Epistemology
A priori
Knowledge or justification claimed to arise from reason, structure, or necessity rather than from fresh observation alone.
Epistemology
Abduction
Inference to the best explanation: reasoning from observed facts toward the explanation that would make them most intelligible.
Epistemology
Adequate evidence
Support strong enough for the claim being made, given the stakes, alternatives, error costs, and available methods of checking.
Philosophy of Mind
Agency
The capacity to act for reasons, make choices, and own actions as more than happenings that merely pass through a person.
Epistemology
Belief
An action-guiding commitment or confidence state that may sound binary in ordinary speech but often needs finer treatment in careful reasoning.
Philosophical Inquiry
Bias
A systematic tilt in attention, inference, or judgment; not just any opinion, but a patterned distortion that can keep error feeling natural.
Ethics
Bounded agency
The recognition that human action is real but limited by time, knowledge, leverage, emotional endurance, and role constraints.
Ethics
Bounded compassionate agency
Compassion disciplined by realistic limits, role clarity, and durable forms of response rather than by fantasies of unlimited personal obligation.
Rational Thought
Burden of proof
The responsibility to supply reasons or evidence proportionate to the strength and stakes of the claim being pressed.
Epistemology
Certainty
A level of confidence that leaves no live room for doubt; often invoked too quickly when the evidence actually supports only strong probability.
Philosophical Inquiry
Charity
Interpretive generosity: understanding a claim in its strongest plausible form before deciding that it fails.
Ethics
Coherence
Fit among claims within a wider view or system; useful, but not identical to truth just because the pieces hang together neatly.
Ethics
Compassion
Concern for suffering that can guide moral attention, though it still needs discipline so it does not become partiality dressed as virtue.
Ethics
Compassion fade
The tendency for concern to weaken as suffering becomes more numerous, abstract, or statistically large, even when the stakes are objectively greater.
Philosophy of Mind
Consciousness
Subjective awareness or felt experience: what it is like for a being to perceive, think, or undergo something.
Ethics
Consequentialism
A family of ethical views that judges actions mainly by their outcomes rather than by intention, rule, or character alone.
Philosophy of Science
Correlation
A statistical pattern of co-variation between things; suggestive, often useful, but not on its own a demonstration of causation.
Philosophical Inquiry
Correspondence
The idea that truth depends on how claims relate to reality, not merely on usefulness, coherence, or social endorsement.
Epistemology
Counterfactual
A claim about what would happen if things were otherwise; central to explanation, causation, and responsibility.
Epistemology
Credence
A degree of confidence rather than a simple yes-or-no belief; useful when evidence supports partial confidence.
Rational Thought
Credencing
The practice of assigning and revising graded confidence rather than pretending every judgment arrives as certainty or disbelief.
Ethics
Culpability
Moral blameworthiness, which depends not only on harm but also on agency, awareness, alternatives, and control.
Epistemology
Deduction
Reasoning in which the conclusion follows necessarily if the premises are true and the structure is valid.
Ethics
Deontology
A family of ethical views emphasizing duty, rule, principle, or respect for persons rather than consequences alone.
Philosophy of Mind
Determinism
The view that every event, including human action, is fixed by prior conditions and laws of nature.
Ethics
Divine command theory
The view that moral authority depends on God's will or commands rather than on independent moral facts or human constructions alone.
Epistemology
Dogmatism
Confidence insulated from challenge: a posture that treats favored explanations as settled before they have survived real scrutiny.
Epistemology
Doubt
A live sense that a claim may be wrong, incomplete, or under-supported; healthy when disciplined, paralyzing when absolutized.
Epistemology
Doxastic voluntarism
The thesis that belief is, in some sense, under voluntary control rather than something that merely happens in response to evidence.
Metaphysics
Dualism
The view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of reality rather than two descriptions of the same thing.
Metaphysics
Emergence
The idea that higher-level patterns or properties arise from lower-level conditions without being exhausted by simple reduction to them.
Epistemology
Empiricism
The broad view that experience and observation are central to knowledge, even if reason still has an organizing role.
