
Conditional versus unconditional good: Talents, qualities and consequences can be used for bad ends and so are only conditionally good, unlike the good will.AQA
Consciousness and physicalism: If physical facts fully determine behaviour and reports, a being claiming to feel pain while feeling nothing is incoherent.AQA
Consequences as the determinant of moral value: The view that the consequences of actions determine their moral value, rather than the agent's intentions or the act's intrinsic nature.AQA
Consequent: The clause following 'then' (Q) in a conditional statement.AQA
Consequentialism: The shared aim of maximising overall good, which both act and rule utilitarianism remain committed to.AQA
Consequentialist meaning of right and wrong: An act is right if it maximises overall welfare and wrong if it does not, so outcomes fix right and wrong.AQA
Consequentialist structure: The feature of utilitarianism whereby rightness depends on maximising overall good.AQA
Conservation of existence: Sustaining existence at each instant requires a cause, since existing a moment ago does not explain existence now.AQA
Consistency: A set of propositions is consistent when they can all be true together, so there is at least one possible situation in which every member is true.AQA
Containment of predicate in subject: A useful test asking whether the predicate is already contained in the subject concept; if yes, the proposition is analytic.AQA
Contingent versus necessary truth: A contingent claim merely happens to be true, whereas a tautology cannot be false in any possible situation.AQA
Contradiction: Arises when an argument or position asserts both a claim and its denial, so it cannot be consistently maintained.AQA
Contradiction and negation: The negation of a tautology is a contradiction, which cannot be true.AQA
Contradiction as a test for analyticity: An analytic proposition is one whose denial produces a contradiction, because its truth rests on the meanings of its terms alone.AQA
Contradiction in conception: Arises when universalising the maxim destroys the very practice that makes the action possible, so it cannot even be thought as universal law.AQA
Contradiction in will: Arises when the universalised maxim is conceivable but cannot be consistently willed because it frustrates a necessary end of rational agents.AQA
Contrast between verification and falsification: Verification asks whether anything could count for a claim, while falsification asks whether anything could count against it.AQA
Contrast with hard behaviourism: Soft behaviourism keeps ordinary-language disposition talk, while hard behaviourism reduces to physics language.AQA
Copy principle: A claim needing support, that simple concepts copy single impressions and complex concepts combine simples, tested by asking which impression a disputed idea…AQA
Cosmological argument: An argument whose move from every event or thing in the universe having a cause to the universe as a whole having a cause is targeted by Russell's objection.AQA
Cosmological arguments: Arguments that ask whether the chain of causes or dependents can run back forever.AQA
Counterexamples: Cases where someone knows that p even though one of the supposed conditions is absent, offered to show a condition is not necessary.AQA
Critique of the zombie argument: An objection denying the first premise, that a zombie world is not genuinely conceivable, so the route to property dualism collapses.AQA

D

Deduction: A step-by-step inference in which a conclusion follows necessarily from premises, as in a valid syllogism.AQA
Deduction and necessity: Reasoning where the conclusion is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises.AQA
Deductive validity: The relation in which the premises entail the conclusion, so that if the premises are true the conclusion cannot be false.AQA
Deductive versus inductive reasoning: The logical form is deductive, so a single instance of evil would suffice, while the evidential form is inductive or probabilistic.AQA
Deductive versus inductive support: Support is deductive where the premises are meant to guarantee the conclusion, and inductive where they make it probable.AQA
Definition of knowledge: The 'if and only if' definition fails if a condition is not necessary, because that condition is not required for knowledge.AQA
Demandingness and alienation: The objection that a theory which forbids partiality seems overly demanding and alienating, ignoring ordinary moral life.AQA
Deontological meaning of right and wrong: Right and wrong concern conformity to duty and the categorical imperative, not the results produced.AQA
Descriptive versus normative language: Statements about what is the case, using 'is' and 'is not', are contrasted with conclusions about what ought or ought not to be done.AQA
Design and intention: The claim that pervasive regularity is far more probable if a designing mind intended it than if it arose by chance.AQA
Diagnosis and resolution of paradoxes: Working out where the trouble arises, such as an ambiguous term, a false premise, an invalid step, or a genuine tension in our concepts, and asking which…AQA
Dilemma: A situation in which an agent faces two or more options, each of which carries an unwelcome consequence, so that no choice is cost-free.AQA
Direct realism: The view that can explain variation through changing conditions, perspective and the perceiver's position without positing sense data.AQA
Disagreement in attitude: Moral disagreement, because there is no moral proposition to be true or false, rather than disagreement in belief.AQA
Disjunctivism: Holds that veridical perception and hallucination are fundamentally different, challenging the inference from indistinguishability of experience to sameness…AQA
Distinction between proof and inductive support: Inductive evidence makes a conclusion probable but does not prove it, whereas proof is the relation in which premises entail a conclusion.AQA
Distinction from contradiction and dilemma: A paradox differs from a plain contradiction, which is two claims that cannot both be true, and from a dilemma, which concerns competing costs of choice.AQA
Distinctness: An idea is distinct when it is sharply separated from everything else, so no confusion remains about what it contains.AQA
Distinguishing sources of moral authority: Explaining how each source would account for the authority of a moral principle, and noting that they can combine.AQA
Divine command theory: The view that actions are right because God commands them, and that right and wrong depend on God's commands.AQA
Divine knowledge and action in a changing world: The requirement that the eternal view explain how a timeless God can know and act in a changing world.AQA
Divisibility of time: Time is divisible, so conserving existence at each instant requires a cause.AQA
Doctrine of the mean: Virtue lies between excess and deficiency, relative to the agent and situation, with vices as the corresponding extremes.AQA
Dreams versus waking experience: A contrast showing that dreams and imaginings are discontinuous and responsive to our wishes, whereas waking experience is stable, predictable and shared.AQA

