How do we decide what’s real? And what can we actually know?

Have you ever wondered what you truly know about the world? Or asked yourself whether what you believe you know is actually true? If so, you’ve already encountered the essence of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that investigates the foundational questions of what we can know about the world and how we can know it.

Epistemology, from the Greek episteme (knowledge) and logos (study), is the theory of knowledge. It asks how we acquire knowledge, how reliable it is, and where its limits lie. In the context of this course, epistemology focuses on two interrelated questions:

• How real is reality?
• How true is what we can say about reality?

While “reality” and “truth” have diverse meanings in everyday language, in philosophy and science, specific meanings of these terms are tied to different epistemological positions. During the course of this chapter, we will address the first of these questions to establish a foundation for our exploration.

You will encounter four meanings of the term “reality” and explore how each aligns with an influential perspectives in psychology, from behaviorism to constructivism. Many of the distinctions developed in this chapter draw on the work of Norbert Bischof, whose epistemological reflections provide an important foundation for the framework introduced here.

Authors: Fabian Mueller & William Palmer

Further Reading

This chapter is based Bischof, N. (2014). For a deeper dive into the topics discussed here, read pages 85 to 110 in Chapter 4: Erkenntnistheoretische Fragen.

References

Bischof, N. (2014). Psychologie: Ein Grundkurs für Anspruchsvolle. W. Kohlhammer Verlag.