Epistemology
Epistemology
The branch of philosophy asking what knowledge is, what justifies belief, and how inquiry can remain responsible under uncertainty.
Ethics
Equality
A claim that people deserve the same standing, rights, or consideration in some relevant respect; not the same as uniformity in every outcome.
Philosophy of Language
Equivocation
A reasoning failure in which the same word shifts meaning across an argument while pretending to remain stable.
Ethics
Ethics
The branch of philosophy concerned with value, obligation, blame, character, and what human beings ought to do or become.
Epistemology
Evidence
What genuinely bears on whether a claim is true: not just whatever reassures, flatters, or happens to be available.
Humanistic Philosophies
Existentialism
A family of views centered on freedom, responsibility, meaning, anxiety, and the fact that human life must be lived rather than merely classified.
Philosophy of Science
Explanation
An answer that does more than restate a fact: it shows why, how, or in virtue of what something makes sense.
Epistemology
Faith
Trust, commitment, or confidence that may be religious but need not be blind; the dispute is usually about what entitles it and where its limits lie.
Philosophy of Science
Falsifiability
A feature of a claim or theory that allows conceivable evidence to count against it instead of protecting it from every possible correction.
Rational Thought
Framing
The way a question or issue is set up so that some features become salient while others fade from view, often steering judgment before argument begins.
Philosophy of Mind
Free will
The sense in which human beings may be responsible choosers rather than mere conduits of prior causes or external programming.
Philosophy of Mind
Functionalism
The view that mental states are identified chiefly by what they do within a system rather than by the material out of which they are built.
Ethics
Human rights
Claims about protections or dignities owed to persons as persons, not merely as members of a favored group or successful coalition.
Political Philosophy
Identity
What makes a person or thing the same across change, and what features count as central rather than incidental in that continuity.
Philosophical Inquiry
Ideology
A package of assumptions, loyalties, and interpretations that organizes perception and judgment; not just an insult for views one dislikes.
Philosophy of Science
Induction
Reasoning from observed patterns toward broader expectations, always carrying the question of how far the pattern may responsibly travel.
Epistemology
Inference
The movement from some claims or observations to another claim that is supposed to follow from them in some disciplined way.
Ethics
Is/Ought gap
The warning that descriptions of what is the case do not automatically generate conclusions about what ought to be done.
Ethics
Justice
A standard of right ordering in treatment, institutions, and distribution; broader than punishment and deeper than mere personal preference.
Epistemology
Knowledge
More than true belief and more than confidence: a claim to having gotten reality right in a way that is responsibly grounded.
Epistemology
Logic
The study of valid structure in thought and argument, including what follows from what and why some inferences only appear to work.
Metaphysics
Materialism
The view that reality is fundamentally material or physical, with mind and value ultimately depending on that physical basis.
Humanistic Philosophies
Meaning
What makes a life, action, symbol, or statement intelligible or significant rather than empty, random, or merely decorative.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics
The branch of philosophy asking what reality is like at the deepest level: what exists, what depends on what, and what kinds of things are basic.
Philosophy of Science
Methodological naturalism
The practice of explaining phenomena by appeal to publicly testable natural causes; a method rule, not automatically a final worldview.
Ethics
Moral demandingness
The degree to which a moral outlook asks for sacrifice, self-limitation, or costly action before it counts a person as decent or serious.
Ethics
Moral distress
Psychological strain produced by feeling pressed by serious moral concerns while lacking a clear, proportionate, or effective path of response.
Ethics
Moral non-realism
A family of views denying that moral claims describe objective moral facts in the realist sense, while still allowing moral language to do important work.
Ethics
Moral realism
The view that at least some moral claims are true independently of individual preference, tribal endorsement, or passing consensus.
Philosophical Inquiry
Narrative
A meaning-shaping story frame that can illuminate reality or distort it by making events serve a preselected moral or tribal script.
Metaphysics
Nihilism
A family of views denying objective meaning, value, truth, or purpose in some domain; often invoked loosely when the real issue is disillusionment or skepticism.
Ethics
Normativity
The force of should, ought, reason, permission, or obligation; the dimension of a claim that purports to guide action or evaluation.
