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Epistemology
is a branch of philosophy that deals with the study of knowledge acquisition. It involves the study of origin, nature and limits of human knowledge and it seeks to discover what is known and how it is known. It deals with cultural studies, cognitive sciences and the history of science. It gives an explanation to why our mind relates to reality and how this relationship is valid or invalid. The term “epistemology” is derived from the Greek word “episteme” which means knowledge and “logos” means “reason”. It is one of the four branches of philosophy and nearly all great philosophers in history have contributed to this field. There are two main tasks in epistemology:
- To determine the nature of knowledge, we get to know what it means when we see someone who knows something or fails to know something.
- To determine the extent of knowledge of humans i.e how much one knows and how much one can know.
Now, epistemologists focus on propositional knowledge rather than procedural knowledge. Propositional knowledge consists of knowledge based on a wide range of subjects such as scientific theories, mathematics, geographical knowledge, or self-knowledge. One principle of this field of philosophy is to find out the criteria for knowledge so that we get to know what can be or cannot be known.
Knowledge is a broad subject and needs a general characterisation by analyzing individual conditions which form their basis of knowledge
- Belief: Knowledge is a specific type of mental state as we know that knowledge exists in one’s mind. It is based on beliefs. If one does not believe wholeheartedly in something they cannot acquire knowledge about it. Thus thoughts that are entertained in one’s mind but are not believed by the said individual cannot be included in his spectrum of knowledge. Some beliefs are occurring while some are non-occurrent. The beliefs that are running actively in an individual’s mind are called occurrent ones and those which run in the background are called non-occurrent. Now, most of the human knowledge is non-occurrent as one can have only a small amount of knowledge actively running in their mind.
- Truth: Belief is really necessary but not sufficient for knowledge. Sometimes, we may be mistaken i.e our beliefs may sometimes be true and sometimes false. Thus to acquire great knowledge we increase our bank of true beliefs. Truth is basically a condition of knowledge i.e if a belief is true only then it can constitute knowledge
- Justification: As we know, knowledge requires to achieve the objective of true belief but along with that it needs success regarding the formation of that belief. Thus, all true beliefs don’t constitute knowledge but only those which arrived in the right way.
- The Gettier problem: For a long time, justified true belief was believed to constitute knowledge but in 1963, Edmund Gettier found out about a belief that was both justified and true but still didn’t constitute knowledge. This is because luck also plays a role in the belief turning out to be true.
- The nature of justification: The biggest drawback with “the Gettier problem” is that neither Gettier nor anyone after him explained any sufficient analysis of justification. We now know that justification consists of beliefs to pursue our goals but what it amounts to is still uncertain. Presumably, justification can be done in two ways: according to the believer’s mind or according to the world.