If Justice Blackmun's statement today was characteristic of the man, so was Justice Scalia's riposte: pithy, barbed and grounded in the certainty of an approach to constitutional law that looks to the intentions of the document's framers.
Fear is grounded in the certainty of the past; hope allows us to explore the uncertainty of the future.
When the confidence that bad policy will not be enacted is grounded in the certainty that the Republicans are too stupid and unhinged to accept "yes" for an answer, we have reached the point of political surrealism.
In opposition to the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein, which is grounded in platitudinous moral certainties, Mr. Sondheim's has reveled in contradiction, paradox and ambivalence.
However, even if Descartes took this view of the certainty of the cogito, he did not accept the general claim that certainty is grounded in indubitability.
From bite mark matching to hair and fiber analysis to "shaken baby syndrome," the courts have done a poor job of demanding that experts be qualified and credible, theories be grounded in science, and statements of certainty be verified with statistical sampling before allowing such expertise to be heard by a jury.
My certainty is grounded in the evidence of corals' natural capacity to adapt and the potential that still exists within the policy realm to halt further climate change (granted, the latter requires a slightly more desperate form of hope than the former).
This certainty is grounded in part, in the cultural and historical context that shaped the interaction between Renisha and her murderer.
If certainty really is grounded in epistemic justification, though, this should not be possible.
The privileged certainty of the cogito is grounded in the "manifest contradiction" (cf. AT 7 36) of trying to think away my present thinking.
But then what explains the certainty of the belief is the fact that it is grounded in the experience; the belief's being subjectively immune to doubt is merely a consequence of its certainty, and not the explanation for it.
