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Epistemology Quotes

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Epistemology Quotes

“He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

MadnessMetaphysicsLunaticEpistemologyGeorge Orwell1984MinorityPhilosophy Of HistoryCollective SolipsismPhilophical Fiction
Book:1984
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“How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this.”

ScienceJudgmentScientistJudgementEpistemology
Author:Albert Einstein
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“I say “I am free”, but what I really mean is “I feel free”; I say “I am unfortunate”, but what I really mean is “I feel unfortunate”; I say “I am powerful”, but what I really mean is “I feel powerful”; I say “the World” , but what I really mean is “my world within the World”. What “I am” will always be a mystery to me.”

WorldSelfMysteryPerceptionEpistemologyOntology
Book:A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms
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“Chisels and hammers may suffice to work a piece of wood, but for etching we require an etcher's needle. Thus common sense and speculative understanding are both useful, but each in its own way: the former in judgments which apply immediately to experience; the latter when we judge universally from mere concepts, as in metaphysics, where sound common sense, so called in spite of the inappropriateness of the word, has no right to judge at all.”

PhilosophyCommon SenseMetaphysicsEpistemologyKant
Author:Immanuel KANT (1724 - 1804)
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“The...act of surrender—or devotion, as the case may be—was, to him, a kind of lifeline for those who sought a quick answer and didn’t want to stick around long enough to see their doubt through to its ultimate conclusion. A conclusion, which, of itself, was a bittersweet paradox—for how could doubt simply cease to exist by any stretch of the imagination? Doubt was, nonetheless—from his own perspective—the only inclusive insight into the nature of a Truth exclusive of conditions.”

TruthDoubtSurrenderDevotionParadoxBlind FaithEpistemologySelf DelusionEasy AnswersFallible
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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“If truth is to be victorious in her conflict of forces, she must herself first become a force and appoint some drive to be her champion in the realm of phenomena; for drives are the only motive forces in the sensible world. If she has hitherto displayed so little of her conquering power, this was due, not to the intellect that was powerless to unveil her, but to the heart that closed itself against her, and to the drive that refused to act on her behalf.”

ReasonPhilosophyEpistemologyKantSchiller
Book:On The Aesthetic Education Of Man
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“Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.”

FeminismIronyLinguisticsEpistemologyOntologyPolitcs
Book:Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
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“Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.”

ExistentialismModernismEpistemologyTolstoyCervantes
Book:The Art of the Novel
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“Let us, thusly, embrace the assumption that to each advocate of a respective paradigm within his respective bubble, the phenomenological gaps between himself and those in neighboring bubbles are insurmountable. The resident of a given bubble has become so inured to the echoes of his own ‘truth’ as to abandon all terms of commonality with the ‘truths’ of others outside his bubble. The internal terms, concepts, definitions and assumptions underlying each paradigm are different and incommensurate with those of their external counterparts. And so, to debate them would be tantamount to speaking through one another without much mutual understanding. In their communities, they speak different words, abide by different sets of logic, axioms and propositions from those of other communities; they, thusly, do not understand the terminology upholding other paradigms beside their own, and many attempts at translation have become lost in circular discourse for there exists no equivalency of terms. Thus, any gaps between bubbles of paradigm are beyond traversal; all arguments between them remain perplexing and irreconcilable. There, then, evolves, among them, a strong tendency to seek out information that only serves to confirm their own biases, and, in the process, to otherize any alien paradigms as hotbeds of disinformation.”

ParadigmPostmodernismEpistemologyPhenomenologyConfirmation BiasPost TruthTheory Of KnowledgeEcho ChamberInsularityInformation BubblesPlurality Of Truth
Author:Ashim Shanker
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“ادعاء حدوث الأشياء صدفة يستلزم إثباتا! فالصدفة ليست هي الكلمة السحرية التي تحل إشكال أي ظاهرة لا نعرف سببها .. الصدفة المحضة هي كلمة لا تعبر عن معرفتنا بل عن جهلنا وقصورنا المعرفي!”

