Quotes About Epistemology

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

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.

That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt....but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.

I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

las ciencias naturales no eran el paradigma del conocimiento.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

We are in need of inquiry into the epistemology of practice. What is the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage? How is professional knowing like and unlike the kinds of knowledge presented in academic textbooks, scientific papers, and learned journals? In what sense, if any, is there intellectual rigor in professional practice?

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.

2. Propositional knowledge.

Propositional knowledge is justified true belief; it is believing something that is true on the basis of adequate grounds.

Second, when one tries to formulate a definition of knowledge or, more generally, when one investigates matters in epistemology, one does not start with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as knowledge. Instead, one starts with paradigm cases of knowledge: central, clear cases of where knowledge does or does not obtain.

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find.

Biology taught me that a field undergoing development should be investigated always from the viewpoint of its past development. Who today would study anatomy without embryology? In exactly the same way epistemology without historical and comparative investigations is no more than an empty play on words or an epistemology of the imagination.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

In other studies, the philosophy is made explicit by a special section in the study—typically in the description of the characteristics of qualitative inquiry often found in the methods section. Here the inquirer talks about ontology, epistemology, and other assumptions explicitly and details how they are exemplified in the study. The

If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is "How should I know?"… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

ridge riding, to use Alvin Gouldner's term—between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of conventionalist constructivism.

there is no metaphysically neutral starting point from which science can lift itself up by its own intellectual bootstraps.

Still more striking is the fact that Kant unites epistemology and ethics specifically through the concept of law.