Quotes About Epistemology

Argument is not needed for rational justification. The believer is entirely within his epistemic right in believing, for example, that God has created the world, even if he has no argument at all for that conclusion..

If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God.

Belief in the existence of God is in the same boat as belief in other minds, the past, and perceptual objects; in each case God has so constructed us that in the right circumstances we form the belief in question.

If we can't think about God, then we can't think about him; and therefore can't make statements about him, including statements to the effect that we can't think about him. The statement that we can't think about God-the statement that God is such that we can't think about him- is obviously a statement about God; if we can't think about God, then we can't say about him what we can't think about him.

My whole account of positive epistemic status, not just this example, owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.

My whole account of positive epistemic status owes much to Thomas Reid with his talk of faculties and their functions and his rejection of the notion (one he attributes to Hume and his predecessors) that self-evident propositions and propositions about one's own immediate experience are the only properly basic propositions.

The Reformed epistemologist may concur with Calvin in holding that God has implanted in us a natural tendency to see his hand in the world around us; the same cannot be said for the Great Pumpkin, there being no Great Pumpkin and no natural tendency to accept beliefs about the Great Pumpkin.

Accordingly, criteria for proper basicality must be reached from below rather than above; they should not be presented ex cathedra but argued to and tested by a relevant set of examples.

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

Peirce relentlessly criticizes the subjectivism that lies at the heart of so much modern epistemology, and he develops an intersubjective (social) understanding of inquiry, knowing, communication, and logic.

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist's verifiability criterion of meaning.

Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about.

Some call this Liberal Copenhagenism model agnosticism. Dr. Marcello Truzzi calls it zeteticism.

Absolute alterity, as long as it remains absolute, cannot be apprehended at all; there is, effectively, no such thing.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function.

A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.

Epistemic competence might be posterior to knowledge conceptually, however, while still prior metaphysically.

All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.

If we have a better understanding of knowledge than we do of such justification or competence, then we can explain the latter through the former.

In my view, since the case can be made that knowledge too is a natural kind, the role of pretheoretical intuitions is similarly diminished in epistemology.

During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.