Epistemology and the Shape of Truth

From the opening pages

You woke up this morning already carrying an absurd quantity of information. You knew where the bathroom was, that the floor would probably remain beneath you, and that the glowing rectangle beside the bed was a telephone rather than a portal through which a minor deity had chosen to deliver notifications. Before breakfast, you had navigated space, interpreted symbols, recognized objects, anticipated consequences, remembered names, and trusted several habits of nature. Then perhaps you announced that you were “not really a philosophy person.”

This is understandable. Philosophy has spent more than two thousand years taking activities everyone performs and giving them names that make them sound billable. The study of knowledge is called epistemology, from the Greek epistēmē, meaning knowledge, and logos, meaning account, study, or reasoned discussion. The English word became prominent in the nineteenth century. The Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier used it in his 1854 book Institutes of Metaphysic, dividing philosophy into epistemology, the theory of knowing, and ontology, the theory of being. Humanity had been wondering how knowledge works long before Ferrier supplied the label, but labels are useful. They allow universities to create departments.

Epistemology asks how human beings manage to know anything at all. It is concerned with the difference between getting something right and merely landing on the correct answer, between having information and repeating a sound, and between sensible confidence and confidence that has escaped supervision. It examines the routes by which people reach conclusions: perception, memory, reasoning, testimony, measurement, records, institutions, and the assurance of a friend who insists that the restaurant is “just around the corner.” It also asks what can go wrong, which is a generous field of inquiry.