Epistemology

I

Introduction

Epistemology (Greek episteme, “knowledge”; logos, “theory”), branch of philosophy that addresses the philosophical problems surrounding the theory of knowledge. Epistemology is concerned with the definition of knowledge and related concepts, the sources and criteria of knowledge, the kinds of knowledge possible and the degree to which each is certain, the limits of knowledge, and the exact relation between the one who knows and the object known.

II

Greek and Medieval Philosophical Problems

In the 5th century bc, the Greek Sophists questioned the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. Thus, a leading Sophist, Gorgias, argued that nothing really exists, that if anything did exist it could not be known, and that if knowledge were possible, it could not be communicated. Another prominent Sophist, Protagoras, maintained that no person’s opinions can be said to be more correct than another’s, because each is the sole judge of his or her own experience. Plato, following his illustrious teacher Socrates, tried to answer the Sophists by postulating the existence of a world of unchanging and invisible “forms”, or ideas—such as the forms of equality, beauty, or justice—about which it is possible to have exact and certain knowledge. The things one sees and touches, he maintained, are imperfect realizations of the pure forms studied in mathematics and philosophy. Accordingly, only the abstract reasoning of these disciplines yields genuine knowledge, whereas reliance on sense perception produces vague and inconsistent opinions. He concluded that philosophical contemplation of the unseen world of forms is the highest goal of human life.

Aristotle followed Plato in regarding abstract knowledge as superior to any other, but disagreed with him as to the proper method of achieving it. Aristotle maintained that almost all knowledge is derived from experience. Knowledge is gained either directly, by abstracting the defining traits of a species, or indirectly, by deducing new facts from those already known, in accordance with the rules of logic. Careful observation and strict adherence to the rules of logic, which were first set down in systematic form by Aristotle, would help guard against the pitfalls the Sophists had exposed. The Stoic and Epicurean schools agreed with Aristotle that knowledge originates in sense perception, but, against both Aristotle and Plato, they maintained that knowledge is to be valued as a practical guide to life, rather than as an end in itself.

After many centuries of declining interest in rational and scientific knowledge, the scholastic philosopher St Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers of the Middle Ages (see Medieval Philosophy) helped to restore confidence in reason and experience, blending rational methods with faith into a unified system of beliefs. Aquinas followed Aristotle in regarding perception as the starting point and logic as the intellectual procedure for arriving at reliable knowledge of nature, but he considered faith in scriptural authority as the main source of religious belief.

III

Reason Versus Sense Perception

From the 17th to the late 19th century, the main issue in epistemology was the role of reasoning as opposed to that of sense perception in acquiring knowledge. For the rationalists, among whom the French philosopher René Descartes, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were the leading figures, the main source and final test of knowledge was deductive reasoning based on self-evident principles, or axioms. For the empiricists, beginning with the English philosophers Francis Bacon and John Locke, the main source and final test of knowledge was sense perception.

Bacon inaugurated the new era of modern science by criticizing the medieval reliance on tradition and authority and also by setting down new rules of scientific method, including the first set of rules of inductive logic ever formulated. Locke attacked the rationalist belief that the principles of knowledge are intuitively self-evident, arguing that all knowledge is derived from experience, either from experience of the external world, which stamps sensations or ideas on the mind, or from internal experience, in which the mind reflects on its own activities. Human knowledge of external physical objects, he claimed, is always subject to the errors of the senses, and he concluded that one cannot have absolutely certain knowledge of the physical world.