E

Eliminative materialism: The view that some or all common-sense mental states or properties do not exist and our common-sense understanding is radically mistaken.AQA
Eliminativism: The view that folk-psychology is a false theory to be replaced.AQA
Embedded arguments within longer texts: A text may contain an argument embedded among non-argumentative material, so identify the specific sentences that do the inferential work.AQA
Emotion and attitudes as a source of moral principles: Moral judgements express or arise from feelings, approvals and disapprovals, so calling something wrong reports or expresses a negative attitude.AQA
Emotivism: Ayer's non-cognitivist view that moral language expresses feelings and influences the attitudes and behaviour of others, having emotive rather than…AQA
Empirical and contingent claims: Claims that happen to be so but could have been otherwise, such as 'the kettle is boiling' because the kettle might have been cold.AQA
Empirical versus analytic identity: The identity is a posteriori and empirical, discovered by science, not guaranteed by the meanings of the words.AQA
Empiricism: The view that knowledge and justified belief depend on sense experience, so the content of concepts derives from experience.AQA
Empiricism and the criterion of meaning: The view that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable.AQA
Empiricist theory of knowledge: The view that substantive knowledge of reality comes from experience, so claims that a priori proofs can establish a real being are challenged.AQA
Ends in themselves: What humanity, in one's own person or in the person of any other, must always at the same time be treated as.AQA
Epistemic priority and burden of proof: Certainty about experience does not by itself prove dualism, but it sets a burden of proof on the physicalist.AQA
Epistemic virtue: Good intellectual traits or competences of the knower, such as careful observation, open-mindedness or intellectual courage.AQA
Ergon (function): A thing's characteristic activity, on which its good depends, so a good knife cuts well and a good eye sees well.AQA
Error theory: The view that moral judgements purport to state objective facts but are systematically false because no such facts exist.AQA
Esse est percipi: To be is to be perceived, so existence depends on being perceived by some mind.AQA
Eudaimonia as final end and self-sufficient good: The good for a human being, chosen for its own sake and never for the sake of anything further, with nothing needing to be added to it.AQA
Evaluation of the design argument: Considering whether the unique-case objection is decisive or whether the inference can still be reasonable against Paley, who infers a designer from apparent…AQA
Everlastingness: The view that God exists within time, having a past, present and future and experiencing one moment after another.AQA
Evidential form of the problem of evil: Argues that the amount, distribution and apparently pointless character of suffering makes God's existence unlikely, even if not strictly impossible.AQA
Existence as a perfection: Existence is a perfection, so a supremely perfect being must possess it.AQA
Existence as a predicate: Kant denies that existence is a real predicate, since saying a thing exists adds nothing to its description and only posits the thing as existing.AQA
Existence in the understanding versus existence in reality: The concept exists in the understanding even for the fool who denies God, but a being existing in reality as well is greater than one existing only in the…AQA
Explanation versus postponement: The question of whether a beginningless regress adequately explains why anything exists at all, or merely postpones explanation.AQA
Expressive and persuasive functions of moral language: Moral language functions to express feelings and to influence the attitudes and behaviour of others.AQA

F

Fact-stating versus expressive accounts: The contrast between treating religious utterances as describing reality and treating them as expressing attitudes, commitments or emotions rather than…AQA
Fairness and impartiality: Treating each person's interests impartially rather than sacrificing some for the aggregate.AQA
Fallacy of composition: Inferring that a whole must have a property because each of its parts has that property.AQA
False dilemma: A fallacy that presents only two options when more exist.AQA
False lemmas and inferential routes: A lemma is an intermediate belief used to reach the target belief, and the route to the belief must not pass through a falsehood.AQA
Falsification principle: The challenge that a genuine assertion must be incompatible with some conceivable observation, and if nothing could count against it, it dies 'the death of a…AQA
First cause: An originating term that the chain of causes or dependents would need in order to begin.AQA
First-person certainty of mental states: The claim that you cannot seriously doubt that you are now having some experience, thought or sensation, whatever else is uncertain.AQA
Flew's falsification challenge: A claim that no possible observation could count against asserts nothing and is therefore meaningless.AQA
Folk psychology: The everyday framework that explains behaviour by attributing states such as beliefs, desires and pains as inner entities.AQA
Functional role: What typically causes a mental state, what it typically causes, and how it interacts with other states, rather than its physical make-up.AQA
Functionalism: The view that a mental state is constituted by its causal role: its typical inputs, outputs and relations to other states.AQA
Functionalism and multiple realisability: The view that mental states are identified with causal-functional roles that could be realised by many different systems.AQA

G

Gettier counter examples: Cases of lucky true beliefs aiming to show the conditions are not sufficient.AQA
Global scepticism: Doubt directed at knowledge as a whole rather than one domain, questioning whether any belief can be known at all.AQA
God as sustaining cause: A cause sufficient to sustain him at every moment must exist, and this cause must have the perfections he lacks, which Descartes identifies with God.AQA
God's relationship to time: Competing views on how the being described as God relates to time, including God being timeless and God being within time.AQA

H

Habituation and education: Repeated good practice shapes character, so that dispositions are built up through education and habituation.AQA
Hallucination: A case in which someone has a perceptual experience qualitatively indistinguishable from a genuine perception, yet no corresponding object is present.AQA
Hedonism: The view that pleasure and the absence of pain are what matter, so that actions are judged by their tendency to produce pleasure or reduce pain.AQA
Hempel's logical analysis of psychology: The named source of this strong reductionist version, treating psychological sentences as reducible to physical ones, so mental vocabulary is retained only as…AQA
Higher and lower pleasures: Pleasures differ in kind, with higher mental and intellectual pleasures ranked above lower bodily ones.AQA
Human good: Rational activity performed well, not merely the capacity for reason.AQA
Hume's critique of the design analogy: The design argument reasons from a single unique case, the universe, to a cause, a designer, and so cannot establish the analogy with human artefacts reliably.AQA
Hume's Dialogues: Work in which Philo presses that the universe's spatial layout shows no clear order, since matter could fall into apparent regularity by chance.AQA
Hume's Fork: Every meaningful proposition is either a relation of ideas, knowable a priori but telling us nothing about existence, or a matter of fact, empirical and never…AQA
Hume's moral sentimentalism: The view that moral judgements involve sentiment, a desire-like state, rather than being mere beliefs.AQA
hypothetical reasoning: Works from a supposition: if P were the case, Q would follow, so strength depends on the conditional and the supposition.AQA

