Philosophy is confusing
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Epistemology is the philosophical discipline dealing with how we know anything.
For instance, let’s say you’re looking at a dog in the distance. How do you know you are actually seeing the dog and not hallucinating it? How do you know that it is a dog? If you’ve seen Great Danes and terriers, how is it that you recognize that a huskie is also a dog? How do you know how big that dog is, when it looks tiny?
Now imagine that your fridge is behind you. If I asked you, you could tell me a list of things you believe is in the fridge. If I asked you whether you knew those things were in there, or whether you were guessing, you would probably say that you knew it. But how do you know that? You are not seeing those things right now. So how can you be sure? Maybe you are misremembering, or maybe someone took the milk from the fridge while you were turned away.
Yet we all frequently state that we know things with absolute certainty. Why do we do that, and what does it take for us to say that we know things?
Here’s another one for you. If I asked you “what is the building blocks of the universe” you might say atoms, elementary particles, quarks or even superstrings. But have you seen those things? Do you know anyone who has? No? Then how do we know that these things exist?
Epistemology tries to provide a coherent answers to all of those questions. It’s the study of how humans perceive the world and form structured beliefs about how the world works and how the world is structured.
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