The Irish philosopher George Berkeley agreed with Locke that knowledge comes through ideas, but he denied Locke’s belief that a distinction can be made between ideas and objects. The Scottish philosopher David Hume continued the empiricist tradition, but he did not accept Berkeley’s conclusion that knowledge was of ideas only. He divided all knowledge into two kinds: knowledge of relations of ideas—that is, the knowledge found in mathematics and logic, which is exact and certain but provides no information about the world; and knowledge of matters of fact—that is, the knowledge derived from sense perception. Hume argued that most knowledge of matters of fact depends upon cause and effect, and since no logical connection exists between any given cause and its effect, one cannot hope to know any future matter of fact with certainty. Thus, the most reliable laws of science might not remain true—a conclusion that had a revolutionary impact on philosophy.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to solve the crisis precipitated by Locke and brought to a climax by Hume; his proposed solution combined elements of rationalism with elements of empiricism. He agreed with the rationalists that one can have exact and certain knowledge, but he followed the empiricists in holding that such knowledge is more informative about the structure of thought than about the world outside of thought. He distinguished three kinds of knowledge. The first is analytic a priori knowledge, which is knowable independent of experience and therefore exact and certain, but is uninformative or contentless because it only makes clear what is already contained in the meanings of words; an example would be the knowledge that all bachelors are unmarried. The second kind is synthetic a posteriori knowledge, which is informative knowledge about the world gained through experience, but which is subject to the errors of the senses; an example would be the knowledge that the star Sirius is blue. The third kind is synthetic a priori knowledge, which is knowable independent of experience, so that it is exact and certain, but at the same time has content. This type of knowledge is gained by reflecting on the nature of rational experience as such, and it expresses the categories that the mind necessarily has to impose on its sensations in order to organize them into rational experience. An example is the knowledge that every event has a cause, which expresses the fact that the mind has to impose the category of cause-and-effect on all its sensations. According to Kant, mathematics and philosophy provide us with synthetic a priori knowledge. Since the time of Kant, one of the most frequently argued questions in philosophy has been whether or not such a thing as synthetic a priori knowledge really exists.

During the 19th century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel revived the rationalist claim that absolutely certain knowledge of reality can be obtained by equating the processes of thought, of nature, and of history. Hegel inspired an interest in history and a historical approach to knowledge that was further emphasized by Herbert Spencer in Britain and by the German school of historicism. Spencer and the French philosopher Auguste Comte brought attention to the importance of sociology as a branch of knowledge, and both extended the principles of empiricism to the study of society.

Empiricism was carried further by the American school of pragmatism, founded by the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey at the turn of the 20th century. They maintained that knowledge is an instrument of action and that all beliefs should be judged by their usefulness as rules for predicting experiences.

IV

Epistemology in the 20th Century

In the early 20th century, epistemological problems were discussed thoroughly, and subtle shades of difference began to divide rival schools of thought. Special attention was given to the relation between the act of perceiving something, the object directly perceived, and the thing that can be said to be known as a result of the perception. The phenomenalists contended that the objects of knowledge are the same as the objects perceived. The neo-realists argued that one has direct perceptions of physical objects or parts of physical objects, rather than of one’s own mental states. The critical realists took a middle position, holding that although one perceives only sensory data such as colours and sounds, these stand for physical objects of which they provide knowledge.

A method for dealing with the problem of clarifying the relation between the act of knowing and the object known was developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. He outlined an elaborate procedure that he called phenomenology, by which one is said to be able to distinguish the way things appear to be from the way one thinks they really are, thus gaining a more precise understanding of the conceptual foundations of knowledge.

During the second quarter of the 20th century, two schools of thought emerged, each indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The first of these schools, logical empiricism, or logical positivism, had its origins in Vienna, Austria, but it soon spread to Britain and the United States. The logical empiricists insisted that there is only one kind of knowledge: scientific knowledge; that any meaningful knowledge claim must be verifiable in experience; and hence that much that had passed for philosophy was neither true nor false but literally meaningless. The so-called verifiability criterion of meaning has undergone changes as a result of discussions among the logical empiricists themselves, as well as their critics, but has not been discarded. More recently, the sharp distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, which was maintained by the logical positivists, has been attacked by a number of philosophers, chiefly by the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine, whose overall approach is in the pragmatic tradition.

The second of these recent schools of thought, generally referred to as ordinary language philosophy or linguistic philosophy, seems to break with traditional epistemology. The ordinary language philosophers undertake to examine the actual way key epistemological terms are used—terms such as “knowledge”, “perception”, and “probability”—and to formulate definitive rules for their use in order to avoid verbal confusion. The British philosopher John Langshaw Austin argued, for example, that to say a statement is true adds nothing to the statement except a promise by the speaker or writer. Austin does not consider truth a quality or property attaching to statements or utterances.

Much recent work in epistemology has concentrated not so much on the sources, kinds, and limits of knowledge as on the question, first raised by Plato, of what the concept “knowledge” entails.