Quotes About Epistemology

Empiricism: The school of philosophy that maintains that knowledge of the external world (as compared to knowledge of analytic logic and its proper applications) comes only from sensory experience. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Empiricism came in reaction to rationalism. Empiricism is a stance in epistemology. It is sometimes summed up by the statement, "What you see is all you get.

Rationalism: In epistemology, the theory that truth begins and ends in the mind, not in the senses. It is the ultimate intellectualism, claiming that everything can be figured out deductively. For this to be so, reality has to have an intrinsically logical design; then all we have to do is really think about something and its nature will reveal itself right inside our beans.

To say that a belief is rational is to talk about how it stands in relation to other beliefs

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Logic is not a science that discovers truths; it is just a collection of tautologies.

Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?

Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically selfevident." He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us.

The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked "We don't know anything" and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.16

We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming

Xenophanes speaks thus:-And no man knows distinctly anything,And no man ever will.

But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?

Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

( ...philosophy is more often the systematization of the prejudices of philosophers than the systematization of nature.) Distrust all generalizations: stick to the concrete.

There is a continuum between science and philosophy. As Fichte said (but did not practice), philosophy should be the science of sciences.

Whenever I have doubt, I often use epistemological methods or dialectic methods to come to a rational conclusion.

Deep down in my heart, I know that I know nothing.

We often know information but not the epistemology of that information.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all 'high level' from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute).