Epistemology Quotes

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Who knows most, doubts most.

What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite.

To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.

Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

I'm not a philosopher.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.