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Epistemology Quotes

Epistemology Quotes

Quotes about epistemology, and the foundation of truth. All the best epistemology quotes.

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Last updated: May 13, 2020

35 Epistemology Quotes organized by Most Popular

“It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.”
— John Dewey, Logic- The Theory of Inquiry
Tagged: The Pattern of Inquiry, Epistemology, Questions, Profound, Philosophical, Ask The Question (And You're Close To The Answer)
“It is worth studying philosophical systems in order to dismiss them.”
— Czeslaw Milosz, Religon And Space
Tagged: Negation As Creation, Philosophy, Epistemology
“With truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
Tagged: Epistemology, Truth
“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
Tagged: Education, Expereince , trial and error, Learning, Epistemology
“To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Epistemology, Understanding How Things Work, Reverse Engineering
“Something is always concealed. For no manifestation reveals everything, and interpretation, no matter how carefully formulated, can never be total in its verbal formulation.”
— Walter Ong, Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization
Tagged: Limits of Knowledge, Concealment, Forever Grapsing, Epistemology
“We have no idea what we don't know. Or what we'll eventually learn, or what might be true despite our perpetual inability to comprehend what the truth is. It's impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.”
— Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Tagged: The wrong side of history, Why we believe what we believe, Epistemology, Technology, The future
“Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the cases on which it thrives.”
— Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
Tagged: Logic Against Logic, Epistemology, Limits of Knowledge, The Seduction of Unreason
“My analysis of practice points to a situatedness and path dependence of knowledge production.”
— Andrew Pickering, e Mangle of Practice: Time,Agency,and Science,The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
Tagged: Epistemology, Knowledge Production, Relativism, Situatedness, Logic Against Logic
“One of the abiding problems of explanation is that it splits issues analytically in order to clarify them, and in the process often impoverishes or denatures the issues, depriving them of some of their full and essential depth.”
— Walter Ong, Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization
Tagged: The Limits of Knowledge, Epistemology, Analytical Reductionism, Hurtles In Objective Interpretation
“As we study other peoples, past or present, we dissolve the totality of their existence into items we are able to handle and fail to note the other parts of their lives which remain unassimilable to ours as a whole.”
— Walter Ong, Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization
Tagged: Knowledge Without First-Hand Proximity, Issues of Abstraction, Epistemology, The Problem of Knowledge Abstraction
“The nature of the knowledge itself was rarely questioned. It was taken for granted that scientists were discovering the objectively real inner workings of nature. These workings are there to be discovered. It only takes effort, sometimes requiring huge expenditures of resources, to uncover them. This pretty well sums up the attitude of most people at the beginning of the twenty-first century, including both scientists and nonscientists.”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Epistemology, Objectivity, Science
“There is exactly one true and complete description of 'the way the world is.”
— Hilary Putnam , Reason, Truth and History
Tagged: Epistemology, Objectivity, Science, Truth
“Order is often a very desirable good and can be indispensable to intelligence and understanding, but to reduce intelligence simply to order is to trivialize intelligence.”
— Walter Ong, Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization
Tagged: order, Epistemology, The Logic Force, Forcing Logic
“What changes people is relationships. Somebody willing to walk through the shadow of the valley of adolescence with them.”
— Bill Milliken, The Power of a Dinner Table
Tagged: Relationships, Stories, Why we believe what we believe, Epistemology, Change
“It was horrifying. As a little kid, you’re absolutely vulnerable to what these powerful preachers and other adults are telling you. They control your life, and as far as you know, the world. You don’t understand that it’s a little group of mostly uneducated people huddling in a little church that people on the outside ignore. To you, it’s the whole world. This mortal threat is coming from your dad, or a visiting minister who’s a friend of your dad and who comes to your house for dinner. It gets reinforced at home, in prayers at every meal, in Bible readings after every evening meal, in prayers before bedtime. So these sermons scare the shit out of you. Then you see adults coming forward, kneeling right in front of you, weeping for their sins. The pressure builds up inside you—I can still remember the heavy dread in my chest. As a little kid who was especially shy, my fear of going to hell would battle with my terror of exposing myself by standing up in front of the church.”
— Doug Frank, Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism
Tagged: Religion, Why we believe what we believe, Epistemology
“The simplest reply was given by Tolstoy with his statement, 'Science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us: What should we do? How shall we live?’ The fact that science cannot give us this answer is absolutely indisputable. The question is only in what sense does it give 'no' answer, and whether or not it might after all prove useful for somebody who is able to ask the right question.”
— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures
Tagged: Epistemology, Knowledge, Liberal Arts, Science
“One talks about a thing by talking about something else.”
— Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement
Tagged: The Secret of Secrecy, Epistemology, Language's Slippery Slopes, When Indirect Is More Direct
“Your mind is not in your head. It is between you and other people.”
— Corey Anton, Where is Mind?
