Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, logic, and metaphysics.

Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four main areas:

1. The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification;
2. Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony;
3. The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs;
4. Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments.

In these debates and arguments, epistemology aims to answer questions such as:

• What do we know?
• What does it mean to say that we know something?
• What makes justified beliefs justified?
• How do we know that we know?

The concept of epistemology as a distinct field of inquiry predates the introduction of the term into the lexicon of philosophy. John Locke, for instance, described his efforts in 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." According to Brent Warren, the character Epistemon in King James VI of Scotland's Daemonologie (1591) "was meant to be a personification of [what would later come to be] known as 'epistemology': the investigation into the differences of justified belief versus its opinion."

While it was not until the modern era that epistemology was first recognized as a distinct philosophical discipline which addresses a well-defined set of questions, almost every major historical philosopher has considered questions about what we know and how we know it. Among the Ancient Greek philosophers, Plato distinguished between inquiry regarding what we know and inquiry regarding what exists, particularly in the Republic, the Theaetetus, and the Meno. A number of important epistemological concerns also appeared in the works of Aristotle.

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