If your argument lacks any underlying logic or evidence, but you still want to throw your weight around online, just send your followers after them with epistemobogy
by thespot84 March 16, 2023
Get the epistemobogy mug.The quality of a person's skills in epistemology ― cognitive bias compensation, scientific skepticism toward oneself and others, bullshit like that. Associated with reasonableness, curiosity, empiricism, a burning for learning, obsessive devotion to evidence as the arbiter of truth, mental modeling skills, high-rung thinking, evenhandedness, honesty, humility, a love of simplicity, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, game-theoretic analysis, statistical literacy, and other junk the human race hasn't figured out yet.
"Oh, I do ClearerThinking quizzes most days to boost my epistemics. Plus I read Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality and LessWrong, to help me be cool like Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander and those other navel-gazing windbags I never read like... Immanuel Kant? Whatever, point is, all humans are morons until they learn how to think. So I'm trying to learn how to be a bit less mind-bogglingly stupid than average."
by TheNakedBum January 24, 2024
Get the epistemics mug.That's an example of Epistemology
by notaNerd233 March 26, 2024
Get the Epistemology mug.A person who hopelessly cannot distinguish between L and R.
by Epistemo March 7, 2025
Get the epistemo mug.A sardonic label for the academic meta-enterprise of endlessly theorizing about knowledge itself. It points to the potential for scholarship in philosophy and social studies of science to become a self-referential, jargon-laden system focused more on internal debates, career-building, and generating complex theories than on clarifying how we know things in the practical world.
*Example: Writing a 400-page treatise deploying Epistemology Industry jargon to deconstruct the "socio-technical imaginaries of evidence-production" in a field you've never actually worked in, all to secure tenure, while a farmer's practical, life-saving knowledge of climate patterns is ignored because it wasn't produced within the industry.*
by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 6, 2026
Get the Epistemology Industry mug.The sister concept to Scientific Pluralism, focused on the nature of knowledge itself. It asserts that there are multiple, equally valid "ways of knowing" and that no single epistemological framework (like empiricism or rationalism) gets to monopolize the title of "true knowledge." This pluralism validates knowledge from lived experience, tradition, narrative, and practical skill alongside experimental data, arguing that a person with a PhD and a master craftsperson with 40 years of hands-on experience both hold profound, yet different, forms of epistemic authority.
Example: Managing a forest. Epistemological Pluralism values the quantitative data from a forestry scientist's satellite survey AND the qualitative, experiential knowledge of an indigenous elder who reads animal behavior and plant health in ways the satellite cannot see. Dismissing either as "not real knowledge" leads to worse outcomes. It's recognizing that the elder's lifelong immersion is a sophisticated cognitive instrument, not a superstition.
by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 6, 2026
Get the Epistemological Pluralism mug.The flawed foundation of a knowledge system built on perceiving connections that are not robustly causal or structurally real. It's when an entire way of knowing—like astrology, some forms of numerology, or rigid historical determinism—is based primarily on weaving together coincidences, correlations, and symbolic parallels into a coherent "truth." The system feels internally consistent because it's excellent at connecting dots, but the dots themselves may not be valid, and the connections are often arbitrary.
Epistemological Apophenia Example: A conspiracy theory ecosystem that explains world events through the repeated appearance of the number 23 or specific symbols is built on Epistemological Apophenia. It creates a vast, interlocking web of "knowledge" where everything is connected, but the epistemic foundation is the perception of spurious patterns, not evidence of actual plots.
by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 6, 2026
Get the Epistemological Apophenia mug.