Any good introductory books on epistemology ?

the only right answer

just read science authors like sam harris

Epistemology means any theory of knowledge (what it is/how it works) and is variously taken to mean anything from "first philosophy," i.e. a philosophical elucidation of how we "know" anything at all, how we interact with that which is not our knowing, etc., to the more colloquial usage of "how this science or field goes about acquiring and classifying the 'knowledge' it deals in."

So you could hear people say
>Kant's epistemology is also a sprawling moral philosophy, and pretty much claims to be a total and self-sufficient theory of what it even means for your conscious awareness to exist and begin asking questions in the first place.
to
>This paper is an epistemological analysis of how different scientists at different historical times thought light was variously a wave, a particle, or something else.

Hermeneutics is a term originally applying to criticism of texts, originally scripture, most famously associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher in that respect. In that original sense, it's a sophisticated theory of textual interpretation based on context, which arose out of hundreds of years of Reformation-inspired Biblical criticism and people yelling at each other about whose Biblical criticism was the hottest and smartest, so they started developing highly nuanced and self-aware theories of what it means to interpret authorial intent.

Schleiermacher was a very smart German idealist fellow, friend of Ranke and contemporary of Kant and Hegel and all the rest, all of whom had sophisticated theories about what it means for a piece of knowledge to be situated/contextualised in a certain way of knowing (a worldview, culture, set of a priori categories, etc.). German idealism, historicism, and romanticism, smushed all these ideas together and ended up with the modern usage of hermeneutics, often associated with Wilhem Dilthey.

Heidegger then takes Dilthey's hermeneutics and comes up with what is often called (especially with reference to Hans Georg Gadamer, Heidegger's student) hermeneutic ontology, which could also (with a bit of looseness) be called hermeneutic epistemology, because it is a development of German idealism which generally begins with Kant.

Ontology means study of "being," "things," or "entities," that is, study of what things are, of what it means to say something "is" something (or that it has an essence, identity, or nature). Heidegger thinks he is more correcter than Kant, because Kant didn't realise that, when he analysed the conditions of the possibility of knowledge of a subject knowing stuff via categories, he was taking for granted that concepts like "conditions of possibility" and "knowledge" and "subject" and "knowing" and "stuff" and "categories" and "concepts" weren't all themselves contingent "somethings" that had to be explained before they could be used to explain anything.

So, ontology is the study of being/beings. Ontology is the study of why, when I look at a car, my mind goes "that's a car." But it is just as much the study of the "being" of all the possibilities and tacit aspects of the car, like the fact that I somehow know I could drive it, steal it, that it has certain properties, that it doesn't have certain other properties, that it should "behave" in certain ways, that it "fits" into the world and society and my culture in certain ways, etc. Everything about the way the mind encounters reality is simply a form of being, a way-that-that-thing-"things, and that includes the idea of "mind," the idea of an idea, the idea of Being, and all the ideas and subtleties and preconceptions that are used in the critiquing of these ideas.

That is why Heidegger's ontology is intrinsically hermeneutic: everything is interpretation, all information exchange is a "disclosing of meaning," undertaken in dialogue, rather than something like a rationalistic determination of "truth." If we imagine that I were to come to know the being "car" as you know it, we shouldn't imagine that there is some kind of computerized machine inside my head that has a list of "properties" and can apply them to that "object" "over there" and "correctly" "identify" it as a "car." The idea of properties, the idea of objects "possessing" properties, the idea of an object, the idea of "over-thereness," "correctness," "identification," and the idea that the car is one "object" (as opposed to an assemblage of them, or perhaps a process, or a flux, or whatever) are all determinations of being. To have the "same" experience of car-ness as you have would better be imagined in terms of "coming to see the meaning as you see it." (Even this has a lot of problems, which Derrida later critiques and Wittgenstein is good at pointing out. If you return again to Schleiermacher and traditional hermeneutics, which was mostly concerned with the meaning of texts in the usual sense, you can understand why Derrida, following on Heidegger's path, says that the world is itself a text, because we can only know it hermeneutically.)

Holy shit thanks for that response I'll have to screen shot it :).
I've not yet gotten past reading ancient philosopher's.
Would you say that hermeneutics in general is more whole? Or the thing that allows for a tethering of epistemology?
All I can do is wonder, after reading your post, is do you need an understanding or an acceptance of a form of hermeneutics to be able to then accept an epistemology?

Bump

Neechee's on Truth and Lies is pretty much the benchmark for continental epistemology and pretty damn easy to read.

>what's the difference between epistemology and hermeneutics?
Epistemology: Is it true? Can we know?
Hermeneutics: What does it mean?
>I've not yet gotten past reading ancient philosopher's.
Don't rush it. Keep reading. Getting rid of metaphysics and ontology didn't work as advertised for recent philosophers that were too much in a hurry, stick to the ancients that invented this vocabulary we use i.e.: "category", "physis", etc. if you don't want to be another brainlet that reads Hegel and thinks the word the translator translates as "science" to refer to biology and chemistry.
>All I can do is wonder, after reading your post, is do you need an understanding or an acceptance of a form of hermeneutics to be able to then accept an epistemology?
No, it's just that epistemology cannot work as a first philosophy. First we have to come up with a metaphysics wherein a view of the fundamental structure of reality is provided, then an ontological inventory of what actually is in there (is there such thing as "The United States", or is whatever we commonly call that way something reducible to more fundamental units?), then we can ask questions over what might be true and knowable. Hermeneutics in fact comes last, when you're done all your inquiries and all that is left is to answer: "But what does it all mean?" Then you start over, another hermeneutic circle.

>>what's the difference between epistemology and hermeneutics?
>Epistemology: Is it true? Can we know?
>Hermeneutics: What does it mean?
Not really. Epistemology, from Episteme, roughly knowledge, 'study of knowledge'.
Hermeneutics is the study of how texts work. Kinda mixed up with semiotics tho.

>Epistemology, from Episteme, roughly knowledge, 'study of knowledge'.
Nice theory of truth you got there.
>Hermeneutics is the study of how texts work.
Your dictionary is not up to date-
>mixed up with semiotics
Scratch that, your dictionary is a fucking mess.

Is it available online for free somewhere?

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