I

Idealism: The view that reality is fundamentally mental, with ordinary objects as collections of ideas dependent on a perceiver.AQA
Idealism and mind-dependence: The view that the immediate objects of perception are mind-dependent objects, rather than material substances behind experience.AQA
Ideas: Faint copies of impressions in thought, being less vivid than impressions.AQA
Identity theory: The view that ties mental states to one physical type, which functionalism differs from.AQA
Illusion and perceptual error: A case in which a perceiver is aware of a property the object does not really have, such as a straight stick half in water looking bent.AQA
Immediate objects of perception: The ideas directly before the mind, which are mind-dependent, as opposed to any supposed material substratum.AQA
Immediate perception: Awareness that is unmediated, so that no mental intermediary stands between the perceiver and the world.AQA
Impartiality and equal consideration: The view that each person's happiness counts equally, so an agent should treat their own child's welfare as no more important than a stranger's.AQA
Implications for physicalist theories: The asymmetry can seem to favour a private inner access that behaviourism struggles to accommodate, yet physicalists may reply that the difference is one of…AQA
Impressions: Lively perceptions from sensation and reflection, which are the original perceptions.AQA
Inclination and necessity: Hypothetical imperatives depend on the agent's ends and so lack unconditional necessity, whereas categorical imperatives bind independently of any desired end.AQA
Inclination and self-interest: The agent's motive may be self-interest, sympathy, fear or habit, and inclination may accompany dutiful action without giving it moral worth.AQA
Inconsistency: A set is inconsistent when they cannot all be true together, because at least one must be false if the others are true.AQA
Indirect realism: The immediate objects of perception are mind-dependent objects that are caused by and represent mind-independent objects.AQA
Individual liberty and rights: Protections of thought, speech and action from interference by others, including the majority.AQA
Induction and probability: Reasoning where premises make the conclusion probable rather than certain.AQA
Inductive reasoning: A probable rather than certain inference, resting on the strength of the analogy.AQA
Infallibilism as a response: Strengthening the justification condition by requiring justification that guarantees the truth of the belief.AQA
Inference as a reasoning step: The step of reasoning that moves from premises to a conclusion, not a sentence in its own right.AQA
Inference from behaviour: The indirect route by which others' mental states are inferred from evidence such as behaviour, testimony and context.AQA
Inference from thought to thinker: Descartes' move from the occurrence of thought to a thinker, which empiricists say needs justification.AQA
Inference indicator words: Words such as 'because', 'since', 'therefore', 'so' or 'it follows that' often signal the sentences giving reasons for a claim.AQA
Inference to a designer: An inductive inference to the best explanation of apparent purpose, concluding a designer who is intelligent and powerful.AQA
Inference to the best explanation: An argument in which predictive and explanatory success supports the reality of mental states, so folk-psychology is the best hypothesis.AQA
Infinite regress: A regress with no first member, where each item depends on a prior one without an originating term.AQA
Innatism: The view that some knowledge or concepts are in the mind from birth rather than derived from experience.AQA
Intending to act: A different everyday use of 'intention', to be distinguished from intentionality as aboutness.AQA
Intentional properties: Directedness or aboutness, which all or at least some mental states have.AQA
Intentionality: The property of being about something, of representing or pointing beyond itself.AQA
Intrinsic: Belonging to the experience itself rather than depending on relations to other things.AQA
Introspectively accessible: Available to the subject, who can attend to them from the first-person perspective.AQA
Intuition: An immediate, direct grasp of a truth that is self-evident rather than reached by step-by-step inference.AQA
Intuition and thought experiments: The intuition that the nation as a whole has no experiences, treated as a premise that functionalists can and do dispute.AQA
Intuitionism: The view that we grasp basic moral truths by rational intuition rather than observation or inference from natural facts.AQA
Involuntary action: An action done under compulsion or through ignorance, and the agent is not held responsible, though regret distinguishes some cases.AQA

J

Justification: The condition that S is justified in believing that p; a lucky true guess lacks it.AQA
Justification versus explanation: Justifying a belief gives grounds for its truth, whereas explaining its cause does not by itself show the view is true.AQA

K

Kalām cosmological argument: An argument from temporal causation: whatever begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, so the universe has a cause, which is identified with…AQA
Knowing what it is like: A skill of recognising, imagining and discriminating red experiences, which may or may not also carry factual content.AQA
Knowledge and luck: Knowledge must be creditable to the agent's virtuous cognitive activity rather than to luck.AQA
Knowledge argument structure: If physicalism were true, complete physical knowledge would exhaust the facts; Mary gains a fact; therefore physicalism is false.AQA
Knowledge by direct access versus inference: Mental states appear known directly or incorrigibly, whereas physical and brain states are known through observation and inference.AQA
Knowledge of other minds: Third-person knowledge of others' mental states that is indirect and inferential, based on behaviour, testimony and context, and can be wrong.AQA

L

Laws of nature: Constant regularities holding through time, so that water boils at the same temperature and planets keep to predictable orbits.AQA
Leibniz and necessary truths: The argument that because experience cannot supply universal necessity, the capacity for truths that could not be otherwise must be innate.AQA
Level of assessment: The distinction between the individual act and the general rule, which separates act utilitarianism from rule utilitarianism.AQA
Limiting test of the structure of justification: How global scepticism is best treated, rather than a position that can be asserted without tension.AQA
Limits of inferring God's attributes: Even if a designer were inferred, the argument cannot establish a God of infinite power, knowledge and goodness.AQA
Limits of knowledge: Each response grounds knowledge in experience while accepting limits.AQA
Local scepticism: Doubt confined to a specific domain of knowledge claims, leaving other domains untouched.AQA
Logical form of the problem of evil: Claims that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, so the set of beliefs is contradictory.AQA

