Quotes & Sayings About Epistemology

Philosophy has been described as thinking about thinking, and all Christians should do that. The term comes from two Greek words, philia ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"), thus "loving wisdom." Nothing anti-Christian appears in that definition. Problems arise if we seek wisdom apart from God, or elevate human reason above Him, but according to Proverbs 4:5-7, God's people should love and seek wisdom.
Formal philosophy is divided into three major areas-incidentally, all core Christian issues: (1) Metaphysics,
which asks questions about the nature of reality: "What is real?" "Is the basic essence of the world matter, or spirit, or something else?" (2) Epistemology, which addresses issues concerning truth and knowledge: "What do we know?" "How do we know it?" "Why do we think it's true?" (3) Ethics, which considers moral problems: "What is right and wrong?" "Are moral values absolute or relative?" "What is the good life, and how do we achieve it? — Rick Cornish

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher. — Jean Piaget

The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others. — Leonard Peikoff

What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong! — Douglas Adams

And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task. — Jostein Gaarder

Explanation is where the mind rests. — David Hume

What is necessary is that epistemology, instead of being the pre-condition for ontology, should grow in it and with it, being at the same time a means and an object of explanation, helping to uphold, and itself upheld by, ontology, as the parts of any true philosophy mutually will sustain each other. — Etienne Gilson

Erudition is the crude residue of wilted harvests; wit: the meddlesome weed that wilts them. — Ashim Shanker

Nothing is as powerful as one's beliefs. — Patty Houser

Bealer has a number of reasons for thinking that a naturalistic epistemology is self-undermining. Let me focus on one of these. (I've tried to take on all of them in the first chapter of Knowledge and Its Place in Nature.) — Hilary Kornblith

True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person. — Willard F. Libby

But here's the maddening thing about knowledge. We don't know that we don't know something until we know it. — Patty Houser

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

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. — Richard M. Rorty

I believe, that empirically informed approaches to the question have issued in more illuminating answers than the old armchair approaches. But I think that it would be a terrible mistake to give up on addressing normative questions in epistemology. — Hilary Kornblith

Fragmenting and colliding both hegemonic and oppositional codes, my goal is to reinscribe validity as a way that uses the antifoundational problematic to loosen the master code of positivism that continues to shape even postpositivism — Patti Lather

Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. — Isaac Asimov

Scientists study only those aspects of the universe that it is within their gift to study: what is observable; what is measurable and amenable to statistical analysis; and, indeed, what they can afford to study within the means and time available. Science thus emerges as a giant tautology, a "closed system". It can present us with robust answers only because its practitioners take very great care to tailor the questions. — Colin Tudge

Epistemology models ontology. — John Polkinghorne

The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others. — Felix Alba-Juez

The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or another. — Paul Feyerabend

The heart cannot rejoice in that which the mind rejects — Kenneth D. Boa

Bass players share a secret fellowship, a sort of gnosis peculiar to their breed, a kind of smart that is hard for others to recognize or understand: the art of the whole sound. Bass players actually believe in musical epistemology, they are practitioners of musical metaphysics. — Randall E. Auxier

One of the goals of scientific theorising is to develop concepts which are adequate to the phenomena under study. In my view, things should work the same way in epistemology. We want to know what knowledge actually amounts to, not what our folk concept of knowledge is, since, just as with our pretheoretical concept of acidity, it might contain all sorts of misunderstandings and leave out all manner of important things. — Hilary Kornblith

In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot. — Gregory Benford

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. — Hilary Kornblith

The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational. — Patty Houser

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. — Herbert Marcuse

One can know very much but comprehend very little and, besides, ... different objectives require different levels of knowledge - though always with the maximum possible comprehension suited to the purpose. — Felix Alba-Juez

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason
if you pick the proper postulates. — Isaac Asimov

I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer - especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics. — Leszek Kolakowski

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says:
... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls. — Felix Alba-Juez

The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know. — Anthony Doerr

Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth ... but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth. — Felix Alba-Juez

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

Why should things be easy to understand? — Thomas Pynchon

I do think that an understanding of contemporary work in the cognitive sciences has a profound effect on how one views the workings of the mind. It doesn't work the way we pretheoretically think it does. Such an understanding, of course, should have a large effect on one's views in philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology. — Hilary Kornblith

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know? — Theodore Bikel

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change ... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. — Philip K. Dick

There is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. — Paul Feyerabend

The extreme mathematical weirdness of (infinity), which Galileo spends a lot of time in TNS giving examples of, is rather presciently attributed to epistemology instead of metaphysics. Paradoxes arise, according to G.G.'s mouthpiece, only "when we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited. — David Foster Wallace

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful. — Oscar Wilde

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. — Jerry A. Fodor

To say that science is the measure of all true knowledge is not a scientific truth but a philosophic claim about science. It's scientism posing as science. — Scott Klusendorf

