EPISTEMOLOGY:
THE THEORY OF
KNOWLEDGE

What is Epistemology?

Epistemology is the name philosophers give to the branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge. (Episteme was the Greek word used by Aristotle for scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge that had been arrived at through inquiry and right reasoning.)

Prologue: Religious Belief and Metaphysical Speculation

Long before Western philosophy, there was religion.

For millennia most people believed in animism: they believed that powerful spirits haunted trees, oceans, lakes, forests, isolated places, and the sky. They believed that these spirits controlled and had made all things. Spirits had to be appeased. They could be dealt with, indeed had to be dealt with, approximately as one deals with human beings, through beseechings, persuasion, bribes, and appeasement.

In some societies belief evolved over time so that the spirits became more corporeal. Instead of spirits, people came to believe in powerful animalistic or human-like gods. These had made the earth and humanity. They were spirits who, if they wanted, put on flesh. Those who claimed to understand their will asserted that the gods demanded respect and worship, offerings and praise.

But in the sixth century before the Common Era a few Greek-speaking thinkers in Ionia (the west coast of the modern nation of Turkey) began to wonder daringly whether the truth might lie beyond the limits of conventional religion. These thinkers began to speculate that the gods might even be fiction. Things, even people, might have an ultimate nature and origin which did not involve gods.

The world might be made of one underlying substance or principle, or of a few. These substances or principles might have been created by a god or gods, or might have arisen out of what we would nowadays call a natural process.

What, thinkers like Thales and Anaximander began to think, did the world (the cosmos, as they called it) actually show it was made of? Was there evidence of its origin and innate structure? Was the world, despite all its apparent myriad forms and substances, perhaps nonetheless made of a small number of ultimate ingredients? If so, was it made of a few, or perhaps only one?

The Universe seemed to be a cyclic framework. Events in it, like the changing of the seasons and the passage of the stars across the sky, seemed to recur. Instead of stuffs, substances or elements, were there perhaps one or more invisible structures, principles, that underlay and held it together? How many ultimate stuffs or principles? Were there gods? perhaps One?? If so, what kind of Being, thing or principle was He?

With such early metaphysical speculations, so natural to human beings, the field of study later called philosophy (Greek: the love of wisdom) was launched. It spread gradually across Ionia, and then to the mainland of Greece.

The Dominance of Metaphysics

For nearly two thousand years metaphysics -- the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of ultimate reality -- dominated all of philosophy's other divisions. Even when Christianity came and gradually contested non-Christian philosophy, philosophy struggled with the new religion for dominance. Christian philosophers absorbed Greek philosophy; and felt their religion, properly understood, solved all the problems of it.

For centuries Christian metaphysics dominated the other major branches of philosophy: what we would today call epistemology (the theory of of what knowledge is, and its validation), ethics, politics, and aesthetics. This was because of the new religion's power. It created a metaphysics of its own, to orient people in a new theory of reality.

In the Christian era this theory of reality was, of course, the theory of the divine creation and rule of the earth by God. According to St. Augustine (354-430 C.E.), Man, fallible and corrupted by Adam's original sin, had to redeem himself by unconditional belief in Jesus of Nazareth, the Saviour, the Son of God. For Christian thinkers, metaphysics, however human and limited to their own theory, was the Queen of the Sciences.

Christian Epistemology

Some Christians, however, were interested in epistemology. While they believed that the Bible, the Church, and the theologians approved by the Church hierarchy gave true knowledge, they were also interested in secular knowledge and what justified belief in it. So some Christian thinkers worked out their own theories of knowledge. Some based their theories on Plato (circa 428-c. 347 B.C.E.), while others created a position known as nominalism. Nominalism held that abstractions had no reality; that only concrete things were real. Abstract words like circle and beauty were just names. This was entirely the opposite of the theory of, for example, Plato. Christian philosophers gradually became called Scholastics.

In the early 17th century the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1640) wondered if he could not find some more certain kind of knowledge. This led him to a philosophic method that began with total doubt; from doubt he reasoned himself into belief in the world and God.

Kant's Epistemological Revolution

But then came German philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.

