Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of
knowledge and truth, encompassing the study of the origin, nature, and
limits of human knowledge.

People approach epistemology in various ways; the following categories
originally reflected divisions among schools of philosophy in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but may prove useful in categorizing
certain approximate trends throughout the history of epistemology:

     (1) Rationalists believe there are innate ideas that are not found in
     experience. These ideas exist independently of any experience people
     may have. These ideas may in some way derive from the structure of the
     human mind, or they may exist independently of the mind. If they exist
     independently, they may be understood by a human mind once it reaches a
     necessary degree of sophistication.

     (2) Empiricists (see: scientific method, philosophy of science naive
     empiricism) deny that there are concepts that exist prior to
     experience. For them, all knowledge is a product of human learning,
     based on human perception. Perception, however, may cause concern,
     since illusions, misunderstandings, and hallucinations prove that
     perception does not always depict the world as it really is.

     Some say the existence of mathematical theorems poses a problem for
     empiricists. Mathematical truths certainly do not depend on experience,
     and they can be known prior to experience. Some empiricists reply that
     all mathematical theorems are empty of cognitive content, as they only
     express the relationship of concepts to one another. Rationalists would
     hold that such relationships are indeed a form of cognitive content.

     (3) The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is widely understood as having
     worked out a synthesis between these views. In Kant's view people
     certainly do have knowledge that is prior to experience, which is not
     devoid of cognitive significance. For example, the principle of
     causality. He held that there are a priori synthetic concepts.

People in all schools of thought agree that people have the capacity to
think of questions that no possible appeal to experience could answer. For
instance: Is there an end to time? Is there a God? Is the God of the
philosophers the same as the Biblical God? Is there a reality beyond that
which we can sense? Such questions are termed transcendental, as they seem
to go beyond the limits of rational inquiry. In the 20th century logical
positivists have declared such questions to be totally devoid of cognitive
significance. Others disagree, and hold that only some metaphysical claims
are devoid of cognitive significance, and that others may not be.

No consensus exists as to which epistemology will prove the most productive
in allowing human beings to have the most accurate understanding of the
world. All people use an epistemology, even if unconsciously. Thinking
beings cannot understand and analyze ideas without first having a system to
accept and analyze information in the first place, which we all do. All
people - even children - possess rudimentary and undeveloped epistemologies.
However, those who study some philosophy and logic can begin to recognize
how their own epistemologies work, and such people can choose to change
their epistemology.

An analysis of this topic would be dependent on the system one used to begin
with. One might wonder: What do I have to do, to be sure that I do have the
truth? How can I be sure that my beliefs are true? Is there some sort of
guarantee available to me -- some sort of criterion I might use, in order to
decide, as rationally and as carefully as I possibly could, that indeed what
I believe is actually true?

Suppose someone thought that his or her belief had been arrived at
rationally. Using logic, one might base his or her belief on observation and
experiment, conscientiously answer objections, and so forth. Accordingly,
one would conclude that his or belief is rational. If so, then one's belief
has at least some claim to be true. Rationality provides an indicator of
truth: if your belief is rational, then it is at least probably true. At the
very least, the rationality of a belief gives reason to think the belief is true.

There are a number of features of beliefs, such as rationality,
justification, and probability, that are indicators of truth. Accordingly, a
feature of belief is an epistemic feature if it is at least some indication
that the belief is true.

Many beliefs have lots of positive epistemic features; many beliefs are
quite rational, quite justified, very probably true, highly warranted, and
so on. However, most people, at least in some moments, do not want to rest
content with just being rational because even a rational belief can be
false. To wit, one can be very conscious, careful, and logical in forming a
belief, and so be rational in holding the belief; but it still might be
false. Arguably, one's ultimate ambition for his or her beliefs is
knowledge. If one does know something, then not only is one justified, or
rational, in a belief, one has the truth. Accordingly, when one is thinking
about the epistemic features of one's beliefs, the overarching question is:
When does someone have knowledge? When can someone say that he or she has
knowledge? Skeptics claim that we cannot have knowledge.

Epistemology includes the study of:

  1. the epistemic features of belief, such as justification and
     rationality;
  2. the origin or sources of such features (and thus the sources of
     knowledge);
  3. what knowledge is, i.e., what epistemic features would make a true
     belief knowledge;
  4. whether it is possible to have knowledge.

Epistemologists spend a great deal of time concerning themselves with
various epistemic features of belief, such as justification and rationality.
And they write long articles and books trying to say just when beliefs are
justified, or rational. A related concern is where such epistemic features
ultimately come from. If one says, for example, that his or her belief that
Paris is the capital of France is justified, one can ask: Where did the
justification for that belief come from? This information could have come
from a reliable source of testimony. Another source of justification would
be sense-perception. So epistemology asks: What are the ultimate sources of
justification, rationality, or other epistemic features of belief? And that
allows one to answer a further question: What are the ultimate sources of
knowledge? Which brings one to the question of what knowledge is. The
question here is not what one can know, or even what one does know. The
question is: What would knowledge be, if one had it? A belief has to pass
some sort of muster to count as knowledge. So what features would a belief
have to have, in order to be an actual piece of knowledge -- not just
something that pretends to be knowledge, but which is actually knowledge?

One of the more difficult topics of philosophy is trying to answer, or
otherwise deal with, the challenge that one cannot have knowledge. A number
of philosophers -- not too many, but some -- have said that we cannot have
knowledge. Many philosophers have said that it is very difficult to obtain
knowledge, but they usually do not deny that we have it or that we can have
it. Not so many philosophers, however, have gone so far as to say that we
have no knowledge at all, or (to say something even stronger) that it is
impossible to have knowledge.

Another contemporary approach to epistemology divides the approaches into
two categories: foundationalism and coherentism.

Foundationalism holds that there are basic beliefs in which you can be
certain and that you can be similarly confident in other beliefs derived
rigorously from these. The most famous example of this is Descartes'
statement cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am"), by which he meant that
it is impossible to doubt one's own existence. Others have responded that a
person's observation of his or her own mental activity is not fundamentally
different or more reliable than other observations and does not necessarily
imply a thinker. The difficulty of foundationalism is that no set of basic
beliefs proposed for it are uncontroversial.

Coherentism holds that you are more justified in beliefs if they form a
coherent whole with your other beliefs. A common, cheeky, riposte to this is
called the "drunken sailors" argument, which points out that two drunken
sailors holding each other up may still not be on solid ground. Stated more
formally: a set of beliefs can be internally consistent but still not
reflect the actual world.

Recently, Susan Haack has attempted to fuse these two approaches into her
doctrine of Foundherentalism, which accrues degrees of relative confidence
to beliefs by mediating between the two approaches. She covers this in her
book Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology.

See also: Self-evidence, theory of justification, the regress argument in
epistemology, a priori and a posterior knowledge, knowledge, scepticism,
Common sense and the Diallelus, social epistemology, aesthetics, ethics,
metaphysics, philosophy, ontology, reason, philosophy of science, science education.

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