Week 1 Notes
Lecture 01 | Scientific and Religious Epistemologies
1.1 | What do we mean by “epistemology?”
What is epistemology?
●Epistemology: branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of
knowledge; the study of how we know truth
●Asks the main questions:
○What is knowledge? – What is true, justified, or belief – externalism,
internalism – foundationalism, coherentism
○How is knowledge acquired? – How do we get knowledge? – rationalism
and empiricism
○What do people know? – can we have knowledge? – skepticism,
dogmatism, relativism – subjectivism, conventionalism
●Asks Ancillary questions:
○How do we know what we know?
○Is human knowledge trustworthy?
○Can our senses be trusted?
○What are the differences between opinion, knowledge, and wisdom?
What is knowledge?
●Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through
experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject
○Knowledge can be created collaboratively
Important Distinctions
●Fact: a thing that is known or proved to be true. (LAW) the truth about events as
opposed to interpretation
●Opinion: a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on
fact or knowledge
●Claim: an assertion of the truth of something, typically one that is disputed or in
doubt
●Evidence: signs or indications of something. (LAW) information given personally,
drawn from a document or in the form of material objects, tending or used to
establish facts in a legal investigation or admissible as testimony in court
○Scientific evidence: similar, signs or inductions of something that we use
to support hypotheses
●Theory: a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explains something,
especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be
explained
○Basically an explanation
●Scientific Theory: a well-established explanation of an aspect about the natural
world that can be repeatedly tested and verified in accordance with the scientific
method, using approved protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation
of results that has withstood rigorous scrutiny and embodies scientific
knowledge
○Withstood numerous rigorous scrutiny, very well supported. As close to
fact as scientists ever come.
How knowledge is acquired
●Personal experiences
○Touched a hot stove it burns me
○Hearing, seeing, doing
●Inference
○Introspection
○Reasoning and deducting
●Randomized controlled experiment
○Touching was painful and tried and it was
●Receiving information from trusted and reliable sources
○Friends and family, textbooks, journal articles and magazines, traditional
and social media
What do people know?
●Different strategies: inquiry, analysis, inference, and argument
●Meta-level knowing procedural: knowing how you know
●Meta-level knowing declarative: what is knowing?
What are major epistemological frameworks
●Three main ways to frame what knowledge is and how it is created/obtained
●Objectivism/positivism: one objective reality where the world and what is “real”
is separate from each individual’s consciousness
○Meaning and truth are objective
●Constructionism: Individuals, in collaboration with those around them, mutually
create an understanding of reality
○Interaction between subject and object
○Meaning and truth are constructed
●Subjectivism/Interpretivism: Social reality and our understanding of the world is
based on an individual’s interpretation of the environment and interactions
○Exist in human consciousness
○Meaning and truth is subjective
1.2 | How is scientific knowledge obtained?
What is the scope and application of scientific knowledge?
●Scope: scientific epistemology help us understand and explain phenomena in the
natural world
○How did the universe and life arise?
○What matters and what practices govern how it works/behaves?
●Framework: Objectivism
●Relevant questions:
○How can science be reliable?
○How does one know in advance which factors will be relevant to the final
explanation?
■How will you know which factors you need to control or what do
you need to measure?
○How can one decide when one model/theory/explanation is better than
another?
○How and why does scientific knowledge change over time?
○How can we know the cause and effect relationship given that one can
only ever observe correlation?
How is scientific knowledge obtained?
●Relies on
○Factual observation (fossils are deposited in layers)
○Inferences (there is a struggle for existence among animals on Earth)
○Testable Hypotheses: a supposition or proposed explanation made on the
basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.
●Experiments are carefully designed to test hypothesis/answer the question
○Materials and methods used to obtain the conduct the experiment are
clearly stated so the experiment could be repeated
○How the data are analyzed is also reported
●Exact measurements, observations are reported in figures and tables are in the
results
Parts of a scientific manuscript
●Introduction
●Methods
●Results
●Discussion
●Conclusions
Process of Peer Review
●All scientific publications are subjected to peer review
○Read and critiqued by 2-3 other scientists who are experts in their field
○Determine whether methods are appropriate to answer the question
○Whether data support the conclusions
○The critiques are sent back to the author and then the article is reviewed
again and if it is deemed worthy then it will be published
●Reviewers recommend to either:
○Reject the paper
○Accept the paper after minor revisions
○Accept the paper after major revisions
