Quotes About Epistemology

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?

Desde el punto de vista epistemológico, hacer dieta es discutible. Si todo lo que existe está sólo en mi cabeza, no sólo puedo pedir cualquier cosa en un restaurante, sino que también puedo exigir que el servicio sea impecable. El hombre es el único ser capaz de no dejar propina al camarero.

religious experience is neither the source nor the foundation of religious truth;

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

The key principle of Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology is constructivism. Constructivism rejects old-fashioned rationalism: Knowledge is not made out of special knowledge-parts preformed in each individual knower at birth. It also rejects empiricism: Knowledge does not consist of epistemic pieces impressed on the knower by the environment, whether physical or social. Instead, the knower has to construct knowledge.

In fact, within Piaget's developmental epistemology, sensorimotor intelligence development takes up a systematic place: It is the centerpiece that bridges biological and psychological development.

Unfortunately, Baillargeon (2008) is not aware of the epistemological commitments resulting from her theory. For example, Baillargeon does not address how her theory avoids the symbol-grounding problem (i.e., the problem of explaining how representative items can have meaning)

One outcome of this lack of appreciation of the relevance of epistemology for the study of psychology and psychological development is that epistemological assumptions often remain tacit. Practically, this amounts to many psychologists basing their theories on assumptions that originate in the empiricist tradition (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 10).

In Piaget's developmental epistemology, sensorimotor intelligence serves as a bridge between biological functioning and rational thought.

From an epistemological perspective, a person is a uniform being who interprets the different parts of her conscious knowledge in a coherent fashion (or at least tries to do this). How do modular theories explain this search for coherence? And how do they explain necessary knowledge, which hardly can be domain-specific (Smith, 1993, p. 5)?

Is it possible that a contingent genesis can lead to necessary knowledge?

the relevance of epistemology for the study of psychology and psychological development is that epistemological assumptions often remain tacit. Practically, this amounts to many psychologists basing their theories on assumptions that originate in the empiricist tradition (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 10).

the main problem of any epistemology is in fact to understand how the mind succeeds in constructing necessary relationships, which appear to be independent of time, if the instruments of thought are merely psychological operations that are subject to evolution and are constituted in time (Piaget, 1950, p. 23);

That's really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.

Richard Bernstein's Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

Foundationalism sounds too good to be true, and it is. For one thing, the distinction between "basic" and "nonbasic" beliefs appears simplistic and naïve

Yet the replacement thesis faces an obvious, glaring problem. As Hilary Kornblith notes, psychology can tell us how we do arrive at our beliefs, but we can still ask, "Are the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs?

The Web of Belief, second edition, coauthored with J. S. Ullian (New York: Random House, 1978)

In that case, that is, given the past failure and poor prospects of analytic epistemology, Quine recommends that epistemology simply be replaced by psychology

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

Biblical soteriology cannot rest on a non-biblical epistemology, but it rests on a biblical epistemology that emphasizes the sovereign God and the infallible Scripture.

Since Christianity is the truth, to perform an investigation for truth independently of it necessarily means that the investigation must adopt a false starting point.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so? —AJENCIS, THE EPISTEMOLOGIES   But