The Chastity of the Intellect - Vincent Hendricks
Humans are in pursuit of knowledge. It plays a significant role for deliberation, decision and actions in all walks of everyday and scientific life ranging from the humanities over the social to the natural sciences. The systematic and detailed study of knowledge, its criteria of acquisiton, its limits and modes of justification is known as epistemology.
Despite the admirable epistemic aim of qacquiring knowledge, humans are cognitive, accident prone and make mistakes perceptually, inferentially, experimentally, theoretically or otherwise. Epistemology is the study of the possibility of knowledge, and how prone we are to making mistakes. Error is the starting point of skepticism. All skepticism asks is how knowledge is possible given the possibility of error. Skeptics have for centuries cited prima facie possibilities of error as the most substantial arguments against knowledge claims. From this perspective epistemology may be viewed as a reply to skepticism and skeptical challenges. It is the bane of epistemology but apparently also a blessing according to Santayana:
"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer."
Metadata: Author: Vincent Hendricks Source: Forcing Epistemology