Epistemology

Epistemology, from the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (word/speech) is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin and scope of knowledge. It has historically been one of the most investigated and most debated of all philosophical discourses.

Justification

Much of epistemology has been concerned with seeking ways to justify knowledge statements.

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Irrationalism

Some approaches to justifying knowledge are not rational — that is, they reject the notion that justification must obey logic or reason. Nihilism started out as a materialistic political philosophy, but is sometimes redefined as the apparently absurd doctrine that there can be no justification for knowledge claims — absurd because it appears to be self-contradictory to claim that one knows that knowledge is impossible, but perhaps for a nihilist, self-contradiction is simply unimportant.

Related Topics:
Logic - Nihilism

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Mysticism is the use of non-rational methods to arrive at beliefs and accepting such beliefs as knowledge. For example, believing that something is true based on emotion would be regarded as epistemological mysticism, whereas believing based on deductive logic or scientific experiment would not. An instance of this may be when one bases one's belief in the existence of something merely on one's desire that it should exist. Another example might be the use of a daisy's petals and the phrase "he loves me/ he loves me not" while they are plucked to determine whether Romeo returns Juliet's affections. The mysticism in this example would be the assumption that such a method has predictive or indicative powers without rational evidence of such. In both of these examples, belief is not justified through a rational means. Mysticism need not be an intentional process: one may engage in mysticism without being aware of it.

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Rationality

If one does not reject rationality, but still wishes to maintain that knowledge claims cannot be or are not justified, one might be termed a skeptic. Here we are on firmer philosophical ground; since skeptics accept the validity of reason, they can present logical arguments for their case.

Related Topics:
Skeptic - Reason - Argument

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For instance, the regress argument has it that one can ask for the justification for any statement of knowledge. If that justification takes the form of another statement, one can again reasonably ask for that statement also to be justified, and so forth. This appears to lead to an infinite regress, with every statement justified by some other statement.

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It would be impossible to check that each justification is satisfactory, and so relying on such a series quickly leads to skepticism.

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Alternately, one might claim that some knowledge statements do not require justification. Much of the history of epistemology is the story of conflicting philosophical doctrines claiming that this or that type of knowledge statement has special status. This view is known as Foundationalism.

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One can also avoid the regress if one supposes that the assumption that a knowledge statement can only be supported by another knowledge statement is simply misguided. Coherentism holds that a knowledge statement is not justified by some small subset of other knowledge statements, but by the entire set. That is, a statement is justified if it coheres with all other knowledge claims in the system. This has the advantage of avoiding the infinite regress without claiming special status for some particular sorts of statements. But since a system might still be consistent and yet simply wrong, it raises the difficulty of ensuring that the whole system corresponds in some way with the truth.

Related Topics:
Coherentism - Coheres - Corresponds

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Synthetic and analytic statements

Some statements are such that they appear not to need any justification once one understands their meaning. For example, consider: my father's brother is my uncle. This statement is true in virtue of the meaning of the terms it contains, and so it seems frivolous to ask for a justification for saying it is true. Philosophers call such statements analytic. More technically, a statement is analytic if the concept in the predicate is included in the concept in the subject. In the example, the concept of uncle (the predicate) is included in the concept of being my father's brother (the subject). Not all analytic statements are as trivial as this example. Mathematical statements are often taken to be analytic.

Related Topics:
Meaning - Mathematical

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Synthetic statements, on the other hand, have distinct subjects and predicates. An example would be my father's brother is overweight.

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Although anticipated by David Hume, this distinction was more clearly formulated by Immanuel Kant, and later given a more formal shape by Frege. Wittgenstein noted in the Tractatus that analytic statements "express no thoughts", that is, that they tell us nothing new; although analytic statements do not require justification, they are singularly uninformative. W.V.O. Quine, in his famous Two Dogmas of Empiricism, challenged the legitimacy of the analytic-synthetic distinction altogether.

Related Topics:
David Hume - Immanuel Kant - Frege - Wittgenstein - Tractatus - W.V.O. Quine - Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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