How Do We Know?: An Introduction to Epistemology Author: Visit Amazon's James K. Dew Jr. Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0830840362 | Format: PDF
How Do We Know?: An Introduction to Epistemology Description
- Paperback: 175 pages
- Publisher: IVP Academic (January 31, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0830840362
- ISBN-13: 978-0830840366
- Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
How do we know what we think we know? Dare we claim to know anything at all about God, or can we speak only about what we believe? Is it time to throw up in our hands and give in to postmodernism?
Don’t buy this book looking for an argument for the existence of God. That’s not the focus. This is a very good introduction to epistemology, with only a light Christian tint. Until the final pages, little is said about knowledge of God, and when we do get to the topic of divine revelation (for that is our primary means of knowing anything about God), the argument for why the Bible story of Jesus is reliable history is unfortunately too brief to be helpful.
Instead, the book hopes to introduce its readers to the philosophy of epistemology–that is, the study of the nature and limits of human knowledge. Dew and Foreman are both associate professors of Philosophy. They start out with the long-standing definition of knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB), provide a few counter arguments to show the inadequacy of that definition, and then lead into some of the deeper issues. What is truth? Where does knowledge come from? Do we really need justification? How and why do we believe? Does “revelation” count as knowledge? (This may be the most important question in the book for Christians.) And how certain can we be?
These topics are deeper than they sound, but you don’t need any background in philosophy to follow the discussion. If the book sounds dry, it’s not. I confess an interest in this discipline, because it’s not uncommon at all for two people to claim to know contradictory facts, judging themselves to be 100% certain of their knowledge, which only highlights how fallible we humans are.
Foreman and Dew have written this in order to explain epistemology to people who have never really considered it and in our day and age, it's more necessary than ever. After all, you have people like Peter Boghossian out there wanting to train up "street epistemologists" to deconvert Christians from their faith. In addition to that, there is a rampant scientism in our society that says science is the way to know the truth. If what you say is not scientific, then it is not a fact.
So how is it that we do know anything at all and what is knowledge? Naturally, you won't find a comprehensive refutation of positions in this work. Instead, it's more to get you thinking about what the different positions are. The authors themselves do not come down on either side in the debate. After reading it, I cannot tell you what position either one of them holds.
The authors also go through the classical problems in studies of epistemology. One such example that will be well-known to students of philosophy is the Gettier Problem. (To which, I remember when this was discussed in my epistemology class one of my classmates immediately asked the professor about Gettier. His question? "Did he get tenure?" Yes. He definitely did get tenure after that.)
Gettier's problem was to show that you could have a belief that was justified and that was true, but even then that might not be enough to say that you had knowledge. This is problematic since the prior definition of knowledge has been justified true belief, which means that now philosophers are looking to see if a fourth item might need to be added to the list.
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