On the importance of epistemology
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
What if we see blue through our window when the truth is pink? Hygiene tasks, as illustrated by Asimov, are relative to our level of knowledge. But what is knowledge? Do we really know what we think we know?
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy to study the knowledge of the world we live in. Knowledge is more vital than belief, even if forming opinions is part of human nature. The consequences of believing in something false have a broad spectrum depending on the context. But, in general, it is an anomaly in our journey. The good news is that we are equipped to filter the good from the bad ― thanks to our reason. Let’s consider the most expensive and rare coffee for a second. A group of people thought about a process to extract the beans out of the elephant poop. It is a manual and delicate method, not to mention that the workers need to be in the right mindset to handle their job. Doing that type of triage is the equivalent task to acquire (real) knowledge.
When we think something is true, it is a belief captured from the world, based on our “senses, reason, and the influence of other people” (Philosophy…