FaithChanceEpistemologyPhilosophy Of ScienceBurden Of Proofإيمانالتصميم الذكيالصدفة
Book:معادلة الإيمان
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“If we were to trace the arc of this resplendent moment to its uncertain trajectory, we might arrive at a time 10,000 years hence in which our story is likely to be told, albeit in the past tense, with the requisite degree of speculation and inconsistency and according to the values, perceptions and prevailing paradigms swirling about its storyteller—who, most certainly, would be just as alien and unseemly to us as we, in our primitive ways, would seem to him... Of course, we can suppose there to be some level of idealization in the storytelling—even if he...were to examine fastidiously all records of our associations, contracts, interactions, transactions and endeavors, he would still come away with his own set of presumptions, in a manner, no different than the sort to be drawn away through the course of taking epistemological preference. Certain facts, agreements and events will unduly be assigned a preponderance of emphasis whilst others, though critical in their own time and to its chief actors, will be glossed over for their lack of sexiness to the keen observer of historical fact. Certain moments will be lost and others manufactured in their place, and these conscripted fabrications will define future idealizations of this moment of time—this, as you are sure to find, deeply critical moment in the history of our species.”

PropagandaSpeculationEpistemologyInconsistencyConfirmation BiasIdealization Of The PastHistorical Inaccuracy
Book:Inward and Toward
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“With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies. The crucial question is not the desirability of the professed goal but the incentives and constraints created and what they are most likely to lead to. The imposition of monthly equality in pensions, rather than lifetime equality, has the net effect of making pension plans more expensive, the more female employees there are [because women live longer than men]. Viewed as prospective behavioral incentives, rather than as a retrospective status pronouncement, this means that employers will find it more costly to hire female work- ers with a given pension plan and more costly to institute a given pension plan when there are more female workers. Reducing the demand for female workers or reducing the likelihood of creating a pension plan is hardly the intention of the courts, but it can easily be the result. It is not clear that anyone is economically better off after such a symbolic ruling.”

EconomicsEpistemologyEquity And Inclusion
Book:Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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“When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't fit our tastes. In an attempt to simplify, we try to force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone, to turn a complicated and at times troubling holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.”

FeminismIndividualismFundamentalismEpistemologyHermeneuticsExegesisBiblicismBuffered Self
Book:A Year of Biblical Womanhood
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“Analisis sosial adalah cara untuk memulai sebuah penyelesaian masalah. Analisis sosial yang harus diutamakan adalah nalar dalam menganalisis sesuatu melalui data yang akurat, kekuatan argumentasi, pengetahuan, epistemologi, dan hal-hal mendasarnya. Hal itu semua membutuhkan dialog dengan berbagai kalangan yang menjadi pemangku kepentingan masalah tersebut untuk menemukan akar masalahnya.”

Public PolicyEpistemologySocial Transformation
Book:Mengubah Kebijakan Publik
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“There is nothing more powerful than gaining knowledge through our beliefs via personal experiences because when we turn belief into knowledge this way, we know what we know at the very core of our being, at a visceral level.”

KnowledgeBeliefsKnowledge QuotesPersonal ExperiencesEpistemologyBeliefs Quotes
Book:A Woman's Guide to Knowing What You Believe: How to Love God With Your Heart and Your Mind
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“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

PhilosophyTruthKnowledgeMetaphysicsEpistemologyOntologyBorgesAbsurdismTaxonomyMeaning MakingSocial Constructionism
Book:The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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“Up to now, most atheists have simply criticized religion in various ways, but the point is to dispel it. In A Manual For Creating Atheists, Peter Boghossian fills that gap, telling the reader how to become a ‘street epistemologist’ with the skills to attack religion at its weakest point: its reliance on faith rather than evidence. This book is essential for nonbelievers who want to do more than just carp about religion, but want to weaken its odious grasp on the world. (Review of Dr. Peter Boghossian's book, 'A Manual For Creating Atheists')”

PhilosophyReligionFaithAtheismEvidenceEpistemologyAtheistsReligious CriticismNonbelieversA Manual For Creating AtheistsManual For Creating AtheistsPeter Boghossian
Author:Jerry A. Coyne
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