Epistemologists Quotes & Sayings

These are tough and unusual times and I don't see the negative global economic situation abating anytime soon. — James McNerney

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

please don't carry my love for you with you forever. but don't let that be all. our capacity to love is vast - all of us. my daughters taught me that. there is room. — Elizabeth Noble

It's sort of my fun to sing along with records and imitate people who are on the telephone that have different ways of speaking. — Meryl Streep

Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye. — Vladimir Nabokov

Buddhist epistemologists do argue that rational analysis leads to the conclusion that rational analysis cannot give us infallible access to truth, including that one. That's not self-defeating, though; it only induces an important kind of epistemic humility and a clearer view of what we do when we reason. We engage in one more fallible human activity among many. — Jay L. Garfield

When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience."Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world. — Gilbert Ryle

Epistemologists should be concerned with knowledge and justification and so on, not our concepts of them; philosophers of mind should be concerned with various features of our mental life and the large-scale structure of the mind, not our concepts of mind, or consciousness, or anything else — Hilary Kornblith

These proven positive consequences of elevated CO2 are infinitely more important than the unsubstantiated predictions of apocalypse that are hypothesized to result from global warming, which itself, may not be occurring from rising atmospheric CO2 levels. The aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment is the only aspect of global environmental change about which we can be certain; and to restrict CO2 emissions is to assuredly deny the biosphere the many benefits that accrue from this phenomenon. — Keith E. Idso

I am quite wedded to the view that epistemologists should concern themselves with knowledge rather than our concept of knowledge. The analogy I like to draw here is with our understanding of (other) natural kinds. — Hilary Kornblith

There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water. — James Lee Burke

In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights. — Aleister Crowley

Except. What is normal at any given time? We change just as the seasons change, and each spring brings new growth. So nothing is ever quite the same. — Sherwood Smith

The decline in the influence of religion has been due, in the main, not to religion itself, but to the very shallowness of many practitioners. People who are indoctrinated and mistake implanted obsession for faith, are themselves destroyers of the very thing which they imagine themselves called upon to try to protect.

In fact, of course, they have no such call: and their capacity to protect something which is other than their imaginings makes for a comical situation. — Idries Shah

You work hard making independent films for fourteen years and you get voted best breasts. — Scarlett Johansson

I am concerned about epistemic normativity, and I don't think that it is just a hangover from a priori and armchair approaches. Some ways of forming beliefs are better than others, and epistemologists of all stripes, I believe, have a legitimate interest in addressing the issue of what makes some of these ways better than others. — Hilary Kornblith

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders. — Adam Phillips

I've been present at birth, and death is just as present and in equal balance. And I've been present at death, and birth is just as present, again in equal balance. — Joy Harjo

Epistemologists have come to a loose description of knowledge as justified true belief which is not based off false assumptions, but even this is fallacious as the prerequisite knowledge required for justification makes this a circular definition. — Chris Matakas

It is better that the truth be known than that scandal be covered up. — Saint Augustine

President Bush bet his presidency-and America's world leadership-on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew. — Mort Kondracke

Leave the rest to the gods. — Horace

Drawing in a deep breath, she smacked his bare ass. Hard. Aidan Fitzgerald, you better fuck me like you mean it! — Katie Ashley