Week 1, Post 1 (2?)

Would it seem reasonable to have a little bit of doubting here? Oh wait--maybe you don't know where I'm coming from on this. We have entered the epistemology chunk of our course. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and the matter of its existence, as part of the larger "science" of philosophy. (True, it's not entirely a science--yet, curiously enough, most sciences actually had their roots in philosophy at one point. But did you know that ontology--usually called metaphysics--is a branch of philosophy?) Such questions as "Can we really know anything for certain?" fall within this category. Unfortunately, there can become a limit to this when you begin considering if it's possible to know whether epistemology exists. Wondering if the study of whether anything can be known is capable of being known makes the brain to perform dizzying spirals that can prove disorienting if kept up for a while.

According to epistemology, for one to truly know something, one must first hold a convinced belief in that putative fact. (This is sensible. Why would you know something that you don't believe is true? You can know that other people hold it to be correct, but since you don't believe it's true, how can you know it? Try spraining your brain on that one.) After that, to know something, the fact must actually be true. (Whether or not you believe something to be a certain way doesn't change the way it actually is--under most circumstances. Some would argue that believing things to be a certain way, regardless of how they actually are, would then somehow change the way they are--but this is usually considered to be conjecture. Regardless, putting the wrong answer on a test will get you a nice red mark, because the instructor discerned that you actually didn't know the answer--perhaps you believed in it, but it's not actually the way things are accepted to be. Though you might try making the teacher attempt to prove their position on the fact in question by epistemological methods, in which case you might bewilder your way into getting credit...) Finally, to know something, it is held that you must be able to prove the rationale for the concept's correctness. This is where things get exceedingly batty. To prove something, you must line up facts that you also claim to "know" in support of the "fact" you're attempting to support. Yet how sure can we be that you or anyone else knows the facts you're using to support this new fact? And if it's actually true, as posed in the second portion, why must you prove it? (Some would argue that this is the major religion-barring portion of epistemology: you can't really prove God's existence empirically, for example, but you can prove it rationally. But then whatever arguments you used to prove it will probably come under scrutiny, invariably being discounted at some point. Regardless, if you can prove that what you're claiming to know is the case, that satisfies the second condition and the third. At which point you're only one faithful step from actually knowing the concept in question. The trick is that if the second part is true, but the argument you use to support it is shaky, you don't know something that you otherwise hold to be true.) In the end, after trying time and again to prove all kinds of things you hold to be correct, you wind up back at the fundamental question of epistemology: "Can we ever know anything for certain?" And by its own principles, one could argue...that we will never know for certain whether we can, or cannot.