Talk:Epistemology/Archive 1

An anonymous user from 203.109.252.13 filled this article with discussion. I'm putting his comments here in case someone might find some use for them, but otherwise I'm reverting the article to its previous unpolished but at least mildly useful state. --Lee Daniel Crocker

The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge.

It is less a branch than the starting point. Episteme and paradigm both mean "over-write" as in 'above'; after Hermes" "as above, so below". It deals with how to impose order whereas most of our knowledge is of the handed on, historical variety as if order has always existed. Natural order has always existed but our social order is, geologically speaking, rather recent, at best a 100,000 years old.

Emmanuel Kant wrote most of what is today dealt with as epistemology, the logic of contriving epistles or chapters or mandalas as units of knowledge. But his world view was static, beginning with Bishop Usher's abstraction from the Bible as created by God in 4004 BCE. Einstein introduced the idea that our world is dynamic, making time more important than space. That word "order" in philosophy always means "OUR KIND" of order, as if theory can prescribe to reality. Kant's static world model forced science to invent time as a 4th dimension that enters from a realm of chaos into our spatial object order as observed by the senses.

The oldest known human efforts to impose order show up in stone age art, shown by Leroi Courhan to have a grammar or conventions in common for over a 100 caves in France. This more or less conforms to cave art elsewhere in the world but needs a lot more research. It amounts to a means of representation we now call art, informed by gestural or body language as mime and rituals, nowadays called method. Its logic is both that of the natural order of our world and aesthetics by which things fit properly and beautifully together as a unit, we enact by way of the harmony of our emotions, also known as magic by way of empathy. Picasso said about stone age art that there's nothing new invented since. Stone age man had eidetic visual recall in three dimensions as happens for us outside the world of words. Children do still but school soon makes them lose it.

The first attempts at written knowledge come as sacred books of which the Indian Vedas would come first and foremost, again focused on a range of 'rituals' religious, magical and for crafts like healing and manufacture. There are 4 compilations or "books" the Rg which contains its epistemology or logic and grammar, the Athur, about healing, the Ayur for spells, curses, prayers, etc., and the Atharva about music, rhythms and cycles of events.

Mundane or non-religious knowledge comes by way of the Greeks, for whom that is a first. Most textbooks of philosophy of any kind begin here, by way of the origin of writing around 6,000 BCE. Anything else is called pre-history, which is not quite correct as today our history is found to reach well beyond the 4404 BCE of Bishop Usher, more likely into millions of years ago. It just seems simpler for textbooks to quote from previous books. An enormous anount of research is still needed to be done to fill out our very checkered history. Greek philosophy is said to begin with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It might be interesting to mention that Nietsche thought Plato a bore.

Up to around the 17th Cy AD the major means of rationalisation used was theology. It is also then that the common ground between logic and the Art of Memory was forgotten in favour of verbal formulations. The AoM was used during oral times, depends a lot on visualisation and can be abstracted from Stone Age art and the Vedas. Essentially it is the world model in which our imagination lives and moves and has its being. Theology begins with monism which arrived around 1350 BCE in Egypt, during the Amarna period of Akhnaton and all that, and whom Freud identified with Greek Oedipus Rex and may also be embodied in Moses, who was originally an Egyptian prince, as in ThuthMosis.

Logic per se as we know it and is taught comes after much reworking by medieval scholars and the most widely used form of it is Boolean logic - used in computers -which pairs off the opposites in binary pairs. This Century has seen an explosion of logics: binary, ternary and poly, as well as many algebras. Russell and Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" showed that verbal logic and mathematical logic were the same. Logics differ by how they "define" their terms in order to keep paradox out of the way and Spenser Brown's algebra is here the most "well defined", leaving no ambiguity in its terms. Since then the arrival of Cantor's Set Theory, finite and infinite, has come to be the means of rationalising numbers. A set amounts to any bunch of data grouped together.

See also theory of justification; the regress argument in epistemology; a priori and a posterior knowledge; knowledge; scepticism; Common sense and the Diallelus; social epistemology



INSERTION: Beware of philosophers, they seldom agree. This one can be called an eclectic, which means he tries to think for himself and only uses other people's brains as a last resort. In our current phase of history the thing to do is bandy around words like "science" and scientific which means to adopt its beliefs and methods whose ground is the material thesis that only matter is real, and evidence has to be based on the senses which since the 20th Cy is more honoured in the breach than the convention.

To get out of academic platitudes here our experience, which includes both inner and outer, is mediated by imagination which comes in two kinds: verifiable from knowledge and others, versus non-verifiable in our current state of knowledge and social consensus beliefs, and as pickled in "knowledge". Personally I have problems rushing off to read the right kind of book about what I should make of or do with my experiences. Usually I am rather too busy to spend time on that. I prefer to "wonder" about how come our world is so beautiful instead.

To take an experience non-verifiable by western knowledge, Let me put up that I report I saw a ghost. As we all know "everybody" would soon use that head nodding, eye winking trick to communicate that "He's just gone cuckoo" since of course *we* don't believe in ghosts, do *we*, so one could not possibly "believe" in ghosts. I don't. I've never met one, so cannot say. If I did meet a ghost the first thing I would do is strike up a conversation to share - if possible - what it is like to be a ghost. If the ghost told me something I did not know before I'd wonder some more about how I obtained that piece of information, rather than rush off worrying whether I'd gone insane. Contrariwise should I visit Africa, say, and publicly admit that I don't believe in ghosts - which is a silly thing to say anyhow - mostpeople there would imagine I'd gone cuckoo. All which makes me a sceptic, not the scoffing kind, but who examines and tests whatever I am told to *believe* by other people. About 90% is not worth bothering with, but that's another matter. End of insertion and back to Larry.

