Quotes About Epistemology

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

Our knowledge can only be finite while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance

Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture's basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains' basic formation.

An epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely congruent with the search for power is a great deal more cunning than wise. It can needlessly undermine the value of knowledge in satisfying curiosity and interest; it significantly weakens one of the profound characteristics of human beings.

Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.

Hegel rejects the very idea of a single world-view, and though he does indeed give us what he considers to be the "best" world-view, it is rather a meta-view, a view about the correctness of views, rather than a view as such.

What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?... How do we really know anything? Is there an I a soul, which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent?... When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?

But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist.

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

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

Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.

As the world of science has grown in size and in power, its deepest problems have changed from the epistemological to the social.

transcendental phenomenology as a science of pure essential possibilities of knowing

In order to determine whether we can know anything with certainty, we first have to doubt everything we know

Courses in historiography confront students with the possibility that history, like literature, is about stories and that it necessarily involves philosophical questions, such as how we can actually come to know things.

Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.

The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)

It is, as it were, the fundamental principle of cognition that the universal can be perceived only in the particular, while the particular can be thought only in reference to the universal.

Epistemology has always been affected by technologies like the telescope and the microscope, things that have created a radical shift in how we sense physical reality.

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.