Epistemology for beginners

This is Brian. He is basically curious. He collects information, knowledge and ideas like a magpie and keeps them in his head. All this stuff connects up to form a web which represents "the truth". He uses it to filter and to make sense of his experience. When someone mentions sausages, out pop his interesting sausage-related factoids and opinions, ready to go. These are the particular reference points by which Brian understands the sausageverse.

A lot of it is quite unconscious. When he talks, for example, he has no idea how he does it or where it's going and yet it mostly comes out making sense. Brian comes across as a complicated normal person, sometimes even an expert. Sometimes he finds the things he says surprising and brilliant. The bright little beam of his consciousness may or may not be paying attention, but the machinery in his head is busy anyway.

Brian's web of stuff is continually changing as new stuff piles in. Sometimes it reinforces his view of things, sometimes it blows holes in it and quite often new stuff is just rejected as pointless and unconnectable. Bits of his web are a work in progress, bits are like articles of faith (fixed points by which he understands everything else), and other bits are just blank spaces, islands of inactivity.

Much of the stuff in there is shared stuff, stuff that everyone else has in their brains too. This way, people have stuff to share and languages to do it in. Many of the connections are shared as well, so up to a point Brian's experience of things is similar to everyone else's.

But not all. Occasionally, Brian bumps into something that niggles away and makes him wonder. Like, do slugs hear tiny violins when they get all romantic? To many people this is exactly the sort of useless junk that gets instantly rejected. But for Brian it's a profound question; if slugs get all poetic about each other, then our experience is really not that different to their's.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge - What is it? How does it work? To what extent can it be true? How much do we have? What are the limits? Stuff like that.

There are lots of different ideas about it, but in the end they're all based on how we see ourselves.

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