Quotes About Epistemology

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

All these theories are motivated by an epistemological criterion of reality—that only what can be understood in a certain way exists.

evolutionary naturalism offers an explanation of our knowledge that is seriously inadequate, when applied to the knowledge-generating capacities that we take ourselves to have.

The limiting of the knowable to the quantifiable was itself a value that was not quantifiable

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

Border thinking is an epistemology, an ethic and politics that emerge from the experiences of people taking their destiny in their own hands and not waiting for saviors. Today

In other words, there is no single underlying reality that is independent of our observations. "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is," Bohr declared. "Physics concerns what we can say about nature."62 This

on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.

Analysis of error begins with analysis of language.

Truth is produced, not discovered, and is a property not of the world but of statements.

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.

The first sentence was "This tome will endeavor to scrutinize, in quasi-inclusive breadth, the epistemology of ophthalmologically contrived appraisals of ocular systems and the subsequent and requisite exertions imperative for expugnation of injurious states," and as Violet read it out loud to her sister, both children felt the dread that comes when you begin a very boring and difficult book.

If we completely divorce epistemology from politics, we lose sight of the nature of the political opposition. If we think about the opposition between Right and Left as the opposition between particular and universal, it is clear that the struggle is epistemological as much as it is political.

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

Kant's greatest merit," says Schopenhauer, "is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.

The author believes that epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of the science of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.

À posteriori: reasoning from observed facts to general conclusions. À priori: reasoning from general propositions to particular conclusions.

The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.

I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer—especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics.

To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

The set of assumptions, prejudices, and mind-sets that structured and limited the thought of any particular age was referred to by Foucault as an episteme. This word derives from the same ancient Greek root as the branch of philosophy known as epistemology

The extreme mathematical weirdness of (infinity), which Galileo spends a lot of time in TNS giving examples of, is rather presciently attributed to epistemology instead of metaphysics. Paradoxes arise, according to G.G.'s mouthpiece, only when we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited.

In formulating any philosophy the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, 'My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.