M

Main conclusions and sub-conclusions: The conclusion is the claim being argued for, and a sub-conclusion is an intermediate claim that is itself supported by earlier premises and then supports the…AQA
Meaning preservation: The test of the theory: if the physical paraphrase loses something the mental sentence said, hard behaviourism fails.AQA
Means-end reasoning: A hypothetical imperative prescribes a means to a desired end, and its force depends on your having that end.AQA
Means-to-ends contrivance: The intricate arrangement of means to ends, which implies an intelligent designer.AQA
Measurement and comparison of welfare: Pleasures and pains differ in kind and intensity, so comparing them on a single scale is difficult, and there is no agreed unit.AQA
Mere difficulty: A single unwelcome option, from which a dilemma is distinguished.AQA
Metaphysical possibility versus actuality: Metaphysical possibility concerns what could obtain without contradiction across possible worlds, whereas actuality concerns how this world is.AQA
Methodological doubt: Doubt used as a tool to reach certainty, as in Descartes' use of hyperbolic doubt, distinguished from scepticism as a conclusion.AQA
Mill's harm principle: Restricting liberty is justified only to prevent harm to others, not to enforce majority taste.AQA
Mill's proof of the greatest happiness principle: The only evidence something is desirable is that people actually desire it; since people desire happiness, happiness is desirable, and general happiness is…AQA
Mind and bodily parts such as the brain: Minds are not identical to any part of a body, such as the brain or a region of it.AQA
Mind-dependent vs mind-independent: Sense-data are mind-dependent, while the objects that cause them are mind-independent.AQA
Mind-independence: The condition that moral properties would not depend on human minds, attitudes or practices.AQA
Mind-independence of moral properties: The wrongness would still hold even if no one believed it, approved of it or wanted it to be true.AQA
Mind-independent bodies: Bodies that perception involves receiving ideas caused by them, rather than depending on being perceived.AQA
Modality: The distinction concerning possibility and impossibility, rather than how certain we feel about a claim.AQA
Mode of presentation: The way a fact is grasped, which changes from discursive knowledge through descriptions and theory to experiential knowledge through the experience itself.AQA
Moral anti-realism: The view Mackie defends by two routes, holding that there are no objective moral values, though moral language and feeling remain explicable.AQA
Moral error theory: Moral statements express beliefs and so are truth-apt, but they are systematically and uniformly false.AQA
Moral evil: Suffering and wrongdoing brought about by the free choices of moral agents, such as a person deliberately deceiving, torturing or exploiting another.AQA
Moral law and rational agency: Only a categorical imperative can express morality, because moral requirements bind regardless of inclination.AQA
Moral reasoning and consistency: Moral reasoning is possible through testing the consistency of universal prescriptions.AQA
Moral responsibility: Bearing on whether the origin of the action lies in the agent and whether they knew the relevant particulars, such as what they were doing and to whom.AQA
Moral worth: For Kant, moral worth attaches only to acting out of duty rather than to mere conformity of the outward act.AQA
Motion and change: The starting point of the First Way: things change, and whatever changes is moved by another.AQA
Motive versus consequences: Moral worth lies in the motive of duty rather than in the outcome produced, since consequences cannot supply unconditional moral worth.AQA
Motive versus outward action: The distinction turns on why an action is done, not merely on what is done, so the same visible behaviour can fall on either side.AQA
Multiple realisability: The same functional role could be filled by different physical systems, so silicon, neurons or alien biology could all realise the same mental state.AQA

N

Natural evil: Suffering arising from processes and events that are not the choices of moral agents, such as earthquakes, disease, drought and the resulting famine.AQA
Naturalist and non-naturalist branches of realism: Realism can be naturalist, holding that moral properties are natural properties, or non-naturalist, holding that they are sui generis.AQA
Naturalist utilitarianism and Bentham's hedonic calculus: Goodness is a natural property such as maximising pleasure or welfare, and right action is what produces the greatest quantity of pleasure over pain.AQA
Naturalist virtue ethics and human flourishing: Virtues and flourishing are natural features of human life, so claims about what a virtuous person would do report natural facts about human functioning.AQA
Necessary and sufficient conditions: Each condition is individually necessary, so removing any one means there is no knowledge, and together the three are jointly sufficient.AQA
Necessary conditions: Conditions each of which is required for knowledge, so that if one is absent knowledge cannot occur.AQA
Necessary versus contingent beings: Anselm's possible reply that God alone is a necessary being while an island is contingent.AQA
Necessary versus contingent existence: Malcolm distinguishes contingent existence, which can be conceived away, from necessary existence, which cannot coherently be denied.AQA
New Knowledge / Old Fact: The response that Mary gains new propositional knowledge, but this is knowledge of physical facts that she already knew in a different way.AQA
Non-cognitivism: The view that religious utterances do not express factual beliefs but something else, such as attitudes, commitments, emotions or a way of life.AQA
Non-identity of mind and body: The claim that minds are not the same as bodies, nor identical to any part of a body such as the brain.AQA
Non-intentional: Not about anything, unlike a belief that represents the world.AQA
Non-synonymy of terms: 'Mental state' and 'brain state' do not mean the same, so the identity is not an analytic reduction.AQA
Non-voluntary action: An action done through ignorance without regret, so responsibility is limited.AQA
Normal incredulity: Everyday, local doubt in which a particular report is disbelieved because of specific evidence, and the belief could in principle be settled.AQA

