The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.
Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.
I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.
Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.'
[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
Certainty, not data, is knowledge.
The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.
Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?
Philosophy is that part of science which at present people chose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had ...and will belong to science.
Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.
Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.
There's no such thing as 'facts of life'. Only standing theories that haven't been disproved as of yet.
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an 'objective' ontological reality.
