what-is-epistemology

=What is epistemology?=


 * Epistemology** is a branch of philosophy that seeks to answers questions regarding the nature, source and evaluation of //knowledge//. Since knowledge is central to our lives epistemology is thus a central branch of philosophy, even though it sounds a bit technical. Attempts to find solutions to epistemological problems are as old as philosophy itself. Usually epistemology is paired up with metaphysics, the study of reality. In metaphysics, we want to know the basic structure and the underlying nature of the reality that surrounds us. However, once we start to find out answers to these questions, we are faced with the big question: How do we know? This question is at the heart of epistemology.

Even though epistemology is a central branch, it did not figure much in ancient philosophy, whose focus was more on metaphysics and ethics, the study of the values of human action. We find in Plato the emphasis on "the world of Forms," the basic reality that underpins the properties that we perceive, such as redness, roundness, and so on. For Plato the world that we sees it is a mere shadow of the world of Forms. As for the epistemological question of how we actually know anything about these Forms, Plato said that we use our reasoning abilities. It is as if our reasons can hook up with the world of Forms just as our eyes and ears hook up with the empirical world. The question, then, is how we can be certain that what our reason delivers us is actually the world of Forms. Is there any way to verify this beyond our own reasoning? Plato did not answer this question; he just assumed that there was no question of this kind.

The discipline of epistemology really emerged after the work of Rene Descartes. As is well known to all philosophy students, Descartes tried to search for an //apodictic// foundation of knowledge that cannot be doubted at all. Suppose everything around us is a deception. Suppose, for example, that there is a giant demon who is intent on deceiving us in every possible way and that this demon has created this world in such a way that we perceive and believe everything in it to be real. (This is just like the movie The Matrix, by the way). What Descartes came up with was highly phenomenal, an original idea that gave birth to modern philosophy that we are studying today. He found that his own thinking self, the stream of conscious thinking or the "i" that thinks, is something that no demon can deceive no matter how powerful. This is because if he shuts down Descartes' thinking system, which he can certainly do, there will be no conscious thinking at the whole story would not have arisen. So since Descartes is now thinking, this thinking must be possible despite the demon's creating the whole world to deceive him. Thus comes Descartes' famous sentence: **Cogito, ergo sum**, or "I think, therefore I am" in English.

The problem with Descartes was that he opened the door for global skepticism. Look at the movie the Matrix. Neo had thought since he was born that he lived in a certain kind of world, where he was now working as a salaryman, and so on. But when Morpheus showed him the real truth, he became so shocked that he threw up! Imagine further that there is no way out for anybody in the Matrix world, no Morpheus to rebel around and to show what reality looks like. This is our own situation. Nonetheless, it is entirely possible for our perceptual world to be just like the Matrix world. There is no way we can be sure. This is the position of global skepticism.

What makes skepticism so unsatisfactory is that it is tantamount to a whole sale denial that knowledge is possible. Not too many people like that position. And since knowledge still figures prominently in our lives, we presumably would like to know how we can get at real knowledge, and in order to do that the global skeptic needs to be defeated. The objective of modern epistemology has been for a long time focused on how to defeat the skeptics. This is because we think knowledge is very good for us, and if the skeptics are right, then knowledge is impossible. To many this is highly counterintuitive.

This is all for now. I'll write more in a new file on some subbranches of epistemology and their specific problems.


 * Soraj Hongladarom**