O

Objection to direct realism: The argument from illusion is used against the view that we are immediately aware of mind-independent objects and their properties.AQA
Objective claim: A claim that purports to be true or false independently of what anyone thinks or feels, offered as a mind-independent fact.AQA
Objective goods: Things such as knowledge, autonomy, friendship or flourishing, with which other non-hedonistic versions identify the good.AQA
Ockham’s Razor: A principle of parsimony: do not multiply entities beyond necessity, preferring the simpler explanation when rival explanations fit the evidence equally well.AQA
Omnibenevolence: The claim that God is supremely good, which raises questions about the relation between goodness and God's will.AQA
Omnipotence: The claim that God is all-powerful, raising the question of what 'all-powerful' means, for example whether it includes the power to do the logically impossible.AQA
Omniscience: The claim that God knows everything, including all truths and, on some accounts, future contingents.AQA
Ontological argument: Moves from God's essence as supremely perfect to God's existence.AQA
Ontological reduction: The claim that mental states are identical with brain states, so only one kind of entity exists, described in two ways.AQA
Order and coherence of sensation: Features of experience that the hypothesis of an external cause is meant to explain.AQA
Ordinary objects as collections of ideas: Tables and chairs just are collections of mind-dependent ideas, rather than material substances.AQA
Ordinary-language analysis of mental talk: Propositions about mental states are propositions about behavioural dispositions, expressed in everyday vocabulary such as 'would do X if Y' rather than the…AQA

P

Paley's Natural Theology: Work in which the same problem of apparent disorder is posed and answered, because contrivance of means to ends remains evident.AQA
Parable of the Partisan: Mitchell's reply to Flew, in which a resistance fighter meets a stranger who claims to lead the resistance and trusts him despite reports of him helping the…AQA
Paradox: A statement or set of statements that, from apparently acceptable premises and apparently valid reasoning, yields a conclusion that seems absurd or…AQA
Parallel reasoning: A parallel case constructed to test whether the same logic holds when applied elsewhere.AQA
Perception as a source of knowledge: The claim that perception can give knowledge about the external world, since awareness reaches the world itself.AQA
Perceptual variation: The fact that the same object can appear differently to different perceivers, or to one perceiver in different conditions.AQA
Perfections and dependence: If he could give himself existence he would give himself every perfection, which he lacks, so he cannot be the cause of his own continued existence.AQA
Phenomenal character of experience: What is assessed by asking whether it can be captured by any mode of physical description.AQA
Phenomenal knowledge: Knowledge of what the experience is like, which Mary allegedly lacked before seeing red for the first time.AQA
Phenomenal property: The subjective, felt character of an experience: what it is like for the subject to be in that state.AQA
Philo's critique of the analogy: The resemblance is weak and remote, so the analogy supports only a limited, imperfect designer at most.AQA
Philosophical method and thought experiments: Our sense of conceiving a zombie may be illusory, resting on incomplete physical knowledge, while defenders reply that such a being is clearly imaginable.AQA
Philosophical scepticism: A systematic, theoretical doubt about whether knowledge is possible at all in a given domain, questioning the justification of whole classes of belief.AQA
Philosophical zombie: A being physically and functionally identical to a conscious human, with the same brain states, behaviour and dispositions to report experience, yet with no…AQA
Physicalism: The view that everything is physical or supervenes upon the physical, including properties, events, objects and any substance(s) that exist.AQA
Physicalism and its denial: The view that mental properties reduce to or supervene on the physical, which property dualism denies for at least some mental properties.AQA
Physicalist reduction and the mental: Any theory that denies the mental, or redescribes it as nothing but physical, must explain away something we seem to know more directly than we know brain…AQA
Physicalist reply: The response that Mary gains ability knowledge but no new propositional knowledge, so her complete physical information was complete after all.AQA
Plato's theory of recollection: The claim that knowledge is already latent in the soul and drawn out by questioning, supporting recollection of truths known before birth.AQA
Practical and argumentative uses: The term is used both for practical dilemmas in ethics and for argumentative dilemmas, where an opponent is offered two alternatives and either leads to a…AQA
Practical wisdom and deliberation: The intellectual virtue that identifies the appropriate action in a particular situation, grasping the relevant features and weighing them.AQA
Precision in philosophical terminology: Using terminology precisely, identifying whether an item claims something truth-evaluable and separating the proposition from its wording.AQA
Preference satisfaction: The good as the satisfaction of informed preferences, weighed equally, so an act is right when it satisfies as many as possible.AQA
Premise and conclusion structure: An argument has at least one premise and a conclusion linked so that the premise is meant to support the conclusion.AQA
Premises and assumptions: A premise is a stated reason offered in support of a claim, while an assumption is an unstated premise the argument needs but does not spell out.AQA
Prescriptive meaning: Moral language guides action and commends it, rather than merely describing or reporting a feeling.AQA
Primary qualities: Qualities inseparable from a body whatever changes it undergoes, such as solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.AQA
Primary versus secondary qualities: Locke's distinction between primary qualities, which are mind-independent, and secondary qualities, which are powers in objects to produce ideas in us.AQA
Probabilistic arguments for God: Arguments treating order as evidence raising the likelihood of theism rather than proving it deductively.AQA
Problem of evil and imperfection: Apparent imperfection and evil in the world count against inferring a perfect or benevolent designer.AQA
Proof of the external world: Argues that God exists, is no deceiver, and therefore guarantees that clear and distinct perceptions of corporeal things are true.AQA
Property dualism: The view that mental properties are irreducible to physical properties, not that a separate soul exists.AQA
Property dualism versus physicalism: One physical substance with two kinds of property, phenomenal and physical, rather than physicalism, on which the zombie is impossible.AQA
Property dualism versus substance dualism: Property dualism accepts one kind of substance, the physical, while substance dualism holds that there are two kinds of substance.AQA
Proposition: The content that a statement expresses, considered apart from the particular sentence or speaker.AQA
Propositional knowledge: Knowledge that something is the case, expressible in true statements such as knowing that red light has a wavelength of about 700 nm.AQA
Propositional knowledge as the target of epistemology: Epistemology's standard target, while the other kinds resist analysis in the same way.AQA
Provisional belief versus unfalsifiable blik: A belief that remains genuinely factual because the believer admits the evidence counts against it and would be shaken if the cause were betrayed, unlike an…AQA

