Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge or truth. In this class I begin to see that the methods of determining what is true had to be created just like many technologies were. I think that “belief” was one of the first sources of knowledge, and still one of the largest. People needed an authoritative source and knowledge had not been preserved in an objective form yet. But it was being preserved in the form of legends and beliefs. So these became the foundation of what a person should believe. However, once a more scientific method was created and knowledge could be preserved, it was inevitable that this would supplant belief and the primary foundation or source of knowledge.

Perhaps it is not true that science overthrew religion because the former was objective and the latter objective. Perhaps Satanic forces were not a factor at all. Instead, people and society needed an effective source of working knowledge. Science provided new information that “worked”. It lead to better crop production or animal husbandry. There was not really a war between religion and science, but rather between productivity and nonproductivity.

I saw a pictures where knowledge was portrayed as the intersection between truth and belief. This is an interesting picture. It means that knowledge resides in our heads, arrives through one of the two conduits, and must simply satisfy both constraints in order to be working knowledge. However, I think people also retain some knowledge that is simply belief without, or perhaps in spite of, truth. People are not completely logical. Everyone has their own favorite beliefs. They all want some things to be true in spite of the facts. These bits of knowledge must often be kept private or masked as “fun” in order to be preserved and practiced.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Understanding why we know things is an interesting field. But it is hard to imagine evolving into such a creature. And is such a person even useful? Do they actually create new gateways to truth and knowledge? Or do they just validate the gateways that are found by other people? I don’t really know. No one in my neighborhood is an epistemologist … or can even spell it.