Unit 6: Epistemology - Level 2

How you know determines what you know.

Lessons

Most of what you 'know' has never been examined for how you came to know it.

Every method of knowing works well for some things and fails completely for others.

There are six distinct methods for arriving at knowledge, each valid in its own domain.

Direct perception is your most reliable way of knowing — but only for what you actually perceived, and even then, it's not infallible.

Inference and logical reasoning are powerful but fragile — good reasoning from bad premises gives you confident, well-structured, wrong conclusions.

Most of what you know came from other people. That's not a problem — unless you've never evaluated the sources.

Analogy is how you understand new things — by mapping them onto familiar ones. Useful until the comparison breaks down.

Now you take the six ways of knowing and apply them to the beliefs that actually run your life.

Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being certain about things that aren't true.

Epistemology isn't a one-time exercise — it's a permanent upgrade to how you process everything you encounter.