Epistemology.

[Epistemologyⁱ/ɨˌpɪstɨˈmɒlədʒi/ (from Greekἐπιστήμη (epistēmē), meaning “knowledge, understanding”, and λόγος (logos), meaning “study of”) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.^[1][2]

It addresses mainly the following questions:

• What is knowledge?
• How is knowledge acquired?
• To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known?

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification.]

[Thanks to wikipedia for the above. The following article is an excerpt from a longer essay I’m currently working on.]

I don’t think the importance of epistemology can be stressed when we’re talking about issues like the truth of a worldview. As I see it, human beings tend to be very rational when it comes to mundane everyday things. For example, people tend to look both ways before they cross the busy street, without having to deliberate upon why is it that such an action is deemed rational. In these cases, people are intuitively expert epistemologists- additional discussions on epistemology have little use here. However, when we start talking about things like the truth of a worldview, it’s a different story. People often employ a different epistemological judgment when it comes to worldviews. A common notion, for example, is expecting absolute proof. Now people rarely do this in their everyday life. I don’t ask for absolute proof for the claim that my mother loves me, or that my breakfast is not poisoned, or that I will survive tomorrow. Instead of asking for proof, we remain perfectly content with a claim being more plausibly true than its alternative e.g., while I don’t have any absolute proof that my mother loves me, I do think this is more plausible than the alternative i.e. my mother doesn’t love me, but has been acting that way for the past twenty-one years for some sinister hidden agenda. Sometimes, we take certain things to be true at face value, based on a strong intuitive impulse. Instead of asking for proof, I intuitively trust my sensory experiences- I just go with my intuition in that regard. I don’t think there’s any good reason not to treat worldviews this way as well. People might disagree with me by saying that the claims that worldviews, especially religious worldviews  generally make are different from our everyday experiences. This is something few people would disagree with: a Prophet of God splitting the red sea with a strike of his staff is a claim of a different proportion altogether, compared to the claim that there’s an apple on my table. I don’t see how that changes how we should judge the truth value of a proposition. If evidence does accumulate which leads us to believe that the plausibility of the Prophet splitting the sea is higher than such an event not occurring, then there shouldn’t be any good reason not to accept it (although admittedly, stronger evidence might be needed to justify such a proposition). It should be noted, that these fallacies in judging (especially religion-oriented) worldviews are not only committed by the skeptics, but also by its believers. Sincere believers are sometimes anxious about whether they are indeed on the truth or not, and in trying to give the skeptics too much benefit of doubt, they may inadvertently succumb to these fallacies i.e. underestimating the truth value of the worldview. Generally speaking, these fallacies result from psychological biases, though the nature of the biases are different in the case of the believer from the skeptic.

With all of this said, an important question arises: what is the appropriate truth value for a given worldview? It is understood that such a worldview needs to be more plausible than not, but what is that specific level of plausibility, upon reaching which we can comfortably say worldview X is true? In this regard, I’m a particularist. I don’t think it is productive to hypothesize about a general plausibility level that would hold true for all worldviews. Rather, if a true worldview does present itself, we’ll know what that plausibility level is. Or more generally, we can productively talk about whether a particular worldview is true or not even without establishing a general truth-meter. The truth-meter (almost spontaneously) arises when we are dealing with particular worldviews, and it is not necessary to hypothesize about a general truth-meter beforehand. If you have difficulty agreeing with my view, consider this: to this day, epistemologists do not have a unanimous consensus about the definition of knowledge. Does that mean we don’t recognize knowledge when we come across it? Of course not. An epistemologist can, on one hand, admit that there is no consensus on the definition of knowledge, while on the other hand, be perfectly happy to accept E=mc², or that the earth goes around the sun, or any other such proposition as examples of knowledge. This is essentially similar to my stance regarding worldviews, just because we might not have a general definition of what the “plausibility level” of the true worldview would be, we would nevertheless know it to be true once- or if- we come across it. It would be helpful, however, to have a vague, descriptive (as opposed to quantitative) idea as regards how the true worldview might be. For example, I have already argued that the true worldview would need to be more plausibly true than not, and I hold that this assertion is valid because this is how we normally judge the truth value of propositions.