Tagged: Relationalism, Social Dynamics of Knowledge, Epistemology, Quote of the Moment, Communication as Connection, Social Soil
“We're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the certitude it generates is paralyzing.”
— Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong
Tagged: Why we believe what we believe, Knowledge, Epistemology, Truth
“For a perspectival realist, the strongest claims a scientist can legitimately make are of a qualified, conditional form: 'According to this highly confirmed theory (or reliable instrument), the world seems to be roughly such and such.' There is no way legitimately to take the further objectivist step and declare unconditionally: 'This theory (or instrument) provides us with a complete and literally correct picture of the world itself.'”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Epistemology, Perspectivism, Science, Importance of Multiple Database Entries
“In Schmitt’s view, all thought, which does not recognize that order is created out of disorder and that rationality is based on an 'irrational' foundation, is itself irrational.”
— Mika Ojakangas, A Philosophy of Concrete Life: Carl Schmitt and the Political Thought of Late Modernity
Tagged: Epistemology, Groundless Ground, Unreason, Logic Against Logic
“Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem … but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.”
— George R. R. Martin, Maester Luwin, A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2)
Tagged: Knowledge, Epistemology, Science, Why we believe what we believe
“Observing your own brain in a bowl, you would not say, "That object is me." We are the sum of the interactions taking place within the mechanism.”
— Dan Brown, Origin: A Novel
Tagged: Epistemology, Bodies, Brains
“Most of the time reality has already moved past where that vertical knowledge resides.”
— Darrell Bricker, The World Might Actually Run Out of People
Tagged: Reality, Epistemology, Limits of Knowledge
“There are no circumstances in which a consensus about an object's color is logically guaranteed to be the truth-however extensive the consensus is.”
— John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art
Tagged: Epistemology, Color Theory, Majority Truth, Big Picture Thinking
“If in the evolution of consciousness we include the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, it is evidently impossible completely, or even significantly, to plan what the next stage of consciousness will be. Consciously developed plans may affect the next stage of consciousness but they themselves will not define it. What will define the new stages will be their relationship not simply to our conscious planning but, more basically, their relationship to the unconscious organization underlying our conscious planning. We had better do our conscious planning humbly, paying attention not only to what we think we can make ourselves to be but to what we really are. Out of what we are, and our relationship to what we are, comes the future. Discovering what we are and acknowledging what we are has never been easy for human beings. It is always an ongoing project.”
— Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness
Tagged: Consciousness, Epistemology, Evolution, Unreason
“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't.”
— Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Tagged: Epistemology, fiction, Illusion, Narrative Fallacy, Simulacrum, Story, Truth
“For example, we normally predicate truth of propositional entities like assertions or beliefs. But we can grasp a proposition as potentially true or false only to the extent that we can understand how to use it to uncover or make salient a fact or state of affairs. So we could say that the being of truth resides in uncovering. Thus Heidegger takes uncovering in a broad sense – lifting into salience – to be the ontological function of truth. He then applies the term in a broad sense to anything that uncovers. So, for instance, if I drive a nail into a board, I am uncovering the way a hammer is used. In this broad sense, my action, for Heidegger, is true – in hammering, I lift into salience what a hammer is and how it is used. Or if a building like a medieval cathedral supports the faithful in their efforts to inhabit a world opened up by God's grace, the cathedral is also true in the ontologically broad sense – it works by lifting into salience what is essential or most important about such a world, and supporting the disclosive practices of that world's inhabitants.”
— Mark A. Wrathall , Heidegger and Unconcealment
Tagged: Epistemology, Salience, Uncovering
“And thus the project of self-realization is thrown back on the experience of self-loss from it springs.”
— Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance
Tagged: Groundless Ground, Epistemology, Getting To Know Yourself, Loss
“Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Tagged: Beyond Logic, Forms of Communication, Poetry, Epistemology
“But a trial is not about a judge— who is an arbiter in matters of law. It’s about a jury— who are arbiters in matters of fact, but make decisions, like all human beings, based on emotion.”
— Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue
Tagged: Law, The justice system, Reason, Emotion vs. reason, Decisions, Epistemology
“I saw an article about a guy who plays blues—a black guy who hangs out with the Ku Klux Klan. So I watched him, like, what is this guy doing? He made sense. He said, "Listen. If you just sit down and talk to a person and just listen to him, I guarantee you that you have something in common." And at the end of the thing, the Ku Klux Klan guy says, "You know what? I think I made a mistake, because this black guy's cool."”
— Shaquille O'Neal, Shaq: 'When I Get Stopped by the Cops, I'm Not Worried' Because 'I Show Respect'
Tagged: NBA, Sports, KKK, Epistemology, Race, Why we believe what we believe
“We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? You people are creating a world of ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive.”
— Mercer, The Circle
Tagged: Knowledge, Epistemology, Too Much Information, Information Overload
“If human wisdom has little or no value, where do the dogmatic assertions about God and his wisdom stem from? Why should they be trusted?”
— Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
Tagged: Human Arrogance, The Source of Knowledge, Human Knowledge, Epistemology