Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction 1st Edition

This is a good overview of Epistemology.Although the coverage of each topic may not be the best, the authors cover masses of relevant topics. Most of these remain unexplored, by America’s younger generations.The authors do not adequately cover the model of truth, that is required by the modern scientific disciplines. This may not be a popular presentation topic, but to pick some other model of truth, means abndoning all the scientific disciplines (that have given us so much knowledge about the natural world).I found sections on evidence, types of evidence, value of evidence, and justifying a proposition, to be good.The section on group decision making, was good.I have little use for the “social” epistemology approach.Generally, the section on probabilistic epistemology was useless. Probability theory is plagued by not differentiating between logical causality, and correlation. Logical causality requires 100% correlation, following certain fixed patterns. There are uncountably infinite ways to probabilistically examine the same event. And by picking the sets of defining variables, and the test group, one can get almost any output desired, between 0.0 to 1.0. Probabilistic analysis is based on convention, and not necessarily on causality (as formal logic is).

Great introduction, read it in about a week, but I was going at it pretty hard. The first ~100 pages were "core epistemology" topics like justification, belief, truth and their relation to knowledge. The authors present a few competing views on each topic in a rather technical way, but with a great deal of clarity. Although the first ~100 pages are kinda painstaking, the last 180 or so move quickly and are much more exciting, as you should have the technical stuff ironed out already. Great sections on naturalistic epistemology, pragmatic encroachment, and social epistemology. Also, the thought experiments they have you do can be pretty hilarious. For anyone (like myself) who has ever complained about the 'narrowness' of the analytic approach, this book shows the real breadth and interdisciplinarity of contemporary academic epistemology. Something for everyone in here, highly recommend.

It was great, although advanced. However, I was looking for advanced material, so I am happy

Since it can be shown that any empirical premise must be testable (i.e., refutable) if it is to convey information, the considerable discussion of brain-in-a-vat ideas is a waste of effort: the BIV premise is specifically designed to NOT be refutable.

This book is my first in the field of epistemology. While it may indeed cover most or all concepts within the field, I found the writing difficult to follow and the subject matter presented in a disjointed way. It may be considered an introduction in the sense that it covers many topics within epistemology, but the way it covers them would seem- at least to me- to require a fair amount of familiarity with the both the subject and ancillary subjects like logic to really grasp what the author is presenting.

it is OK

This book is very poorly written and dead boring. Topics are superficially and confusingly plowed through providing no real insight or depth of understanding.

Excellent for beginners and trained alike!