Improve your vocabulary by Quiz

Use epistemology in a sentence

Epistemology Definition

the philosophical theory of knowledge

Sentence Examples

Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, did not begin in modern times.

In Plato's philosophy, logic is not separated from epistemology and metaphysics.

Epistemology is concerned rather with the possibility of knowledge in the abstract.

He can wander into ethics, aesthetic, and logic, into epistemology and metaphysics.

I did not include epistemology or "the theory of knowledge" as a separate discipline.

Thus the special importance of sense-data is in relation to epistemology, not to metaphysics.

This nursing ontology requires an epistemology consonant with human science values and methods.

A bibliography of such references would be in effect a bibliography of metaphysics, or rather of epistemology.

And it is in the teacup of logic and epistemology that the storm in regard to theories of the universe has arisen.

This suggests that a strictly monistic epistemology, whether idealistic or realistic, does not get rid of the problem.

"Logic therefore needs," as he says, "epistemology for its foundation and the doctrine of methods for its completion."

Whatever questions there may be about knowledge, they will not be the kind of problems which have formed epistemology.

As compared with Kant, Hegel is distinguished above all by his complete abjuration of the agnostic standpoint in epistemology.

Epistemology was the study of nothing for nothing could be known absolutely no matter how much the brain yearned for certainty.

This is, to my mind, suspicious, even when epistemology is defined in a way which most epidemiologists would not approve.

If the blight of discord is ever removed from epistemology, we may expect agreement as to the relations of logic to metaphysics.

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to draw a hard and fast line between epistemology and other branches of philosophy.

Metaphysics, logic, epistemology, i. e. branches of philosophy which played so great a part in the West, are of no interest to him.

It is true that it is the bold proposal of analytic logic to keep logic out of the pit of epistemology by excluding the act of knowing from logic.

This outlook is still vague and vacillating, and it may perhaps compel epistemology to return on its old path from the sophists to Plato, from Hume to Kant.

In recent years the economic or pragmatic epistemology, as developed by Avenarius and Mach in Germany, and by James in America, points in the same direction.

To justify this pretension, epistemology has first to transform all our conjunctions into static objects, and this, I submit, is an absolutely arbitrary act.

We may, for convenience, group together these deeper questions regarding the nature of knowledge and its scope, and call the subject of our study "Epistemology."

The Critical Philosophy won its first success in Germany less as a new epistemology than as what, in fact, its author meant it to be, a rehabilitation of religious belief.

The problem of knowledge as conceived in the industry of epistemology is the problem of knowledge in general—of the possibility, extent, and validity of knowledge in general.

It is the necessity of exhibiting this assurance which makes it impossible to subordinate logical problems, and forces us at last to questions of epistemology and metaphysics.


We may, then, regard epistemology as a part of logic—the metaphysical part—or as a part of metaphysics; it does not much matter which we call it, since we mean the same thing.

Because logic has tolerated and attempted to compromise with this subjective act of knowing, say these reformers, it has been forced constantly into epistemology and has become a hybrid science.

By this I mean much more than that the formulae of epistemology are foreign to him; I mean that his attitude to these things as things involves their not being in relation to him as a mind or a knower.

Indeed, one may say that the evolution of modern epistemology has had a centrifugal influence on logic, and instead of growth towards unity of conception we have a chaos of diverse and discordant theories.

As we have seen, Logic does not investigate the truth, trustworthiness, or validity of its own principles; nor does Mathematics: this task belongs to Metaphysics, or Epistemology, the criticism of knowledge and beliefs.

Logic implies an epistemology or theory of cognition in so far as epistemology discusses the concept and judgment and their relations to the real world, and here is to be found its closest connection with psychology.

Even an acute American thinker, after first criticizing pragmatism as a kind of idealistic epistemology, goes on to treat it as a doctrine which regards intelligence as a lubricating oil facilitating the workings of the body.

For many centuries this breach between the operations of intelligence and other operations has been closed by various metaphysical devices with the result that logic has been a hybrid science, —half logic, half metaphysics and epistemology.

Wundt explicitly emphasizes the fact that his psychological account neither represents nor renders unnecessary a philosophy of history; similarly, it may be added, the present work is neither the equivalent nor the negation of ethics, jurisprudence, theology, epistemology, or metaphysics.

A confusion of logic with physiological physiology has bred hybrid epistemology, with the amazing result that the technique of effective inquiry is rendered irrelevant to the theory of knowing, and those physical events involved in the occurrence of data for knowing are treated as if they constituted the act of knowing.

A course in the introduction to philosophy acquainting the student with the aims of philosophy and its relation to other fields of study, and placing before him an account of the most important problems of metaphysics and epistemology as well as of the solutions which have been offered by the great thinkers, together with such criticisms and suggestions as may stimulate his thought, will awaken in him a proper appreciation of a deeper study of the great systems and lead him to seek light from the history of philosophy.

A purely formal logic, which is concerned merely with the internal order of knowledge and does not undertake to show how the laws of thought originate, why they hold good as the measures of evidence, or in what way they are applicable to concrete reality, would be as barren as scholasticism. While logic thus goes back to epistemology for its bases and for the theoretical determination of the interrelation of knowledge and truth, it goes forward in its application to the practical service of the sciences as their methodology.