Epistemology

From Geography

Epistemology (in Dutch kennistheorie or epistemologie) is a part of philosophy that seeks to find where the nature and origin of knowledge is. Simply said epistemology is the study of knowledge.

Definition of epistemology

Epistemologists are concerned with tasks that can be sort into two categories. First one is the nature of knowledge, where does it come from and how does it relates to notions such as truth, belief and justification? Second is what is the extent of human knowledge, how much do we or can we know? A movement in the philosophy that beliefs we cannot know anything at all is called the skepticism.

Kinds of knowledge

The word “knowledge” and its cognates are used in a variety of ways. One way of using it is as an expression of psychological conviction. Such as "I just knew it would be sunny, but then it rained". Philosophers tend to use it only in the factive way (so one cannot know something that is not the case). An other sense of knowledge is procedural knowledge. knowing how to drive from Arnhem to Nijmegen is an example. IF you know the proffesor of the course spatial action or you know the innercity of Nijmegen, than we talk about acquaintance knowledge, alsco called familiarit.

Epistemologists typically focus on propositional knowledge (which is about belief, truth and justification). And don’t focus the earlier mentioned expression of psychological conviction, procedural and acquaintance knowledge. A proposition is something which can be expressed by a declarative sentence, and which purports to describe a fact or a state of affairs, such as “It is wrong to murder innocent people for fun or He knows that Houston is in Texas” (Truncellito, 2007) Any of these truth might be (in principle) knowable but it's also possible that there are unknowable truths. A goal of epistemologists is to determine criteria for knowledge so that we know what is possible or impossible to know.

References

• Truncellito,David. A. (2007). Epistemology in the encyclopedia of philosophy. The George Washington University. Date of finding: 20 October 2012. http://www.iep.utm.edu/epistemo/

Editors

• Published by Robbert Vossers (4080939) and Thijs Koolhof (4048385)
• Page improved by Lars Paardekooper 20-10-2012