Epistemology
From Neoredemptive
The study of knowledge and of knowing.
- What does it mean to "know" something?
- How do we come to "know" something?
- What is the relationship between our knowing of something and the thing itself?
You can drive yourself crazy studying this stuff. And not just "I'm sick of reading this drivel!" crazy; "we're all just brains in jars and have no way to know otherwise!" crazy.
The traditional epistemology of the West has been foundationalism, upon which humanism and scientism rest. Foundationalism asserts that there are some precepts ("foundations") which are indubitable and universally perceptible, and that these are sufficient grounds upon which to build a coherent system of knowledge.
Much postmodern thought is "postfoundational", insisting that our minds have no access to any external reality, but rather that our entire thought life is mediated by language and therefore by "language games" which have a more pronounced influence upon our knowing than the things about which we presume to known. This view is not credible because it is self-referentially incoherent and thereby self-defeating: the theory implies that it, itself, is not actually a statement about reality, but rather simply an artifact of "how postmoderns talk with each other", which in turn has no meaningful connection with the "real world". Indeed, without a Creator capable of rending the fog of human consciousness, we have no grounds for any confidence in any of our imaginations. Still, this lack of credibility has not lessened its widespread acceptance among the atheistic intelligentsia.
See Also
Quotable Quotes
- How then do we lift ourselves above the level of the finite and the mundane to gain an eternal perspective on what is true and relevant? The biblical answer is blunt in its candor. By ourselves we can't. We can't break out of Plato's cave of the human, with all its smoke and flickering shadows on the wall. We can't raise ourselves above the level of the timebound and the earthbound by such feeble bootstraps as reason. But where we are limited by our own unaided efforts, we have help. We have been rescued. (Prophetic Untimeliness, p.107)
- One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are, but that cannot be anything except bullshit. (On Bullshit, p.61-62)
- The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. (On Bullshit, p.64)
