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EPISTEM_MOMENT

                                             September 8, 2020

                                                          EPISTEMS
About In Bertrand Russell's piece,
"Epistemological Premises" (1940):
                                            See Russell's "Basic Writings":
                                            http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-Basic-Writings-of-Bertrand-Russell.pdf

     This material is actually quite good:

        "Epistemological premisses are different
         according as they are momentary,
         individual, or social."

     Russell steps through a few basic examples of
     how we know things.

                                                      
    "...  I believe that 16^2 = 256; at the moment, I         
    believe this on grounds of memory, but probably at        
    some time I did the sum, and I have convinced myself      
    that the received rules of multiplication follow from     
    the premisses of logic. Therefore taking my life as a     
    whole, 16^2 = 256 is inferred, not from memory, but       
    from logic. In this case, if my logic is correct,         
    there is no difference between the individual and the     
    social premisses."                                        
                                                              
    "But now let us take the existence of the Straits
    of Magellan. Again, my momentary epistemological
    premiss is memory. But I have had, at various
    times, better reasons: maps, books of travel,
    etc. My reasons have been the assertions of others,
    whom I believe to be well-informed and
    honest. Their reasons, traced back, lead to
    percepts: Magellan, and others who have been in the
    region concerned when it was not foggy, saw what
    they took to be land and sea, and by dint of
    systematized inferences made maps. Treating the
    knowledge of mankind as one whole, it is the
    percepts of Magellan and other travellers that
    provide the epistemological premisses for belief in
    the Straits of Magellan. Writers who are interested
    in knowledge as a social phenomenon are apt to        SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY   
    concentrate upon social epistemological premisses.
    For certain purposes this is legitimate, for others
    not. Social epistemological premisses are relevant
    in deciding whether to spend public money on a new
    telescope or an investigation of the Trobriand
    Islanders. Laboratory experiments aim at
    establishing new factual premisses which can be
    incorporated in the accepted system of human
    knowledge."

    "For me now, only my epistemological premisses
    momentary epistemological premisses are really
    premisses; the rest must be in some sense
    inferred. For me as opposed to others, my individual
    premisses are premisses, but the percepts of others
    are not."                
                             
    "My momentary knowledge consists largely of memory,
    and my individual knowledge consists largely of
    testimony. But memory, when it is veridical, is  
    related to a previous perceptive premiss, and
    testimony, when it is veridical, is related to
    someone else’s perceptive premiss. Social empiricism
    takes these perceptive premisses of other times or
    other persons as the empirical premisses for what is
    now accepted, and thus evades the problems connected
    with memory and testi- mony. This is plainly
    illegitimate, since there is reason to believe that
    both memory and testimony sometimes deceive."

    "If I, now, am to have any reason to believe what I read
    yesterday in the Encyclopaedia, I must, now, find reason to
    trust my memory, and to believe, in suitable circumstances,
    what comes to me in the form of testimony. I must, that is to
    say, start from momentary epistemological premisses. To do
    anything else is to evade problems which it is part of the
    business of epistemology to consider."




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