Part 1: Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with philosophical questions about our knowledge. More specifically, epistemology deals with our knowing, believing, and attempts to be human beings who are rational about the things we claim to know. It is a branch of philosophy that you actually think about far more than you might realize. Most people might not be professional philosophers, but they do think of themselves as being rational beings (and employ philosophical methods in their attempts to do so), even if they don’t realize this is what they are doing.

To see this, consider the kinds of philosophical questions we deal with in epistemology. We know all kinds of things. But what does it mean to “know” something as opposed to merely believe something? What, exactly, is the nature of knowledge? A quick example will illustrate the difference. Imagine that two people wake up the day after the last presidential election. One knows that Donald Trump won the electoral college vote, and the other merely believes it. How is it that one person knows it and the other merely believes it? Perhaps this is because the one who knows it stayed up until very late in the night to watch all the results come in and saw that Trump got the votes. The other became bored or frustrated, or perhaps fell fast asleep, never seeing the final results, yet did have a sense that Trump would win. As such, this person woke up the next morning with a belief that Trump was the new president-elect. So what’s the difference between “knowing” and “believing”? Perhaps we could say that the one who knows has evidence, and the one who believes merely has a hunch. But then there are a series of follow-up questions. Do “hunches” count for nothing? How much evidence is needed? What counts as evidence? Is evidence always required? And what about times when we have lots of evidence for an idea that still turns out to be wrong? Such are the philosophical questions about knowledge itself.

There are plenty of other important epistemological questions. If, for example, we can identify what it means to “know” something, we might still wonder how we know those things. Do we know simply by way of rational reflection, as some suggest, or does knowledge require us to see, taste, touch, smell, or hear something? The possibilities represent the way two very different schools of thought have accounted for knowledge over the past few centuries. According to rationalists, for example, knowledge is primarily rooted in reason itself; on this view, we know those things we can demonstrate by rational argument. By contrast, empiricists have traditionally argued the opposite, that knowledge is primarily grounded in the different kinds of experiences that we have. On this view, roughly, we know something if it is evident to the senses. I know because I can see it or hear it, or because I have access to it by way of other sensory inputs.

In addition to these questions, and in response to the kinds of answers that philosophers give, there are also questions about whether our perceptions of the world (e.g., from sight, sound, or smell) properly reflect the world as it really is. So imagine that I have just brushed my teeth one morning and walk into the kitchen to eat breakfast with the family. I pick up the glass of milk that my wife poured for me and take a gulp. I cringe at the taste of the milk and declare to the family, “The milk has gone bad!” Of course, everyone at the table thinks I’m crazy because it tastes just fine to them. Here’s an example where our perception has gotten reality wrong. In this case it’s easy to say that this is not much of a worry since it is not an example of what normally happens. There is clearly some kind of polluting factor that caused the milk to taste funny (the lingering taste of toothpaste in my mouth). But then again, how do we know that this case is an exception to the rule and not what is happening all the time? How do we know that there aren’t always some polluting factors that cause us to mis-see or mis-taste the world we live in? What if those pollutants just aren’t evident to us? In response to these possibilities, however obscure and unrealistic they may seem, we are left with major philosophical questions about our perceptions.

Epistemology also deals with the related questions about truth itself. What does it mean to say that some statement or proposition is true? What is it that makes the statement true? Consider a proposition like “Vitamins are beneficial to our bodies.” Leaving aside the medical debates about the value of vitamins, for the sake of argument let’s grant that this is a true statement. The question here is why. Why is it a true statement? What is it about the statement that makes it true? Is it true because it corresponds to the way the world really is? Is it true because it helps us in some way? Is it true because it is compatible with other things we think are true? Or is there some other thing that makes it true? Philosophers have debated questions like these for millennia, but especially for the past hundred years or so.

Another major set of philosophical questions that epistemology deals with are issues of certainty (or what we might call epistemic confidence) and skepticism. On the one hand, it seems plausible to doubt and question the vast majority of what we think we know. These doubts come from all directions and attack all sorts of beliefs that we hold. Not surprisingly, therefore, some philosophers in history have argued for epistemic skepticism, the idea that we really can’t, or at least don’t, have knowledge. Of course, they feel rather certain about this. But most other philosophers throughout history have rejected skepticism. The questions most philosophers ask have to do with the way we know things and the extent to which we can have epistemic confidence about truth and truth claims.

One final set of epistemological questions worth mentioning, though there are plenty of other issues we could mention, deals with questions about science and God. Because they have had extraordinary successes over the past few centuries, do the natural sciences hold a special privileged epistemic status? In other words, are the sciences able to establish a greater degree of epistemic confidence for what they say than theology, history, or some other discipline within the social sciences? Is a statement true simply because a scientist says so? Or, despite the sciences’ extraordinary successes over the past few years, are there limitations to what the sciences can say to us and limits to their epistemic authority? On the flip side of that, how about religious knowledge? Is it possible to know things about God, or is theology lowered to the level of mere belief? If it is possible to know something about God, how are we supposed to get that knowledge? Does the Bible (or some other holy book) count as a proper source of knowledge? And what about nature itself? Can we derive any theological truth from the natural realm? These are all vitally important questions in the field known as religious epistemology.

Such are the questions that epistemology deals with. In this section, we explore some of these questions and offer a quick survey of historical and contemporary discussion on these matters. We trust that you will find them helpful as we explore an extremely important field of philosophy.