Can someone explain what metaphysics and epistemology means? And with examples as well please.
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Epistemology is just the study of ‘how we know things.’
An example might be something like if someone said “The earth is flat. You can’t prove it is round.” His claim is both a claim about ONTOLOGY (how things actually are .. e.g., flat or round) as well as a claim about EPISTEMOLOGY (how we can know or prove something.. eg., ‘you can’t prove it!’)
Philosophers might argue about different theories of knowledge … what does it mean to KNOW or BELIEVE something. What kind of beliefs constitute a justification for what we call ‘knowledge.’
Like, if I said I believe that Napoleon spit in a puddle in on January 10th, 1804, this might be true and I might be right… but this does not necessarily constitute true knowledge.
So epistemology has to do with a lot of this kind of stuff.
In terms of branches of philosophy metaphysics deal with the most basic underlying questions we could ask about our existence. What is existence, what causes a thing to happen, does time exist, how can something be conscious etc. These are what most people think of when they think of the big deep questions that philosophy deals with. Pick anyone of them and argue for long enough and eventually someone will ask “sure but how do you know that?” Which is basically epistemology. The philosophy of knowledge, what is true. How do we know?
These are some of the most basic branches of philosophy and in many ways they form the basis for the other often more practical branches ethics (what ought a person do?) And aesthetics (what constitutes beauty.)
Don’t know about metaphysics.
Epistemology in the Social Sciences refers to knowledge frameworks.
It broadly encompasses what can be known from within a particular reference.
The knowledge of someone living in a western culture is different to a first nations culture.
Theoretical frameworks come from different epsitemologies. Marxism and the post-structuralist theories explored by Foucault are good examples of this.
That’s my viewing of it from my studies. I think other fields may have a different interpretation.
A bit like discourses in the social sciences has a very specific meaning different from the dictionary definition.
You’ll get the meaning from the etymology:
**Meta-physics** is Greek for “after / behind” “the physical world / nature”. So it could encompass all the “great questions” like “why is there something instead of nothing?”, “what is reality?” or even “do gods exist?”.
Personally I think it is the *woo-woo* part of philosophy, baseless speculations and word plays, and that it will shrink more and more when science gets a grip on its traditional realms (e. g. neurosciences and the mind/consciousness problem, cosmology, &c.).
You may want to read: [Stanford Metaphysics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/), especially the “Is Metaphysics Possible?” last chapter.
Or Aristotle’s *Metaphysics*: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html
**Epistem(e)-logy”** similarly means “discourse or reasoning about / study of” (logos) “knowledge / science” (episteme). Basically study of how we know things or the nature of knowledge.
Some interesting examples here: [Britannica’s Epistemology](https://www.britannica.com/topic/epistemology).
You may want to read Kuhn’s [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions) or Popper’s [The Logic of Scientific Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions) about the epistemology of science.
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