Quotes About Epistemology

El propósito de la filosofía no es el de buscar el conocimiento, sino el de demostrar que dicho conocimiento es imposible para el hombre.

The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it's not me (and it's also not you).6 The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don't know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained.

Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don't—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and commentariat, who dispense opinions free of accountability.

Probabilites are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

Philosophy is difficult, like looking directly at the tip of your nose is difficult! We rely in every act of knowing on foundational philosophical beliefs.

We are epistemological beings: we live out an orientation to knowing, whether we "know" it or not.

Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

Ich weiss, dass ich nichts weiss, und kaum das.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science.

there is no such thing as matter at all, and that the world consists of nothing but minds and their ideas. Hylas

Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.

at first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.

But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like?

We can be sure, he [Kant] says, that anything we shall ever experience must show the characteristics affirmed of it in our a priori knowledge, because these characteristics are due to our own nature, and therefore nothing can ever come into our experience without acquiring these characteristics.

In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy.

we can only infer it, and can never be directly and immediately aware of it.

Acquaintance with objects essentially consists in a relation between the mind and something other than the mind; it is this that constitutes the mind's power of knowing things. If we say that the things known must be in the mind, we are either unduly limiting the mind's power of knowing, or we are uttering a mere tautology.

is clear that human knowledge must always be content to accept some terms as intelligible without definition

All our knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths, rests upon acquaintance (connaitre, kennen) as its foundation

If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.

Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.