Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What are the origins of the word epistemology?
Skepticism questions whether knowledge is possible at all. Skeptics argue that belief in something does not justify whether or not it is necessarily true.[7] Characterizing knowledge as strong or weak is dependent on a person's viewpoint and their characterization of knowledge.[7] Much of our knowledge on epistemology is derived from, in particular, rational and philosophical skepticism. [8]
"Received knowledge" describes the epistemological position in which women in the study perceived knowledge as a set of absolute truths received from infallible authorities. The process of learning, as understood by "received knowers", involves receiving and repeating the knowledge and words of authorities. In this sense words are no longer viewed as weapons, and are seen as critical to the learning process, but the origin and meaning of words and knowledge remain external.
"Words are living powers, not merely articulated air." Language is to consciousness what geometry is to space and mathematics to time. It is language, not sense experience, that orients mind to reality.
Epistemology or theory of knowledge – branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. The term was introduced into English by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808–1864). Epistemology asks the questions: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?"
In any stricter (epistemological) sense of the word ‘rationalist’, Bernard should rather be considered as adhering to the opposite camp. He takes sensorial "experience" as the point of departure for the acquisition of knowledge. He criticises the theory of innate ideas – characteristic of the rationalist stream of thought in modern philosophy – and points out that the mind is at birth a "tabula rasa" or rather a blank slate awaiting ideas from experience. He thinks that ideas are derived from experience, and this is highly reminiscent of the empiricism of Locke. However, he does seem to have the greatest sympathy for Malebranche (who belongs, in the epistemological sense of the word, to the rationalist school) out of all philosophers, except on this basic issue of the origin of ‘ideas’.
In Jonathan Kvanvig's essay, "Why Inquiring Minds Want to Know?: Meno Problems and Epistemological Axiology" he asserts that epistemology has no place in philosophical study. The value of knowledge originates from the Socratic dialogue written by Plato called Meno. In Meno, Socrates' distinction between "true belief" and "knowledge" forms the basis of the philosophical definition of knowledge as "justified true belief". Socrates explains the similarities and differences between "true belief" and "knowledge", arguing that justified true belief fails to "stay in their place" and must be "tethered". According to Kvanvig, true belief is what is necessary to maximize truth and to avoid error, thus dropping justification from the equation of knowledge. He argues that once we recognize what the manipulated boundary notion of non-Gettierized account of knowledge is, then it becomes clear that there is nothing valuable about the anti-Gettier condition on knowledge. Kvanvig acknowledges that true belief falls short of knowledge, however to him, true belief is no less valuable than knowledge. Kvanvig believes that epistemology should be focused on understanding, an epistemic standing that Kvanvig maintains is of more value than knowledge and justified true belief.
Epistemological realism is a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind. It opposes epistemological idealism.
Just as he challenged the dominant analytic–synthetic distinction, Quine also took aim at traditional normative epistemology. According to Quine, traditional epistemology tried to justify the sciences, but this effort (as exemplified by Rudolf Carnap) failed, and so we should replace traditional epistemology with an empirical study of what sensory inputs produce what theoretical outputs: "Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input — certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance — and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology: namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence...But a conspicuous difference between old epistemology and the epistemological enterprise in this new psychological setting is that we can now make free use of empirical psychology." (Quine, 1969: 82–3)
Laible's 2002 paper, "A Loving Epistemology: What I Hold Critical in My Life, Faith, and Profession," was republished in "Reconsidering Feminist Research in Educational Leadership", Michelle D. Young, and Linda Skrla, (State University of New York Press (2003), along with three chapters responding to Laible's ideas, "Life Lessons and a Loving Epistemology: A Response to Julie Laible’s Loving Epistemology," "Research on Women and Administration: A Response to Julie Laible’s Loving Epistemology ," and "The Emperor and Research on Women in School Leadership: A Response to Julie Laible’s Loving Epistemology."
One of the more influential responses to the problem is that knowledge is not particularly valuable and is not what ought to be the main focus of epistemology. Instead, epistemologists ought to focus on other mental states, such as understanding.[30] Advocates of virtue epistemology have argued that the value of knowledge comes from an internal relationship between the knower and the mental state of believing.[25]
The word epistemology is derived from the ancient Greek epistēmē meaning "knowledge" and the suffix -logy, meaning "logical discourse" (derived from the Greek word logos meaning "discourse"). It is analogue to the German Wissenschaftslehre (literally, theory of science) which was introduced by philosophers Johann Fichte and Bernard Bolzano in the late 18th century. The word first appeared in English in 1847 as a translation of the German in New York's Eclectic Magazine review of a philosophical novel by German author Jean Paul:[38][39]
The idea of epistemology predates the word. John Locke describes his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) as an inquiry "into the original, certainty, and extent of HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, together with the grounds and degrees of BELIEF, OPINION, and ASSENT".[42]. According to Brett Warrent, the character Epistemon in King James VI of Scotland's Daemonologie (1591) "was meant to be a personification of a philosophical concept currently known as ‘’epistemology’: the investigation into the differences of a justified belief versus its opinion."[43]
Jennifer Lackey is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. She is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of "Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge" and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of "The Epistemology of Testimony" and "The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays."