Metaphysics
Objectivity
Independence from merely personal preference or point of view; not the elimination of all perspective, but accountable contact with what is really there.
Metaphysics
Ontology
The part of metaphysics that asks what kinds of things exist and what categories of being we actually need.
Epistemology
Operational rigor
The habit of translating high-minded standards into visible practices: checks, thresholds, tests, objections, and revision procedures.
Ethics
Pathological altruism
A pattern in which caring impulses become self-damaging, manipulative, or counterproductive because compassion is not being guided by proportion or realistic limits.
Epistemology
Perceived control
What a situation feels actionable enough for a person to influence, which may or may not line up with actual leverage.
Epistemology
Perceived responsibility
The felt sense that some harm or outcome belongs on one's moral ledger, whether or not agency, evidence, or leverage actually support that conclusion.
Philosophers
Phenomenology
A way of doing philosophy that begins with lived experience and the structures of appearance before reducing everything to outside measurement alone.
Metaphysics
Principle of sufficient reason
The claim that things do not simply obtain for no reason at all: there must be some basis, cause, or explanation for why they are so.
Epistemology
Probability
A disciplined way of representing uncertainty, not a substitute for reasoning about assumptions, evidence, and stakes.
Rational Thought
Problematic news consumption
A pattern of information intake that inflates alarm, erodes proportion, or manufactures false duty by exposing the mind to more tragedy than it can responsibly process.
Rational Thought
Psychic numbing
The weakening of felt response when suffering is experienced at large scale, causing the mind to go flat precisely where the numbers grow more severe.
Epistemology
Rationality
The discipline of proportioning belief, inference, and action to reasons, evidence, and coherent standards rather than to impulse alone.
Metaphysics
Reductionism
The attempt to explain higher-level realities entirely in lower-level terms; sometimes illuminating, sometimes flattening what matters.
Ethics
Relativism
The view that truth, value, or justification is always relative to a scheme, culture, or perspective; often confused with the milder point that context matters.
Epistemology
Reliability
The tendency of a method, source, or cognitive process to produce truth or near-truth often enough to deserve trust.
Philosophy of Science
Science
A disciplined, self-correcting form of inquiry that uses observation, modeling, testing, and criticism to learn about the world.
Philosophy of Science
Scientism
The overextension of scientific authority into domains where empirical method may inform inquiry without exhausting it.
Ethics
Scope leakage of happiness
A pattern in which the emotional burden of remote suffering spills beyond the boundaries of actual agency and begins colonizing ordinary happiness.
Philosophy of Language
Semantics
The study of meaning, reference, and how words or sentences manage to say anything determinate at all.
Philosophical Inquiry
Skepticism
A demand for stronger justification before assent; healthy when it disciplines inquiry, self-defeating when it refuses any standard short of impossibility.
Political Philosophy
Social contract
A way of grounding political authority by asking what terms of cooperation free and roughly equal persons could reasonably accept.
Philosophical Inquiry
Steel-manning
Reconstructing an opponent's position in its strongest plausible form before criticizing it.
Humanistic Philosophies
Stoicism
An ancient philosophy of disciplined judgment, agency, and emotional training; not mere emotional suppression or detached toughness.
Philosophy of Mind
Subjectivity
What depends on a perspective, standpoint, or lived experience; not therefore unreal, but not automatically a public measure either.
Epistemology
Syllogism
A structured form of reasoning in which a conclusion follows from premises through explicit logical form.
Philosophical Inquiry
Truth
A standard by which claims answer to reality rather than merely to preference, convenience, usefulness, or tribal endorsement.
Ethics
Unmitigated communion
A style of moral or relational orientation in which another's suffering is absorbed too directly into the self, with too little boundary, mediation, or proportion.
Ethics
Utilitarianism
A consequentialist view that evaluates actions chiefly by how much overall well-being, happiness, or preference satisfaction they produce.
Ethics
Virtue ethics
An ethical approach centered on character, practical wisdom, and the cultivation of the kinds of people capable of living well.
Philosophical Inquiry
Worldview
A broad interpretive frame that organizes what a person treats as real, valuable, knowable, and worth doing.