Epistemology

(from episteme - knowledge)
We refer to the things we know or could potentially know as knowledge. We see this as different from belief (doxa) which is not based on known facts but on such things as faith – but belief is simply knowledge without evidence. It could be ‘true’ or not. This is tricky because religious people see their belief as truth in some sense.
We use science to establish facts about the world around us, the physical, material world. Without factual knowledge we would know nothing for certain. Because of this, some consider epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge one of the most important areas of philosophy. We can study the epistemologies of the great ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, for instance. So what are the different ways that we acquire knowledge, considering that we are unable or unwilling to do every experiment ourselves?

One method is referred to as ‘Tenacity’. (from tenacious, to ‘hang on tightly). With this method knowledge is acquired when it is given to you by another person. This is how a school usually works although it is to be hoped that you are encouraged to think for yourself as well; you gain your knowledge from your teacher, either by instruction or guidance.
It is straight-forward, but there is an inherent problem with this method. That is the possibility that the person giving you the knowledge is wrong. Where did your teacher or the author of the materials you use get her knowledge? Probably from a book or several books, internet sources, and archives. Stored information. Where did the authors of those sources get their information? Possibly from a research text or by using techniques that they were taught at a university. And where did their teachers get their knowledge? Possibly empirically (by experiment or observation) but also from earlier books and sources.
There are many chances along this line of communication for there to be an error and for the knowledge to become partly or completely false. This is a tendency to unreliability which is often used to challenge the accuracy of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia based on viewer contributions. The only check on their entries is corrections and additions by other viewers. It is quite possible for a viewer to remove accurate information and replace it with inaccurate information, because they think that they 'know better'. Given this, it is amazing how accurate Wikipedia happens to be.
The other problem here is our inherent trust in others and the power of conformity. This often leads us to accept what others have told us as true knowledge and we have a fear of disagreeing or challenging it if everyone else around us accepts it. There is a chance that the knowledge is false. But since we tend to trust people or want to believe them,, chances are that we will take that information to be true.
If we are then told by a second person a different piece of information that contradicts the original information we received from the first person, we would tend to continue to believe the first person. We would demand a higher standard of proof from the second person because they are challenging what we already ‘know’. The knowledge we have, right or wrong is tenacious – it hangs on because we tend to defend it. After all, we may have made some major life decisions based on it! Consequently, wrong ideas and beliefs seem to hold on long after they have been disproved and those who hold them continue to find defences for them, no matter what evidence you produce. This is the basis of a some important modern thinking in the Philosophy of Science, such as Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in understanding.

Another method of knowledge acquisition is by ‘Authority’. This is similar to the method of tenacity in that it is based on knowledge given to you by another person, directly or indirectly. This argues that we tend to believe those among us who seem to have special knowledge or who have ‘charisma’, a sort of extreme plausibility. They are convincing because they are qualified or because they sound very convincing. They have authority.
It is often from a group and may forced upon you. A example of this is the behaviour of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition. When the Church required people to accept their doctrines they were using the method of authority to force people to follow their beliefs. It was a crime to reject the teaching and official positions and you could be tortured to death. However it is clear that most people accept the doctrines and were enthusiastic about the murder of anyone who disagreed or objected.
Of course many of these beliefs were untrue by modern knowledge and even bizarre. The Church insisted that the Earth was the centre of the universe, even after Galileo proved them to be wrong. He was silenced by the Pope personally, imprisoned, forced to recant and publically refuted. Governments also use the method of authority, often deciding what people should ‘know’ by controlling what the press can print and TV broadcast, even in ‘free’ democracies. The government instructs from authority, telling us what the facts are – some choose to believe and others do not.

Often you ‘know’ something to be true even though you were never taught it or didn’t need to be taught it. Simple maths and logic is obviously true – we can ‘see‘ it. This is a priori knowledge – it ‘comes before’ everything else that we know. When Descartes started by trying to doubt everything, he finally had to accept that he could be sure only that his mind existed - Cogito, ergo sum - ‘I am thinking, therefore ‘I’ must exist’. That is an a priori, a starting point. For some people, the existence of God is an a priori, an unquestionable starting point in developing an argument.

When Descartes used doubt to test what he knew, he was being a Skeptic. We may say that we are sceptical about some claim that we hear but the true Skeptic takes this method of doubt much further.
Skepticism is a belief system that finally claims that we can not truly know anything. There are several formal parts to the Skeptic’s proof that there is no true knowledge in the world.

1. Knowledge must come from either reason or sense; but it is better to assume that neither is valid as each may contradict the other. Faith and fact may conflict but we ‘feel’ that both are true. Neither may true as they contradict each other.
2. Every argument comes from earlier arguments which come from earlier arguments and so on in an infinite regression back. Like a two-year-old asking why over and over, the skeptic points out that it absurd to keep going back. (The a priori approach allows us to find a starting point).
3. Self-evident truths like logical proofs do not exist since they require outside proofs, thus negating their self-evidence.
4. Senses cannot be proven by reason and reason cannot be proven by senses. We have no way of establishing the existence of either way of acquiring knowledge.

One problem with Skepticism is that it is essentially, logically self-defeating. It is a self-annihilating argument. This is the syllogism that breaks it.

• A skeptic claims that we cannot know anything to be true.
• Skepticism is something that we can claim to know.
• Therefore a skeptic cannot know that scepticism itself is true.

Most people would claim that science and scientific method would seem to be the most reliable way to gain knowledge. We have all been taught that the most reliable knowledge comes from science and its experiments to prove things about our world. This is empirical knowledge, derived from examination of the physical world and the approach preferred by Aristotle. He was a very modern thinker. If we choose to doubt a scientific claim, we can reproduce the experiment or observation and prove it to be right or wrong. That is what makes science reliable – its willingness to be tested.
But what we observe from life is not necessarily true since we, as imperfect human beings, are incapable of perfectly observing our world. So what we base all experiments on are approximations and so our answers are approximations which can never be completely true. Also, the science that we choose to do and the way that we interpret the results is affected by our culture. What if the findings conflict with our beliefs? A Catholic nation like Ireland did not do research into contraception. We do not do science to try and prove the existence of faeries. We tend to do experiments that reinforce what we already believe or that take us to the next level of what we are already doing or ‘know’. So our use of science to establish knowledge may be limited or faulty. Again Wikipedia is a nice analogy. Some topics are popular and have lots of reliable, well moderated information. Others are not and have few or single contributors who may be unreliable. Other areas are contentious and disputes break out between competing 'truths'. From all that we have to try and ascertain what is reliable knowledge. Science also has its popular, well funded areas, its neglected areas and its zones of furious dispute. Few of us have the skills to sort it all out.