Epistemology

Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the validity and requirements of human knowledge. The foundational writing for Objectivist epistemology is Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE); Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR) further develops a number of the basic ideas of ITOE.

Epistemology includes those facts about how one thinks and how one should think which one must understand to minimize errors when learning about other subjects.

• The Senses
• Consciousness
• Volition
• Concepts: Unit, Concept formation
• Objectivity
• Knowledge: Context, Hierarchy
• Reason: Certainty, Truth, the Arbitrary
• Emotions

See Also

• Concept formation
• Measurement ommision
• The objectivity of knowledge.
• The Validity of the senses.
• Sensations, Percepts, Concepts.
• Concept formation by Measurement Omission.
• The difference between, and validity of, both Deduction and Induction.
• Axioms of human knowledge, Axiomatic concepts.
• Existence, Identity (A is A), Consciousness.
• Volition as a necessary part of an objective Epistemology.
• Psycho-Epistemology and its relation to Epistemology.

Imported from Wikipedia

Objectivism's epistemology, like the other branches of Objectivism, was present in some form ever since the publication of Atlas Shrugged. However, it was most fully explained in Rand's 1967 work Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Rand considered her epistemology central to her philosophy, once remarking, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."

According to the Objectivist epistemology, through sensory perception and a process of reasoning, man can achieve absolute knowledge of his environment. Objectivism rejects skepticism. As a corollary, it also maintains that anything that is not learned by objective, rational means is not true knowledge, rejecting faith as a means of attaining knowledge.

From sensations to concepts

Sensory perception is considered axiomatically "valid" on the grounds that it is self-contradictory to deny the efficacy of the senses as sources of genuine knowledge. (Objectivism argues that such an assertion implicitly relies upon the validity of the senses, since the senses are the only possible source of the alleged knowledge of their invalidity.) Some animals other than human beings operate at the level of sensory perception and thus possess a measure of knowledge.

Sensation, or awareness of raw sensory data, counts as knowledge in a limited way. However, sensations as such are not retained by the mind and so cannot provide guidance beyond the present moment. Perception extends the awareness of the objects of sensation over time, a "percept" being a group of sensations that is automatically retained and integrated by the mind. Some animals can apprehend reality on a perceptual level, and humans definitely can.

Human beings are unique in possessing another, higher level of cognition: the conceptual level. According to Objectivism, the human mind apprehends reality through a process of reasoning based upon sensory observation, in which perceptual information is built up into concepts and propositions.

However, humans are not guaranteed to achieve this level of consciousness, instead possessing a "volitional consciousness", reaching the "conceptual level" only by an act of volition to which no one can be led or forced from the outside. All humans by definition have the potential to achieve the conceptual level, but some may fail to actualize this potential