Jaegwon Kim, another critic of naturalized epistemology, further articulates the difficulty of removing the normative component. He notes that modern epistemology has been dominated by the concepts of justification and reliability. Kim explains that epistemology and knowledge are nearly eliminated in their common sense meanings without normative concepts such as these. These concepts are meant to engender the question "What conditions must a belief meet if we are justified in accepting it as true?". That is to say, what are the necessary criteria by which a particular belief can be declared as "true" (or, should it fail to meet these criteria, can we rightly infer its falsity)? This notion of truth rests solely on the conception and application of the criteria which are set forth in traditional and modern theories of epistemology.
Hjørland defined subjects as the "epistemological potentials of documents". This definition is in line with the request oriented understanding of indexing quoted below. The idea is that a document is assigned a subject to ease retrieval and findability. And the criteria for what should be found – what constitutes knowledge – is in the end an epistemological question.
Plantinga discusses his view of Reformed epistemology and proper functionalism in a three-volume series. In the first book of the trilogy, "Warrant: The Current Debate", Plantinga introduces, analyzes, and criticizes 20th-century developments in analytic epistemology, particularly the works of Roderick Chisholm, Laurence BonJour, William Alston, and Alvin Goldman. Plantinga argues that the theories of what he calls "warrant"—what many others have called justification (Plantinga draws out a difference: justification is a matter of fulfilling one's epistemic duties, whereas warrant is what transforms true belief into knowledge)—put forth by these epistemologists have failed to capture in full what is required for knowledge.
Jaegwon Kim, another critic of formative epistemology, further articulates the difficulty of removing the normative component. He notes that modern epistemology has been dominated by the concepts of justification and reliability. Kim explains that epistemology and knowledge are nearly eliminated in their common sense meanings without normative concepts such as these. These concepts are meant to engender the question "What conditions must a belief meet if we are justified in accepting it as true?". That is to say, what are the necessary criteria by which a particular belief can be declared as "true" (or, should it fail to meet these criteria, can we rightly infer its falsity)? This notion of truth rests solely on the conception and application of the criteria which are set forth in traditional and modern theories of epistemology.
Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,[2][3] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?",[4] "What does it mean to say that we know something?",[5] and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?"[6]
Once you embark into refined knowledge, there are certain criteria as to what constitutes 'evidence.' In other words, there are rules governing how we know what we know (This should be recognized as an epistemological concept). And depending on the choice of your Root Metaphor (described below), different criteria exist as to what constitutes good evidence.
First, due originally to Bertrand Russell (1907) in a discussion of James's theory, is that pragmatism mixes up the notion of truth with "epistemology". Pragmatism describes an "indicator" or a "sign" of truth. It really cannot be regarded as a theory of the "meaning" of the word "true". There's a difference between "stating an indicator" and "giving the meaning". For example, when the streetlights turn on at the end of a day, that's an indicator, a sign, that evening is coming on. It would be an obvious mistake to say that the word "evening" just means "the time that the streetlights turn on". In the same way, while it might be an "indicator" of truth, that a proposition is part of that perfect science at the ideal limit of inquiry, that just isn't what "true" "means".
Computational epistemology is a subdiscipline of formal epistemology that studies the intrinsic complexity of inductive problems for ideal and computationally bounded agents. In short, computational epistemology is to induction what recursion theory is to deduction.
More recently, Goldman has focused his epistemological efforts on questions of social epistemology, of the different social mechanisms through which knowledge is transmitted in society. His work in social epistemology has dealt with the law (especially evidence), voting and media, among other topics. He attempts to provide (in his words) a less radical view of social epistemology than those suggested by cultural theorists and postmodernists under that name. His approach uses tools of analytic philosophy especially formal epistemology to analyze problems in social knowledge. Some of this work is summarized in his book "Knowledge in a Social World".
This section of the science is properly termed the Epistemology—the doctrine or theory of knowing, just as ontology is the science of being... It answers the general question, ‘What is knowing and the known?’—or more shortly, ‘What is knowledge?’
– Walter Terence Stace
– Ward Jones
– What Engineers Know and How They Know It
– Wilfrid Sellars
– William Alston
– William Crathorn
– Word and Object
– World Hypotheses
– World view
What varies with context is how well-positioned a subject must be with respect to a proposition to count as "knowing" it. Contextualism in epistemology then is a semantic thesis about how 'knows' works in English, not a theory of what knowledge, justification, or strength of epistemic position consists in. However, epistemologists combine contextualism with views about what knowledge is to address epistemological puzzles and issues, such as skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the Lottery paradox.