This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“Trying to produce a system of knowledge about some subject matter by reasoning from first principles, without relying on judgments about cases, is like trying to design a new airplane based on theoretical physics, without knowing details about any actual airplanes. Your system is almost certainly going to fail in some major way. If it’s a philosophical system, though, there’s a good chance that you won’t recognize that it failed, because there won’t be any decisive empirical test as there is in the case of an airplane, so when someone points out the problems with your theory, you can come up with rationalizations to keep holding on to it. That has happened to many, perhaps the vast majority of, philosophers throughout history.” – Michael Huemer, Chapter 7: Taxonomy and Paradigms of Knowledge, Page 127
“But observation never gives us
normative information. Observation only tells us what is, not what ought to be.
You can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell justification. Normative
propositions also can’t be inferred from descriptive information alone—you
can’t figure out what ought to be solely on the basis of what is. Therefore,
empiricism itself cannot be justified on the basis of observation.” – Michael
Huemer, Chapter 10: Puer Reason, Page 171
“Disagreement poses a practical problem for a few reasons. It directly causes social tension; it causes partisans of different views to waste resources trying to defeat each other; and, perhaps most importantly, it likely results in our making bad decisions since we do not know what the right decisions are. Or perhaps more precisely, the unreliability of our ways of forming beliefs causes disagreement and also causes bad decisions. Unfortunately, it is precisely on certain kinds of practical questions (politics and morality) that we are most likely to disagree.” – Michael Huemer, Chapter 17: Irrationality, Page 324
Is This An Overview?
Epistemology are the methods by
which beliefs are justified, the underlying thinking behind decision
making. All statements contain implied
knowledge claims, with epistemology the study of that knowledge. Knowledge that needs to be justified by
rational beliefs, formed by a probabilistic account of evidence. Which requires the individual to want to
pursue truth and avoid errors. There are
many views of what is knowledge, and what are justified beliefs, but each has
their own logical limitations.
Belief systems can
be internally coherent, but not externally valid. Theoretic knowledge of principles needs to be
tested by experience to be useful, as there can be missed information within
the theoretic knowledge. Most knowledge
is obtained through other people’s testimonies.
Accumulated information that would be potentially impossible for anyone
to verify all the knowledge in their lifetime.
Testimonies are a crucial source of knowledge, but cannot be trusted as
they can confirm biases rather than understand reality. Even knowledge that is obtained and used by the
individual requires cognitive faculties, but the faculties have their own
limitations.
Caveats?
This book is a guide to epistemology
topics and ideas, which uses a lot of jargon.
A reference book for those taking a course in epistemology, or for
professional epistemologists.
The methodology of
the book is not tailored to facilitate improving decision making. Rather the book is meant to find the logical
limitations to claims. Epistemology is
supposed to be a study of knowledge, but as the author notes, epistemologists
do not have an accepted and working definition of knowledge, as each attempted
definition has logical limitations.
Neither knowledge nor any obtained belief can be proven, not even if
someone is not a brain in a vat.
