Knowledge theory {epistemology}| describes how people can know something. People can know things by association and by insight, as information becomes knowledge.
questions
How is something true? How can people detect errors? What are roles of opinion and speculation? What are the knowledge types? What is nature of cause and effect? Do intuitions exist? Do revelations exist? What emotions and feelings exist? What is consciousness?
How can people know that external objects exist if all they know is experience? How do external objects and body generate experience? Can experiences and physical world have no relation?
analysis: logic
Philosophical logic studies term definitions, references, predications, propositions, connectives, operators, and quantifiers. Philosophical logic studies truth, modality, argument, entailment, and inference. Epistemology tries to find necessary and sufficient conditions to establish statement truth. Epistemology is about difference between knowledge and belief.
categories
Knowledge has categories: aesthetical, architectural, circumventional, constructional, dynamical, geometrical, topological, and transportational. All categories are relative and changeable.
categories: event
Events describe object and part motions. Objects and parts can change or stay the same over time. Identical events can be at same time and place, with same object and part changes.
categories: objects
Objects have parts and properties. Physical objects, relations, and motions exist independently of human thought.
experience
Experience has sense qualities, perceptions, and ideas. People can have immediate perceptions and conscious sense qualities.
goals
Goals provide knowledge uses. Ultimate goals do not exist, because goals also serve other purposes. At high levels, goals are circular.
reality
People experience reality as outside body and mind. Physical energies, masses, momenta, positions, and times have quantization. Small energies, lengths, masses, and times are unmeasurable and undetectable.
sense organ
Brains know about sense organs and their controllers, as well as sensed objects and events.
animal
Animals can distinguish food from non-food. Animals can recognize predators. Animals can discriminate to categorize species. Animals can discriminate same-species individuals. Animals can discriminate gender. Insects, birds, rodents, and baboons can learn to discriminate neighbors from strangers.
meaning
Sentences, pictures, diagrams, and all linguistic and non-linguistic representations can derive meaning from mental intentions.
methods
Analogy aids understanding. Analysis divides systems, objects, or events to isolate subsystems or system parts, but universe has no simple or isolated systems. Fields, neutrinos, and radiation are everywhere, and even vacuum has activity. Previous learning gives meaning to current thoughts, actions, and language, using symbolic concepts and mechanical habits.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>Epistemology
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0224