epistemology - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "epistemology"

Total concepts: 44

Concepts

One True Proposition Affliction - Cognitive trap of believing there is only one correct answer or truth about complex matters, ignoring nuance and context.
Epistemic Responsibility - The moral and intellectual obligation to form beliefs carefully, seek adequate evidence, and maintain honest practices in acquiring, holding, and sharing knowledge.
Evidence-Based Thinking - The disciplined practice of forming beliefs and making decisions based on the best available evidence rather than intuition, tradition, or authority.
Empiricism - The philosophical position that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience and observation rather than innate ideas or pure reason.
Epistemic Rationality - The systematic pursuit of accurate beliefs through evidence, reason, and willingness to update one's views.
Knowledge Has Unbounded Reach - David Deutsch's claim that there is no inherent limit to what humans can understand or achieve, because good explanations can be extended indefinitely.
Mimesis - The philosophical concept of imitation or representation, central to Greek theories of art, reality, and knowledge.
Epistemology - The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, scope, and limits of knowledge.
Cogito Ergo Sum - Descartes' foundational philosophical proposition meaning 'I think, therefore I am,' establishing the certainty of one's own existence through the act of thinking.
Scout Mindset - Julia Galef's concept of approaching beliefs as a scout seeking accurate maps of reality rather than a soldier defending existing positions.
Calibration - The alignment between confidence in one's judgments and actual accuracy, reflecting how well subjective certainty matches objective correctness.
Intellectual Honesty - The practice of seeking truth and accuracy in reasoning, being willing to change beliefs when presented with evidence, and avoiding self-deception in intellectual pursuits.
Platonism - The philosophical tradition descending from Plato, centered on the reality of abstract Forms and the primacy of reason.
Falsifiability - Karl Popper's criterion that a theory is scientific only if it makes predictions that can potentially be proven wrong by observation or experiment.
Skepticism - The philosophical attitude of questioning claims and withholding judgment until sufficient evidence and reasoning are provided.
Epistemic Vigilance - The cognitive capacity to evaluate the reliability, trustworthiness, and accuracy of information received from others before accepting it as knowledge.
Episteme - The underlying framework of knowledge and assumptions that defines what counts as truth and valid reasoning in a given historical era.
Epistemic Humility - The recognition that one's knowledge is always limited, incomplete, and potentially wrong, combined with the disposition to hold beliefs lightly and remain genuinely open to revision when presented with new evidence.
Consilience - When evidence from multiple independent sources converges to support the same conclusion.
Epistemic Erosion - The gradual degradation of collective knowledge quality, critical thinking capacity, and epistemic trust caused by information pollution, AI-generated content, and declining verification standards.
Belief Revision - The process of changing one's beliefs when confronted with new evidence that contradicts prior assumptions.
Reach of Explanations - The extent to which a good explanation applies beyond the phenomena it was originally designed to explain.
Weltanschauung - A comprehensive worldview or philosophy of life that shapes how an individual or group interprets and interacts with the world.
Scientific Method - A systematic process of observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, and revision used to build reliable knowledge about the world.
Justified True Belief - The classical definition of knowledge as a belief that is both true and supported by adequate justification or evidence.
Social Constructionism - The theory that much of what we perceive as reality is shaped and maintained through social processes, language, and shared meanings.
Bold Conjectures - Karl Popper's idea that scientific progress comes from risky, high-content hypotheses that forbid much and could easily be wrong.
Pragmatism - A philosophical tradition holding that the truth or value of an idea should be measured by its practical usefulness and real-world consequences rather than by its correspondence to abstract or objective reality.
Hard-to-Vary Explanations - David Deutsch's criterion for good explanations: every detail plays a functional role so the account cannot be easily modified without ruining its explanatory power.
Law of Excluded Middle - Classical logic principle that for any proposition, either it or its negation must be true—there is no third option.
Epistemic Integrity - The practice of ensuring that one's knowledge claims are genuinely grounded in personal thinking and synthesis rather than passively absorbed or misattributed external information.
Ultracrepidarianism - Giving opinions on matters beyond one's knowledge or expertise.
Myside Bias - The tendency to evaluate evidence, generate arguments, and test hypotheses in a way biased toward one's own prior opinions and beliefs.
Dichotomy - Division or contrast between two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive things, ideas, or categories.
Epistemic Uncertainty - The uncertainty arising from lack of knowledge or information, rather than from inherent randomness or variability in the world.
Critical Rationalism - Karl Popper's epistemology holding that knowledge grows through bold conjectures subjected to rigorous criticism and empirical testing, never by proof or induction.
Knowledge Half-Life - The time it takes for half of the knowledge in a given field to become outdated, superseded, or proven incorrect.
Theory of Forms - Plato's metaphysical theory that abstract, perfect Forms are the true reality of which physical things are mere copies.
Anamnesis - Plato's theory that learning is the soul's recollection of eternal truths it knew before birth.
Map is Not the Territory - Models and representations of reality are not reality itself.
Epistemic Bubble - An information environment where relevant perspectives are absent, not because they are excluded but because they were never included.
Scientific Fallibilism - The principle that all scientific knowledge is provisional, approximate, and subject to revision, and that no scientific theory should be treated as final, complete, or absolutely true.
Bundle Theory - The philosophical view, associated with David Hume, that the self is not a substance but merely a bundle of perceptions in constant flux.
Rationalism - The philosophical view that reason is the primary source of knowledge and truth.

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