Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks what knowledge is, what justifies a belief, and how far either can reach. The spoke’s domain has named it since the split, and two pages have linked to it since 2026-07-10 — this page is the referent they were pointing at.

Its subject is wider than knowledge alone. Steup and Neta frame the field as the study of cognitive success in general: knowledge is the most-studied kind, with justification, evidence and rationality alongside it.

The three knowledges

Acquaintance (knowing a person or place directly), know-how (practical ability), and propositional knowledge — knowing that something is the case. Nearly the whole literature is about the third (sep-epistemology).

JTB and its failure

The traditional analysis says knowledge is justified true belief. Gettier’s counterexamples showed the three conditions can all hold while knowledge does not, because the belief is true by luck. Everything structural in the modern field is downstream of that failure — the disputes below are competing repairs to the justification condition.

The two standing disputes

• Internalism vs. externalism — is justification fixed by the subject’s internal mental states alone, or does the external reliability of the belief-forming process count? The test case is a brain in a vat with your exact mental life.
• Foundationalism vs. coherentism — knowledge as a building resting on basic beliefs, or as a web with no privileged base. The regress argument (justification cannot run backwards forever or in a circle) is foundationalism’s case.

In this spoke’s corpus

• rene-descartes is the corpus’s foundationalist, and does it before the word exists: the methodic doubt is a search for a belief the regress cannot get behind, and the cogito is the candidate. His dualism is built on top of that epistemic bedrock, not beside it.
• rationalism is a claim about which source delivers cognitive success — reason over the senses — held by Descartes and Spinoza, with mathematics as the model.
• friedrich-nietzsche attacks the whole enterprise rather than taking a side in it. Perspectivism denies there is a view from nowhere against which any justification could be checked, which is a challenge to internalist and externalist alike, and the spoke records it as a live disagreement rather than a settled one.
• nihilism is what follows for value once that challenge lands.

Empiricism is still absent, and this page makes the hole sharper: rationalism is here with two exponents and its foil has none. That is the spoke’s open counterweight question, restated.

Related

sep-epistemology · rationalism · rene-descartes · friedrich-nietzsche · mind-body-problem · western-philosophy