Epistemology Quotes

• Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

  Theodore Bikel

  Study, Knows

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• But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?

  Gregory Bateson

  Heart, Knowing, Answers

  Gregory Bateson, Carol Wilder-Mott, John H. Weakland, International Communication Association, Speech Communication Association (1981). “Rigor & imagination: essays from the legacy of Gregory Bateson”, Praeger Publishers

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• Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Empty, Schemes

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.429, Princeton University Press

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• It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.

  John Polkinghorne

  Ontology, Faithfulness, Models

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• Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

  Jean Piaget

  Taken, Psychology, Logical

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• Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

  Jean Piaget

  Views, Psychology, Transition

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• In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

  Jean Piaget

  Psychology, Developmental, Absolutes

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• A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Mind, His Love

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.16, Vintage

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• If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don't give me Ayn Rand.

  Paul Ryan

  Views, Giving, Trying

  "Ryan Shrugged". Interview with Robert Costa, www.nationalreview.com. April 26, 2012.

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• In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is – i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts – i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.

  Ayn Rand

  Philosophy, Mean, Men

  "Philosophy, who needs it?". Book by Ayn Rand, 1982.

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• There should be no element of slavery in learning. Enforced exercise does no harm to the body, but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children's lessons take the form of play.

  Plato

  Children, Teaching, Exercise

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• If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Men, Ethics, Knows

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.129, Routledge

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• When I think of the most able students I have encountered in my teaching - I mean those who have distinguished themselves not only by skill but by independence of thought - then I must confess that all have had a lively interest in epistemology.

  Albert Einstein

  Teaching, Mean, Thinking

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• We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

  Gregory Bateson

  Knows

  Gregory Bateson (1972). “Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology”, p.493, University of Chicago Press

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• There is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Science, Progress, Events

  Paul Feyerabend (1993). “Against Method”, p.14, Verso

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• Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture.

  Semir Zeki

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

  Max Born

  Philosophy, Believe, Philosophical

  "Experiment and Theory in Physics" by Max Born, (p. 44), 1943.

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• If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology

  Cornelius Van Til

  Christian, Reality, Men

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• It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

  Jean Piaget

  Inspirational, Education, Children

  Richard Isadore Evans, Jean Piaget (1973). “Dialogue with Jean Piaget”, Praeger Publishers

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• The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology-the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects.

  Hal Abelson

  Taken, Learning, Thinking

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• About 70% of what I've written about is centered on the clashes and conformities between the emerging life and physical sciences and older metaphysical frameworks in the 17th and 18th centuries. The other 30% consists of one-off essays or researches into other intriguing contemporary topics such as visual experience, aesthetics, social justice issues, and the epistemology of moral knowledge.

  Catherine Wilson

  Issues, Justice, Research

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or another.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Science, Ideas, Historical

  Paul Feyerabend (1975). “Against method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge”, Verso

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• The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Errors, World

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• Too often preachers want to deal with people simply at the level of publicly accessible reason. We participate with them in their own epistemology. But this is not New Testament preaching. We have a message that is not from this world; it is from God. We don't know it by our own cleverness; we know it because God has revealed it.

  Mark Dever

  People, World, Levels

  Source: matthiasmedia.com

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• To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology.

  Greg L. Bahnsen

  Commit, Rejects, Autonomous

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