30.1: Epistemology

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Epistemology is the area of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. The name is strange, but if you are considering a question about what knowledge is, or how we can understand something, then you are doing epistemology. And the dirty secret is, if you have made it this far into the text, you have already done a lot of epistemology. Questions about how to acquire scientific knowledge or how to evaluate testimony are major areas of epistemology that you’ve already spent some time thinking about. In the following sections, we will look at some ways to apply what we learned in the preceding ten parts of this text to our study of epistemology. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive look at the intersection of critical reasoning and epistemology. Instead we are looking to model some basic application of concepts that should help you think about further uses of these concepts in your studies.