Top 100 Quotes About Epistemology
#1. Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.
Baruch Spinoza
#2. 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
#3. The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#4. To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology.
Greg L. Bahnsen
#5. We often know information but not the epistemology of that information.
Debasish Mridha
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known.
Raheel Farooq
#11. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#12. But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.
Immanuel Kant
#14. 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
#15. On the other hand, when we disown our beliefs, we lose touch with ourselves. We no longer know who we are or what we believe and neither does anyone else.
Patty Houser
#16. 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
#17. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.
Michael Crichton
#18. 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
#19. Truth is, something exists, and everything exists for a reason. Regardless if the reason is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, reason exists and can be named.
John K. Brown
#20. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#21. 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
#22. The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational.
Patty Houser
#23. It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#24. 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
#25. Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.
Pankaj Mishra
#26. If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?
Felix Alba-Juez
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.
Raheel Farooq
#30. Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth ... but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth.
Felix Alba-Juez
#32. The heart cannot rejoice in that which the mind rejects
Kenneth D. Boa
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.
Isaac Asimov
#36. Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Ayn Rand
#37. We must start from the premise that - in all likelihood - we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.
Chuck Klosterman
#38. It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?
Theodore Bikel
#42. One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#43. 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
#44. You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason
if you pick the proper postulates.
Isaac Asimov
#45. We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
#46. Reichenbach, I believe, made it a precondition for doing scientific epistemology that the very notion of 'Jewish science' be philosophically inadmissible. The Nazi racial laws were not only a crime against humanity, they were a crime against philosophical principle.
Ronald N. Giere
#47. So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.
Hilary Kornblith
#48. The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
Imre Lakatos
#49. The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.
Kedar Joshi
#50. 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
#51. Subjectivity is strange to Science, while Relativity is an objective part of it.
Felix Alba-Juez
#52. First stage is knowing the truth, second is not knowing the truth, third is realizing the paradox.
John K. Brown
#53. ...because television had become the primary means through which people appropriated the world, it promulgated an epistemology in which all information, whatever the source, was forced to become entertainment.
Neal Gabler
#54. The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.
Felix Alba-Juez
#55. It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.
John Polkinghorne
#57. 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
#60. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot
#61. 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
#62. Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
Oscar Wilde
#64. In reality, conclusions are muddy, there are no final curtains, and life just goes on.
Sam Waterston
#65. 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
#66. The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things
Baruch Spinoza
#68. Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us - in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them.
Jean Piaget
#69. Well, I don't know why people insist on knowing themselves. It's hard enough to know what to wear.
John Leguizamo
#70. 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
#71. ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion
Patricia Crone
#72. The question of painting is bound up with epistemology, with the engagement of the viewer, with what the viewer may learn.
Guido Molinari
#73. 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
#74. Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.
John Dewey
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Explanation is where the mind rests.
David Hume
#78. Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.
Kenneth A. Bruffee
#79. The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
Daniel Quinn
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. He who would know the world must first manufacture it.
Immanuel Kant
#85. Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
Ian Hacking
#88. When I think of the most able students I have encountered in my teaching - I mean those who have distinguished themselves not only by skill but by independence of thought - then I must confess that all have had a lively interest in epistemology.
Albert Einstein
#89. To demand the absolute and to be content with absolutely nothing else results in a skepticism.
Bernard J.F. Lonergan
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessary
condition for knowledge.
Kedar Joshi
#94. Science is a collection of successful recipes.
Paul Valery
#95. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.
N. T. Wright
#96. But here's the maddening thing about knowledge. We don't know that we don't know something until we know it.
Patty Houser
#97. Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.
Jostein Gaarder
#98. Science is often misrepresented as 'the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.' Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
Jared Diamond
#99. And perhaps I understood it all wrong, but I understood it and that was the novelty.
Samuel Beckett
#100. 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
