IB Philosophy 3. Epistemology Key Definitions

Arguments from illusion highlight how our senses can present the world as being other than it actually is, as when a straight stick appears bent in water or a white wall looks pink under coloured lighting. These cases are taken to show that what we directly perceive are sense data or mental representations rather than physical objects themselves, motivating indirect realist and idealist theories of perception.

Banking model of education: Paulo Freire’s term for a pedagogical approach in which teachers deposit knowledge into passive students, reinforcing existing power structures rather than developing critical thinking.

Coherentism is a theory of epistemic justification holding that a belief is justified not by resting on a foundation but by cohering with the wider system of beliefs one already holds, so that mutual support among beliefs replaces the need for self-evident starting points. Critics object that a perfectly coherent set of beliefs could still be entirely divorced from reality, since coherence alone cannot guarantee truth.

Contemplative epistemology is a tradition of inquiry that treats disciplined practices such as meditation, introspection, and mindful observation as legitimate methods for producing knowledge about the self, the mind, and the nature of reality.

The correspondence theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it accurately represents an independent reality. Truth, on this view, is a relation between language (or thought) and the world.

Deductive reasoning is a form of inference in which the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. If the premises are true and the reasoning is valid, the conclusion must be true (e.g., "All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal").

The digital divide is the gap between individuals, communities, and nations that have meaningful access to digital technologies and those that do not, resulting in unequal opportunities to access, produce, and benefit from digitally mediated knowledge.

Direct realism (also called naive realism) holds that perception gives us unmediated access to the external world as it really is. The objects of perception are the physical things themselves, not mental representations or sense data.

Epistemic access: the conditions under which a person or group can acquire, share, or contribute to knowledge. Barriers to epistemic access include censorship, institutional gatekeeping, language, and the systematic exclusion of certain ways of knowing.

Epistemic justification is the property of a belief that makes it reasonable or rationally held. Within the justified true belief framework, justification distinguishes knowledge from lucky guesses by providing the reasons, evidence, or reliable processes that support a belief's claim to truth.

Epistemic power is the capacity to shape, control, or restrict what counts as knowledge, who has access to it, and how it is used within a society.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge, including the distinction between knowledge and opinion, the role of reason and experience, and the conditions under which beliefs count as justified.

Foundationalism is a theory of epistemic justification that addresses the regress problem by positing that some beliefs are self-evident or incorrigible, requiring no further justification, and that all other justified beliefs ultimately rest on this secure foundation. The view, associated with Descartes and classical empiricists, faces the challenge of identifying which beliefs genuinely qualify as foundational and whether they can bear the weight placed on them.

Idealism is the metaphysical and epistemological thesis that reality is fundamentally mental or mind-dependent, so that physical objects either reduce to collections of ideas or exist only insofar as they are perceived. Developed by Berkeley and later by Hegel, the view challenges common-sense realism by arguing that we can never step outside experience to verify an independently existing material world.

Epistemological idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental or mind-dependent. In its strongest form, associated with Berkeley, physical objects exist only as collections of perceptions, and there is no mind-independent material world.

Inductive reasoning is a form of inference in which the conclusion is supported by the premises but does not follow necessarily from them. Induction generalises from particular observations to broader claims (for example, "every swan I have seen is white, therefore all swans are white"), making it probabilistic rather than certain.

In Western philosophy, knowledge is traditionally defined as justified true belief, requiring that a claim be factually accurate, genuinely accepted by the person, and supported by adequate evidence or sound reasoning. This definition has been challenged by Gettier cases and alternative accounts from non-Western traditions.

Knowledge dissemination is the process by which knowledge is communicated, distributed, and made accessible to wider audiences through various media and technologies, from oral tradition and print to digital platforms and artificial intelligence.

Nyaya is a classical school of Indian philosophy that places logic and rigorous epistemological analysis at the centre of philosophical inquiry, recognising four valid means of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony. The Nyaya tradition developed a sophisticated theistic argument contending that the orderly operation of karma and the structure of the universe require an omniscient, eternal God as their ultimate coordinator.

Nietzsche's perspectivism holds that all knowledge and value judgments arise from a particular perspective, shaped by the interests, drives, and circumstances of the knower, with no neutral 'view from nowhere' from which to evaluate claims absolutely. This does not collapse into relativism, since Nietzsche still distinguishes between life-affirming and life-denying perspectives.

Phenomenalism holds that statements about physical objects are ultimately reducible to statements about actual and possible sensory experiences, so that to say a table exists is just to say that certain visual and tactile sensations would occur under appropriate conditions. The view avoids metaphysical commitments about unobservable matter but struggles to account for unexperienced objects and the regularity of nature.

In the philosophy of the Indian thinker Bhartrhari, pratibha refers to a form of direct, intuitive understanding or flash of insight that grasps meaning holistically, prior to and distinct from propositional analysis. It challenges Western epistemology's focus on propositional knowledge ('knowing that').

Realism in epistemology and metaphysics holds that the external world exists independently of our perception or beliefs about it, and that our senses, when functioning properly, give us at least partially accurate access to this mind-independent reality. The position underpins everyday and scientific reasoning but must answer sceptical challenges about how we can verify the correspondence between our experiences and the world as it actually is.

Reliabilism is an externalist theory of justification holding that a belief is justified if it is produced by a cognitive process that reliably generates true beliefs. The believer need not be aware of the process's reliability for the belief to count as justified.