Kant's book invented a new kind of philosophy called critique, or the critical philosophy. It created what has been called the critical revolution in philosophy. In a bold move counter to both the skepticism of the Scots philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) and the prevailing dogmatic school of German metaphysics, Kant decided, for the most part, to ignore the ultimate nature of the exterior world (which he called the noumenal world, the world of noumena -- absolutely real things). Instead, Kant attempted to explain the noumenal world's interface with our world -- the world of what we seem to perceive, inside and outside our bodies -- which Kant named the phenomenal world.

Never mind for the moment what Kant actually said about this interface. The approach of his philosophy was revolutionary. It ignored the whole nature of the real outside world, and created a fascination with two things: 1) the mechanisms and functioning of our own minds (and, as we would say today, nervous systems); and 2) the way things appear to us. And by ignoring the whole of previous metaphysics, and giving a fascinating account of how (Kant thought) we could have at least some certain knowledge, Kant's critical revolution caused the sudden rise to prominence of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge.

Epistemology had existed at least since the time of Plato. Plato's theory of the world of Forms was an epistemological theory; it explained what knowledge was, and how Plato thought we could have certainty. Through reflection, Plato believed, people can remember what they already know (but have forgotten), that things in the world imitate perfect forms existing in another dimension. These other-worldly forms are the universals that everything in our world imitates. Aristotle too had worked out a theory of universals, a rather different theory from Plato's. The Stoics had worked out a theory of their own.

But it was Kant's revolution of thought which changed everything in philosophy. From then on, but expecially since the decline in influence of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1832) at the end of the 19th century, the prestige of epistemology has continued greatly to increase; the prestige of metaphysics fallen into steep decline. (See my essay on Russell and Wittgenstein and, again, the essay on metaphysics after Kant.)

Epistemology deals with questions like, How do we know that our beliefs are true? What is truth, and how can we know it? Can we have certain knowledge?

In the dispute between Kant and the 18th century dogmatic metaphysicians (as they are usually called) like Christian Woolf, it was our knowledge of the exterior world that was at stake.

Kant was dissatisfied with dogma. Reading Hume inspired him to thinking about what certain knowledge we can have. Kant, a believer in an atomic theory of the exterior world, nonetheless came to believe that we could have no direct and certain knowledge of that world. For all our knowledge of exterior reality, he thought, is brought to us by means of our innate (mental?) categories of perception and intellection; these often mislead us, for example, in the cases of mirages and when we look at bent sticks in water. Kant attempted to clarify what our mental categories are. It was these categories alone which mediated our knowledge and gave rise to it; it was these alone which we could know, and which could give us certain kinds of certain knowledge.

The exterior, unknowable world Kant called the noumenal world. The world revealed to us through our senses -- i.e, through the categories -- Kant called the phenomenal world. According to Kant, we can know phenomena; we cannot know noumena. At least, we can not know noumena for certain; which, for Kant, seemed to make speculation about noumena a waste of time: for the most part, he did not discuss them.

(This is not my central point in this essay, but philosophers until Kant had hoped that they could demonstrate that reality, especially the exterior world, was real and certain. Kant's critical philosophy seemed to reduce the amount of reality of which we could have certain knowledge by eliminating noumena from the part of knowledge that could ever be certain.)

From Kant's day to this (with the possible exception of the philosophy of Hegel), most of the interesting action in philosophy has been in epistemology. It is safe to say that in 2000 most philosophers believe that epistemology is the dominant, most important part of philosophy. Unless a philosopher has an interesting position in epistemology, that philosopher is unlikely to be considered major.

Metaphysics, on the other hand, has slid into disrepute. (See my essay elsewhere on this site.) One exception to this trend has been the Russian-American philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982). She always began her descriptions of her philosophy, Objectivism, by talking about her metaphysical positions; then proceeded to epistemology. The clear implication of this was that she regarded metaphysics as primary.

However, Rand was so far from the respected academic center of orthodox Western philosophy in the 20th century, either British or continental, that, for most philosophers, she was unimportant. It is only in very recent years that her reputation in intellectual circles has improved.

I think that Rand's epistemological position is very important. Specifically, I think that her work on the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the analytic-synthetic dichotomy is outstanding, and offers a way forward for philosophy in the 21st century.

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Last modified: 5:41 PM 4/1/2002