Epistemology Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

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. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

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

In other studies, the philosophy is made explicit by a special section in the study - typically in the description of the characteristics of qualitative inquiry often found in the methods section. Here the inquirer talks about ontology, epistemology, and other assumptions explicitly and details how they are exemplified in the study. The — John W. Creswell

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

He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived. — Baruch Spinoza

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

Besides our eyes, skin and the other senses through which we receive the shadows of the exterior reality, we have a 'mental eye' (intelligence) with which we can perceive reality as it is. — Jesus Zamora Bonilla

What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science. — Edgar Mitchell

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

Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking. — John Dewey

Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life. — Manuel Toharia-Cortes

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans ... If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness. — Philip K. Dick

some Japanese philosophers have been eager to graft the newly introduced discipline of western academic philosophy onto its premodern Japanese antecedents. The conflict with traditional values proposed a whole host of new questions: Can one articulate an original yet comprehensive epistemology that would give western empiricism and logic an appropriate place but subordinate it to a dominant "Asian" basis for thought and values? Can one develop a viable ethics that places agency in a socially interdependent, rather than isolated and discrete, individual? Can one construct an interpretation of artistry based in a mode of responsiveness that is also the ground for knowledge and moral conduct? Can one envision a political theory of the state that allows for personal expression without assuming a radical individualism? Along with these fundamental issues, a great deal of attention was devoted to a still more basic question: What is culture and what affect does it have on philosophizing? — James W. Heisig

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

When I first began studying philosophy, a good deal of what went on in analytic epistemology was focused on addressing the Gettier problem. At first, I became quite caught up in it, and the kind of analytical ingenuity required for the work appealed to me. After a while, however, I started to lose interest. — Hilary Kornblith

If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia? — Felix Alba-Juez

Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge. — Felix Alba-Juez

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object ...
If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities. — John Locke

It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish which lies in the way to knowledge. — John Locke

The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things — Baruch Spinoza

Knowledge depends on the mode of the knower; for what is known is in the knower according to the measure of his mode — Thomas Aquinas

Subjectivity is strange to Science, while Relativity is an objective part of it. — Felix Alba-Juez

Up to now, most atheists have simply criticized religion in various ways, but the point is to dispel it. In A Manual For Creating Atheists, Peter Boghossian fills that gap, telling the reader how to become a 'street epistemologist' with the skills to attack religion at its weakest point: its reliance on faith rather than evidence. This book is essential for nonbelievers who want to do more than just carp about religion, but want to weaken its odious grasp on the world.

(Review of Dr. Peter Boghossian's book, 'A Manual For Creating Atheists') — Jerry A. Coyne

Metagapism is the belief that love is the ultimate reality, literally god and the one shared soul, and the source, nature and destiny of all. — John K. Brown

The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known. — Raheel Farooq

The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology. — Susanne K. Langer

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up. — Simon Blackburn

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve. — Baruch Spinoza

Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium). — Baruch Spinoza

Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence; we are assured of meeting there no obstacles; but of all these ways, which will lead us most promptly to our goal? Who shall tell us which to choose? We need a faculty which makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is this faculty. It is necessary to the explorer for choosing his route; it is not less so to the one following his trail who wants to know why he chose it. — Henri Poincare

He who would know the world must first manufacture it. — Immanuel Kant

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy. — Sun Tzu

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. — Willard Van Orman Quine