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 true?

Suppose you thought your belief had been arrived at rationally. You used logic, you based your belief on observation and experiment, you conscientiously answered objections, and so forth. So you conclude that your belief is rational. Well if so, then your belief has at least some claim to be true. Rationality is a indicator of truth: if your belief is rational, then it is at least probably true. At the very least, the rationality of a belief is reason to think the belief is true.

Now, there are a number of features of beliefs, such as rationality, justification, and probability, that are indicators of truth. So let's define a general term:

A feature of belief is an epistemic feature if it is at least some indication that the belief is true.

Many of our beliefs do, I think, have lots of positive epistemic features; many of our beliefs are quite rational, quite justified, very probably true, highly warranted, and so on. But most of us, I think, at least in some moments, don't want to rest content with just being rational. We don't want to have a rational belief that is, unfortunately, false. Because that's possible, right? I 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. So rationality isn't our ultimate ambition that we have for our beliefs.

INSERTION: Me again. I'd like to distinguish here between sociophiliacs and orthophobics, neither word in the dictionary, yet. Sociophiliacs are, sort of herd instinct types who feel uneasy unless they belong to a crowd or share group beliefs. Sociophiliacs are "lovers of societality". Orthophobics, as in phobia, have some sort of aversion to this "orthodoxity" and prefer to think for themselves. I've always been bothered by how come we have to be taught to think. Larry seems to be a sociophiliac and I am not. My favorite pastime is to question things which gets stomped out of children by about age twelve odd. I could spend many more times the space Larry uses to object to and clarify his choice of words. end of insertion.

Our ultimate ambition for our beliefs is knowledge. Because if I do know something, then not only am I justified, or rational, in a belief; because I have knowledge, I have the truth. So naturally, when we are thinking about the epistemic features of our beliefs, the big question is this: When do I have knowledge? When can I say that I have it? As I'm sure you are aware, there are some people who claim that we can't have knowledge; such people are called skeptics. More on that, of course, later.

Now I can describe to you the field of epistemology, which is also called the theory of knowledge. Here is a definition:

Epistemology includes the study of (1) what the epistemic features of belief, such as justification and rationality, each are (e.g., what justified belief is); (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.

So, first, 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.

INSERTION: nonsense, our social affliction is a pre-occupation with *beliefs*, as in ""You honestly don't believe that, do you, man?". The *rational* is legally defined and so taken for granted that if one mouthes the platitudes of the tribe one is rational. The more one adds up together what is held to be rational, the less rational it gets. Most of the "justification" in philosophy arises from the impossible task of pickling everything in 3rd person, abstractive mode of "discourse" which quite denies the value of individual experience. Some recent philosophical debate is about all our knowledge being a projection form out of our subjective being.  In this we find the rationalisers who seek to stay with tradition, custom and conventions versus those who insist we can have a fresh look at this.

A more essential point is to consider that we can be ignorant of knowledge versus competent or deficient in understanding, which comes along with being born. All too often being ignorant is treated as also being stupid, mainly when one does not know the right piece of jargon or the proper word for things. One of the things, fi psychology cannot explain is *transfer of understanding*. Anybody with half a memory can rote learn the right words and totally lack understanding. But understanding I cannot give you. The tougher job is to learn to understand others, not to mimic them. End of insertion.

A second, related concern is where such epistemic features ultimately come from. If I say, for example, that my belief that Paris is the capital of France is justified, I can ask: Where did the justification for my belief come from? Probably at some point some reliable source told me that Paris is the capital of France; and that was enough to make me justified in adopting the belief. OK, then one, but only one, source of justification would be testimony, which is just a fancy word for what other people tell me. 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 to answer a further question: What are the ultimate sources of knowledge?

Which brings us to the third topic studied by epistemologists, namely, what knowledge is. The question here isn't what we can know, or even what we do know. The question is: What would knowledge be, if we had it? A belief has to pass some sort of muster if it's 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?

Then, fourth, there is one of the more difficult topics of philosophy -- trying to answer, or otherwise deal with, the challenge that we cannot have knowledge. A number of philosophers -- not too many, but some -- have said that we cannot have knowledge. A lot of philosophers have said that it's very difficult to obtain knowledge; but they don't 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.



Hmmm, wouldn't it be a good idea to mention the philosophy of science a bit more prominently? It is only the most famous child/subbranch of epistemology, after all.;-)

see also: scientific method,which links back to here. Kim Bruning

 See Also: aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Ontology, Reason

Can someone either explain what is meant by "cognitive content" within the article, or provide a relevant link? I don't know what to make of:


 * Some empiricists reply that all mathematical theorems are empty of cognitive content, as they only express the relationship of concepts to one another.


 * I think it is meant that mathematics doesn't tell us anything about the "real world" (doesn't tell us anything substantial) but just describes relations between concepts. Andres 18:52, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)