WHAT AND WHAT ARE THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CURRENTS? - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

Among the most important epistemological currents, skepticism, dogmatism, rationalism, relativism or empiricism stand out.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy in charge of studying knowledge as a phenomenon. From this discipline theories such as the origin of knowledge, its meaning and its relationship with the subject are generated.

Some of the key questions posed by this discipline could be What is knowledge? What does it mean to know something? What is the difference between believing and knowing? How can we get to know something? And what are the bases for real knowledge?

Beyond the philosophical field, epistemology has had an important impact on the scientific and academic world from the attempt to define the limits and possibilities of creating and producing new knowledge.

Likewise, they have been applied to disciplines such as mathematical logic, statistics, linguistics and other academic areas.

As in many other philosophical disciplines, theories and discussions on this topic have been around for thousands of years.

However, it has not been until modern times where these approaches have strongly penetrated and raised concerns that have given rise to new proposals as methods and structures of knowledge.

The basic premise about knowledge is that it comes from the coincidence of a belief with "reality". However, starting from this point there are many variations and questions in this regard.

Epistemology aims to answer a wide range of questions and determine, among other things, what we can know (the facts), the difference between believing and knowing and what it is to know something.

Based on this, different theories have been formulated to attack each of these areas, starting from the most basic, the approach of the subject to the object of knowledge.

Main epistemological currents

Phenomenology of knowledge

This current aims to describe the process by which we come to know, understanding that verb as the act by which a subject apprehends an object.

However, unlike other epistemological approaches, the phenomenology of knowledge is only concerned with describing this process by which we approach an object, without establishing postulates regarding the ways to acquire and interpret it.

Skepticism

It is the questioning of whether the human is capable of accessing the truth. Starting from there, different scenarios have been developed to exemplify and challenge our conception of reality as the dream theory.

For example, it is questioned about the possibility that everything we live is really in a dream, in which case "reality" would not be more than an invention of our brain.

One of the most important questions that revolve around epistemology is the possibility of knowing. Although it is true that "knowing something" comes from the coincidence of a proposition with a reality, it is the term "reality" that can create a conflict in this definition. Is it really possible to know something? This is where theories like this derive from.

Skepticism in its simplest definition could be divided into two streams:

-Academic skepticism, which claims that knowledge is impossible, since our impressions can be false and our senses deceptive, and since these are the "bases" of our knowledge of the world, we can never know that it is real.

-Perian skepticism, which alleges that for the same reason, there is no way to define whether or not we can know the world; it remains open to all possibilities.

Solipsism

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside of one's own mind is insecure; the external world and other minds cannot know each other and may not exist outside the mind.

Constructivism

Constructivism is a relatively recent perspective in epistemology that regards all our knowledge as "constructed," depending on convention, human perception, and social experience.

Therefore, our knowledge does not necessarily reflect external or "transcendent" realities.

Dogmatism

It is a completely opposite position to skepticism, which not only assumes that there is a reality that we can know, but that it is absolute and as it is presented to the subject.

Few people venture to defend these two extremes, but between them is a spectrum of theories with tendencies to both.

It is from this diatribe that the philosopher René Descartes proposes two types of thoughts, some clear and verifiable and others abstract and impossible to verify.

Rationalism

Descartes's hypothesis was closely linked to the branch of epistemology known as rationalism, whose postulates place reason above experience and ideas as the closest object to the truth.

For rationalists the rational mind is the source of new knowledge; through our mind and reflection we can reach the truth.

However, other philosophers respond to this theory with the postulate that just thinking is not enough and that thoughts did not necessarily correspond to the material world.

Relativism

According to relativism there is no universal objective truth; rather, each point of view has its own truth.

Relativism is the idea that points of view are relative to differences in perception and consideration.

Moral relativism encompasses differences in moral judgments between people and cultures. Truth relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, that is, that truth is always relative to a particular frame of reference, such as a language or culture (cultural relativism).

Descriptive relativism, as its name implies, seeks to describe the differences between cultures and people, while normative relativism assesses the morality or veracity of opinions within a given framework.

Empiricism

This theory is based on the senses as the source of knowledge. Real knowledge is formed from what we can perceive.

It is our internal (reflection) and external (sensations) experience that allows us to form our knowledge and our criteria.

For this reason, empiricism denies the existence of an absolute truth, since each experience is personal and subjective.

John Locke, for example, believed that in order to distinguish whether our senses were perceiving reality we had to differentiate between primary and secondary qualities.

The first ones are those that have the material object, the "objective" physical characteristics, and the secondary ones, not considered real, are those that depend on our most subjective perception such as flavors, colors, smells, etc.

Other philosophers like Berkely, claimed that even the primary characteristics were objective and that everything is just perceptions.

Starting from that same discussion, we can also rescue some theories such as realism, which proposes the existence of a real world beyond our perceptions, or representationalism, which postulates that what we see is only a representation.

JTB theory

If believing in something does not make it real, how can we define if we know something? More recently the philosopher Edmund Gettier proposed the JTB theory.

It states that a subject knows a proposition if: it is true (what is known is a real fact), believes in it (there is no doubt about the truth) and it is justified (there are good reasons to believe that it is true).

Other currents such as evidentialism suggest that the evidence justifies belief and others like reliabilism argue that justification is not necessary to produce a real belief or that any cognitive process such as vision is sufficient justification.

Like any other philosophical discipline, epistemology is in constant evolution and reconsideration and despite the fact that the list of theories seems to be endless, its development is a pillar in obtaining new knowledge and reflections on our reality.

References

1. Dancy, J. (1985). An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Blackwell.
2. García, R. (sf). Knowledge under construction. Gedisa Editorial.
3. Santos, B. d. (sf). An epistemology of the South. Clacso Editions.
4. Verneaux, R. (1989). General or critical epistemology of knowledge. Barcelona: Herder.