Q

Qualia: Intrinsic and non-intentional phenomenal properties that are introspectively accessible, a term used by some but not all philosophers.AQA
Qualitative hedonism: Mill accepts hedonism but argues pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, so higher mental pleasures rank above lower bodily ones.AQA
Quantitative measurement of pleasure: Treating all pleasures as alike in kind and comparable in amount, so that they can be measured and summed.AQA
Question-begging: Assuming what the argument is meant to prove, often by smuggling the conclusion into a premise.AQA

R

Rational activity: The exercise of reason, which is distinctive of humans since nutrition and perception are shared with other living things.AQA
Rational nature and dignity: The capacity to set ends and act on principles, which gives persons dignity rather than a mere price.AQA
Rationalism: The view offering reason as a source of knowledge, within which both intuition and deduction are routes by which reason yields knowledge.AQA
Rationalist method and its limits: The test is applied by reason alone, not by the senses, because sensory ideas can be obscure or muddled, though clarity and distinctness may feel compelling…AQA
Real predicate: A genuine predicate tells us something about the subject, adding a property to the concept, as 'red' adds a property to 'apple'.AQA
Realism about mental states: Treating the posits of folk-psychology as real rather than as useful fictions, because it predicts and explains behaviour well.AQA
Realism versus anti-realism: Realism holds that mind-independent moral facts exist, while anti-realist positions such as emotivism treat moral utterances as expressions of attitude rather…AQA
Realist responses to verificationism: Possible replies such as denying the verification principle or arguing moral truths are known by intuition.AQA
Reason as a source of moral principles: Moral judgements are reached by rational reflection, as when someone works out that a principle must be applied consistently to similar cases.AQA
Reasons and support: A stated reason offered in support of a claim is a premise, and argument analysis maps what is claimed and what supports it.AQA
Reducibility of mental properties: Analysable entirely in physical terms, so that the mental property is nothing over and above the physical; property dualism denies this for at least some…AQA
Reductio ad absurdum: A form of objection showing that the reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion when applied elsewhere.AQA
Reduction of moral properties to natural properties: Moral properties are natural properties, knowable in principle by the same broad kinds of enquiry as other natural facts.AQA
Rejection of infinite regress: Refusing an endless series, whether of moved movers or of causes, as unable to explain change or causation.AQA
Rejection of perceptual intermediaries: The denial that sense-data or representations are inserted between the perceiver and the object, so awareness reaches the world itself.AQA
Relativity of perception: The same relativity affecting secondary qualities, as when warmth is felt differently by two hands, also affects perceived size and motion.AQA
Relevance of the distinction to the problem of evil: The distinction matters for the problem of evil because free-will defences address moral evil more readily than natural evil.AQA
Reliabilism: A theory of knowledge that drops the demand for internal justification and instead asks whether a belief was produced by a reliable process.AQA
Reliabilism as an externalist condition: An account on which the reliability need not be accessible to the believer, so the condition is external to the believer's awareness.AQA
Reliable process: A process such as perception, memory or sound reasoning that generally yields true beliefs, unlike a lucky guess even if it happens to be correct.AQA
Replacement of common-sense psychology: The prediction that mature neuroscience may replace rather than reduce folk psychology, so talk of beliefs and desires may be abandoned.AQA
Replacing justification with reliable formation: The revision in which the justification condition is replaced by a reliable-formation condition, giving belief, truth and reliable formation (R+T+B).AQA
Representation: Sense-data represent the mind-independent objects that cause them.AQA
Respect for the moral law: Acting out of duty means performing the act because it is morally required, from respect for the moral law, regardless of inclination.AQA
Responses grounding goodness in God's nature: A third move, that God's commands express his necessarily good nature, which is a response to consider rather than a solution the dilemma settles by itself.AQA
Rule utilitarianism and indirect defences: The response that rule utilitarianism can accommodate special obligations, and that partiality often produces the greatest overall happiness.AQA
Russell's critique: The objection that the inference to a cause of the universe as a whole is invalid unless independently justified, because wholes can lack properties their…AQA
Ryle and soft behaviourism: Gilbert Ryle is the named proponent of the view that propositions about mental states are propositions about behavioural dispositions.AQA