First stage is knowing the truth, second is not knowing the truth, third is realizing the paradox. — John K. Brown

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. — Ayn Rand

Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it - and that there is no other way for him to live. He — Ayn Rand

ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion — Patricia Crone

Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience. — Alan W. Watts

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. — Donna J. Haraway

Is language the adequate expression of all realities? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Without causality in the world, there is no point in educating people, or making any moral or political appeal. — Felix Alba-Juez

Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture. — Semir Zeki

How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this. — Albert Einstein

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable. — Arthur Schopenhauer

A theologian's epistemology controls his interpretation of the Bible. If his epistemology is not Christian, his exegesis will be systematically distorted. If he has no epistemology at all, his exegesis will be unsystematically distorted. — Gordon H. Clark

The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is 'metaphysical' and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate. — Max Horkheimer

To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology. — Greg L. Bahnsen

We often know information but not the epistemology of that information. — Debasish Mridha

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong — Gregory Bateson

It is the mythical, the romantic seduction of the pseudoknowledge, i.e. the folkore - both popular and scientific - that propagates quickly and easily through society, hiding and diminishing the powerful reality of what the new ideas and technologies can offer to humanity. — Manuel Toharia-Cortes

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television program begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the previous programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself. — Neil Postman

Knowledge is not discovery, but recognition. — Raheel Farooq

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessary
condition for knowledge. — Kedar Joshi

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

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge ... it would not be the source of necessary truths ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today's physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories. — Lois McMaster Bujold

We care about knowledge because knowledge is crucial to a worthwhile, valuable life. The questions of epistemology may be abstract, but their importance to our lives is vital. — Duncan Pritchard

Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology. — Robert Anton Wilson

Bealer argues that the kind of naturalistic view which Quine holds will rob him of the ability to make the normative claims which (many) naturalists wish to make in epistemology. I don't think this is right about Quine, but I'm certain it's not right about my own view. To the extent that I can show that talk of knowledge is firmly rooted within empirical theories where it plays an important explanatory role, I thereby demonstrate its naturalistic credentials. — Hilary Kornblith

In reality, conclusions are muddy, there are no final curtains, and life just goes on. — Sam Waterston

This false epistemology, however, has also led to disastrous consequences. The theory that truth is manifest - that it is there for everyone to see, if only he wants to see it - this theory is the basis of almost every kind of fanaticism. For only the most depraved wickedness can refuse to see the manifest truth; only those who have reason to fear truth conspire to suppress it. — Karl Popper

From the standpoint of epistemology it is just as admissible to derive animals from the human species, as man from animal species. But we know how ill Professor Dacque fared in his academic career because of his sin against the spirit of the age, which will not let itself be trifled with. It is a religion, or-even more-a creed which has absolutely no connection with reason, but whose significance lies in the unpleasant fact that it is taken as the absolute measure of all truth and is supposed always to have common sense upon its side. — C. G. Jung

Deism" in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite. — Matthew Stewart

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning. — Jean Piaget

... every feeling is the perception of a truth ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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? — Gregory Bateson

Pity the theory which sets itself in opposition to the mind! It cannot repair this contradiction by any humility, and the humbler it is so much the sooner will ridicule and contempt drive it from real life. — Carl Von Clausewitz

The authority of science ... promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies ... Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality ... In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad. — Cornel West

The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge. — Kedar Joshi

Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light. — Cass Sunstein

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not. — Kay Redfield Jamison

[ ... ] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Observations always involve theory. — Edwin Powell Hubble

Is numerical equality (forced by the use of specific physical units) the same as conceptual equality? Of course NOT! — Felix Alba-Juez

Nothing can be known either of God or man until God has become man in Jesus Christ. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute. — Neil Postman

To believe in nothing is as ridiculous as to believe in everything. Reason and factual evidence may convert a belief into knowledge. — Felix Alba-Juez

[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode. — Jonathan Sacks

The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible. — Jesus Zamora Bonilla

If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality. — Raheel Farooq

Distortion and suppression of the truth is encouraged by a prevailing attitude of scientism, not science itself but rather a certain attitude of veneration toward science as the exclusive means of obtaining truth — Angus J.L. Menuge

Well, I don't know why people insist on knowing themselves. It's hard enough to know what to wear. — John Leguizamo

In order that the concept of substance could originate
which is indispensable for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it
it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency
to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just
had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. — Neil Postman

The first sentence was "This tome will endeavor to scrutinize, in quasi-inclusive breadth, the epistemology of ophthalmologically contrived appraisals of ocular systems and the subsequent and requisite exertions imperative for expugnation of injurious states," and as Violet read it out loud to her sister, both children felt the dread that comes when you begin a very boring and difficult book. — Lemony Snicket

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism. — Russ Shafer-Landau