Quotes About Epistemology

I may not know something with certainty, but I can still assign a lesser or greater degree of probability to something.

This is also true from a methodological point of view: a scientist orients his own research on the basis of epistemological ideas. He might be more or less aware of them. Very often to be aware of your own assumptions is far better than to be guided by methodological prejudices of which you are unaware.

But Quigley's interdisciplinary interests resulted not from dilletantism, but from a distrust of reductionism as a means of understanding society and an insatiable curiosity he synthesized into a revolutionary holistic epistemology.

I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.

While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.

Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.

Human understanding is limited—and the things that metaphysics seeks to know, we can never know.

Pure truth no man has seen, nor ever shall know.

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor expressed by writer Christopher Hitchens. It says that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens has phrased the razor in writing as What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

It is naturally difficult, if one denies the existence of the second theatre, to elucidate what is meant by describing the episodes which are supposed to take place in it as self-intimating. But some points are clear enough. It is not supposed that when I am wondering, say, what is the answer to a puzzle and am ipso facto consciously doing so, that I am synchronously performing two acts of attention, one to the puzzle and the other to my wondering about it.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

nothing can be known, save what is true;

But the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Hence the knowledge of every knower is ruled according to its own nature. If therefore the mode of anything's being exceeds the mode of the knower, it must result that the knowledge of the object is above the nature of the knower. Now the mode of being of things is manifold.

So how do we know anything at all, if in fact we do know anything at all?

J. dBudziszewski points out, "The motto 'Reason Alone!' is nonsense anyway. Reason itself presupposes faith. Why? Because a defense of reason by reason is circular, therefore worthless. Our only guarantee that human reason works is God who made it.

What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?

Without faith, there is no proper understanding by which a man can judge. As Augustine well said, 'I believe in order to understand'.

To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology.

A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless.

We must not defend our message (that Christ's Word is self-attesting and possessing ultimate authority from the Lord) with a method that works counter to it- by claiming an ultimate epistemological standard outside of Christ's Word of truth.

Christian apologetics is a defense of religious faith, thus pertaining to the question of one's ultimate commitment in life. Apologetics entails intellectual reasoning in justification of one's beliefs, thus touching on the epistemological question of the final standard of knowledge.

Number is different from quantity.

the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.