S

Scope: Deliberately broad, covering properties, events, objects and any substance or substances that exist.AQA
Scope of doubt: The difference between philosophical scepticism, which targets whole classes of belief and standards of justification, and incredulity, which targets…AQA
Scope of moral consideration: The question of which beings count in the utilitarian calculation, such as animals, the severely cognitively disabled, or future generations.AQA
Scope of the claim: Either every mental state has intentional properties, or only some do.AQA
Secondary qualities: Powers a body has, by virtue of its primary qualities, to produce particular ideas in perceivers, such as colours, sounds, tastes and smells.AQA
Self-application problem: If the sceptic claims to know that nothing can be known, that claim itself falls under the doubt.AQA
Self-knowledge and privileged access: First-person knowledge of one's own mental states that is direct and typically non-inferential, giving seemingly immediate access to those states.AQA
Self-refutation: The charge that stating the theory undercuts its own utterance, since if it is true there are no beliefs to hold it.AQA
Semantic reduction: A claim about meaning: every proposition that appears to talk about a mental state can be translated with no change of meaning into propositions speaking only…AQA
Sensation and reflection: The two sources from which ideas come, explaining knowledge without innatism.AQA
Sense datum: Something mind-dependent that is directly experienced, which the argument claims we are directly aware of in both veridical perception and hallucination.AQA
Sense-data: Mind-dependent objects that are the immediate objects of perception and are caused by and represent mind-independent objects.AQA
Sense-data and appearances: What we are immediately aware of in illusion, being mind-dependent rather than the external object itself.AQA
Sense-data and inference: We are directly acquainted with appearances and construct beliefs about physical objects, so certainty about the external world is limited.AQA
Simplicity and explanatory power: The criteria making the external world the best hypothesis, since it is the simplest explanation accounting for the features of our sensations.AQA
Skill analogy: Acquiring virtue is compared to learning a skill or craft through practice and guidance.AQA
Society and convention as a source of moral principles: Moral principles are generated and sustained by social agreement, custom, upbringing or shared convention.AQA
Solipsism: The far narrower claim that only one's own mind exists.AQA
Soundness: A sound proof is valid and also needs true premises.AQA
Spatial order and purpose: The arrangement of parts adjusted for a purpose, which Paley emphasises rather than mere regularity.AQA
Speaker attitude and perspective: Certainty and strength of feeling are psychological features, whereas objectivity concerns independence from attitudes.AQA
Special obligations and relationships: The ordinary moral experience in which parents, friends and citizens are permitted, even required, to favour their own.AQA
Standard response: The reply that the paradox trades on an incoherent task, like a square circle, so failing to do it is no limitation.AQA
Strong reading: The claim that all mental states have phenomenal properties, so every belief, hope or calculation carries a felt quality.AQA
Subjective claim: A claim that depends on a subject's experience, attitude or perspective, reporting how it seems or feels to someone.AQA
Substance dualism: The theory against which the claim that a mind without a body is not conceivable is used as a premise.AQA
Sufficiency versus necessity: Attacking necessity concerns a condition being absent while knowledge remains; attacking sufficiency concerns all conditions present but no knowledge.AQA
Supervenience: A dependence relation whereby if two situations are identical in every physical respect, they cannot differ in any other respect.AQA
Supervenience of the mental on the physical: There can be no difference in mental properties without a difference in physical properties; property dualism denies this for at least some mental properties.AQA
Support for indirect realism: The conclusion that the immediate object of perception is mind-dependent supports the view that what we are immediately aware of is a sense-datum or…AQA

T

Tabula rasa: The claim that the mind begins without innate ideas and gains content through experience.AQA
Temporal causation and a beginning of the universe: The claim that the universe had a beginning in time, so the causal series is a first event requiring a cause rather than a hierarchy of simultaneous dependence.AQA
Temporal order and regularity: Regularities that persist through time, such as the same laws of nature holding yesterday, today and tomorrow.AQA
The 'death of a thousand qualifications': The believer keeps adding qualifications so the claim survives every counter-observation, emptying it of content.AQA
The 'Master' argument against unperceived matter: We cannot conceive a sensible object existing unconceived, so mind-independent matter is incoherent.AQA
The acquaintance knowledge response: Mary does not gain new propositional knowledge but does gain acquaintance knowledge, so the gain is not propositional and physicalism is not refuted.AQA
The analogy with geometrical essences: Just as a triangle must have three angles equal to two right angles, existence follows from God's essence.AQA
The categorical imperative as a test of maxims: Testing the subjective principle on which an agent acts by asking whether a world where everyone acted on it is coherent and could be consistently willed.AQA
The cogito: The recognition that while he is thinking he cannot doubt that he exists, grasped by reason alone without appeal to sense experience.AQA
The coherence of the concept of God: The only alternative to God's existence being possible is that the concept is self-contradictory.AQA
The concept-to-existence inference: Moving from a concept of God to God's actual existence without any observational input, which the empiricist rejects.AQA
The criterion of truth: Clear and distinct perception is the test by which reason recognises truth, rather than relying on the senses.AQA
The dream argument: The second wave, since I cannot be certain I am awake, so even my body and surroundings may be doubted.AQA
The evil demon and doubt about reason: The third wave, where a malicious deceiver could make me go wrong even about simple arithmetic and geometry, so those too are suspended.AQA
The existence of God as a guarantee: The idea of a perfect being is argued to require a perfect cause, so God exists, and a perfect God would not allow systematic deception.AQA
The existence of minds as substances: The claim that minds genuinely exist as a distinct kind of thing, that is, what fundamentally exists.AQA
The fact-value distinction: The logical distance between descriptive claims and normative claims, where no set of purely factual premises entails a moral conclusion without a further…AQA
The falsification challenge: If no possible evidence could count against a religious claim, its status as a factual assertion is questioned.AQA
The formula of humanity: The second formulation of the categorical imperative, commanding that humanity be treated always as an end and never merely as a means.AQA
The gap between possibility and actual fact: A possibility claim does not entail the corresponding actuality claim, so it tells us nothing directly about the actual world.AQA
The good will: The only thing good without qualification, good not because of what it achieves or the results it produces.AQA
The inference from first cause to God: Identifying the cause of the universe with God, a further step that needs independent support and requires an additional argument.AQA
The intuition–deduction distinction: Intuition is non-inferential and immediate, whereas deduction is inferential and mediated by premises.AQA
The knowledge argument: An argument that can be applied to functional facts, since no amount of facts about function suffices to explain qualia.AQA
The logic of moral inference: The inference from descriptive premises to a prescriptive conclusion is not obvious, and the new relation of 'ought' needs to be founded and explained.AQA
The mean relative to circumstances: The mean between excess and deficiency, selected by practical wisdom in the particular situation.AQA
The meaning(s) of the attributes: Each attribute is contested, so learners should be able to state a definition, explain an interpretation and identify a difficulty.AQA
The motivating force of moral judgement: To judge an action wrong is already to be against it, so moral judgements move us to act.AQA
The Naturalistic Fallacy: The error of defining or deriving 'good' from natural properties alone.AQA
The ontological argument: An a priori proof that defines God as the most perfect being and claims existence is a perfection, so a most perfect being must exist.AQA
The open question argument: For any proposed reduction of 'good' to a natural property, it remains an open, genuinely meaningful question whether that property is good, so the…AQA
The paradox of the stone: A dilemma asking whether God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it, either way undermining omnipotence.AQA
The reliability of reason and the external world: The proof of the external world moves from concepts to existence, which the Fork classifies as illegitimate.AQA
The role of good will and maxims: Good or bad attach to the will and its maxims rather than to results, so a good will is good in itself regardless of consequences.AQA
The source of moral goodness: What goodness depends on; if goodness is independent of God's commands, God is not this and appears subject to a standard beyond himself.AQA
The substantial self: A continuing self that the cogito presupposes but which experience does not directly reveal.AQA
The tripartite analysis of knowledge: The account of knowledge as justified true belief, which the no false lemmas condition responds to in Gettier-style cases.AQA
The tripartite definition of knowledge: Defining knowledge as justified true belief, as the tripartite account does.AQA
The uniqueness of the universe: There is only one universe and no other worlds to compare, so the design inference cannot be checked or strengthened.AQA
The unreliability of the senses: The first wave of doubt, since the senses sometimes deceive us, so they cannot be trusted where they might be deceiving me now.AQA
The utility calculus: A weighing of an action by dimensions such as intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent.AQA
The verification principle: The criterion holding that utterances such as 'God exists' are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, so are literally meaningless rather than false.AQA
Theories of the good: Accounts of what the good consists in, which non-hedonistic versions define differently while keeping the maximising structure.AQA
Time-lag argument: An objection to direct realism based on the finite speed of light, since distant objects are perceived as they were in the past.AQA
Timelessness (eternity): The view that God exists altogether outside time, with no earlier or later and no succession in the divine life, seeing all times at once.AQA
Trademark argument: Reasons from the idea of a supremely perfect being to a cause adequate to that idea.AQA
Treating persons merely as means: Treating someone solely as a tool, ignoring their rational agency, as in deception and coercion, which bypass or override the capacity to consent.AQA
Tripartite analysis of knowledge: An analysis in which knowledge is true belief that is justified, with the three conditions being belief, truth and justification.AQA
Trust and commitment: Trusting a person despite contrary evidence, where the believer's commitment is provisional and held against appearances rather than abandoned.AQA
Truth: This concerns actual fact, and is to be distinguished from consistency.AQA
Truth by logical form: A statement is true solely in virtue of its logical form, so it cannot be false.AQA
Truth by meaning: A statement is true by the meanings of its terms, so it cannot be false.AQA
Truth in virtue of meaning: An analytic proposition is true or false solely in virtue of the meanings of its constituent terms, so its denial yields a contradiction.AQA
Truth values and propositions: Truth values are true and false, attributed to propositions, that is, to claims that can be assessed as correct or incorrect.AQA
Truth versus belief: A proposition can be true even if nobody believes it, and widely believed claims can be false.AQA
Truth versus justification: Justification concerns the reasons someone has for holding a claim.AQA
Truth versus validity: Validity concerns the form of an argument rather than the truth of its parts.AQA
Truth-aptness of ethical language: Whether a moral statement is the kind of thing that could be true or false.AQA
Truth-aptness of moral judgements: Moral statements are capable of being true or false because they report facts.AQA
Truth-aptness of religious language: Whether religious utterances can be true or false in the descriptive sense, which cognitivists affirm and non-cognitivists deny.AQA
Truth-conducive process: A process that generally yields true beliefs, so that ordinary perceptual beliefs can be knowledge without the believer having to prove that it is.AQA
Truth-evaluable content: Content that claims something true or false, which a question or command does not normally have.AQA
Type identity: The claim that every type of mental state just is a type of brain state, not merely caused by it.AQA
Tyranny of the majority: The risk that a numerical majority uses law or social opinion to crush a minority's legitimate interests.AQA

U

Universal consent: The claim that if ideas were innate they would be universally assented to, but no principle is agreed on by all, including children and the 'idiot'.AQA
Universalisability: A speaker is committed to the same prescription in any relevantly similar situation.AQA
Universalisation of maxims: Acting only on a maxim that you could will to become a universal law.AQA
Utilitarian focus on welfare or happiness: Utilitarians judge actions by the amount of pleasure or happiness produced, so a lie can be right if it maximises welfare.AQA

V

Validity: This concerns whether a conclusion follows from premises, and is to be distinguished from consistency.AQA
Validity of inferences: Affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent are valid inferences, whereas affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are invalid.AQA
Validity, soundness, certainty and probability: Validity is when the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true, and soundness is validity plus premises that are actually true.AQA
Variation in perceived qualities: Some perceived features vary with perceivers, which the distinction explains while bodies retain primary qualities.AQA
Virtue as character trait: A stable character trait or disposition to act and feel well, not a one-off act or a rule.AQA
Virtue as excellence: Stable excellences that enable a person to reason and act well, perfecting the distinctively human function.AQA
Virtue epistemology: An account that replaces justification with an account of epistemic virtue, giving V+T+B.AQA
Virtue-based meaning of good and bad: Good and bad characterise persons and their traits, and right action is what a virtuous person would characteristically do in the circumstances.AQA
Virtues as character dispositions: A stable disposition that shapes both what an agent notices as salient and how they act.AQA
Virtuous activity over a complete life: Eudaimonia consists in activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life, not a passive state.AQA
Voluntary action: An action done by the agent with knowledge of what they are doing and without external compulsion, so the agent is responsible.AQA

W

Watch analogy: A watch's arranged parts serving a purpose imply a watchmaker, and Paley extends this reasoning to the universe.AQA
Weak verifiability: A statement is meaningful if some possible observation is relevant to its truth or falsity.AQA
Weaker reading: The claim that at least some mental states have phenomenal properties, while allowing that other states such as abstract reasoning may lack any distinctive…AQA
Weakness of analogy: The analogy is weak because the universe is unlike a machine made by a human craftsman, and we have no experience of universe-making.AQA
Wisdom's Gardener parable: An explorer claims a gardener tends a clearing, but when every possible test fails the believer still insists the gardener is invisible and undetectable.AQA

Z

Zagzebski on definition: Her work on the nature of definition is used to examine what definitions do and their limits.AQA

Other terms

'What it is like' test: The question 'is there something it is like to be in this state?', used to test candidate states for phenomenal character.AQA

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