Epistemology

== Historical context ==
{{anchor|History of epistemology}}
Contemporary philosophers consider that epistemology is a major subfield of philosophy, along with [[ethics]], [[logic]], and [[metaphysics]],<ref name="Britannica Epistemology" /> which are more ancient subdivisions of philosophy.<ref name="Blair2006" /> But in the early and mid 20th century, epistemology was not seen as an independent field on its own. [[Willard Van Orman Quine|Quine]] viewed epistemology as a chapter of psychology.<ref name="Quine1969" /><ref name="Malpas1992" /><sup>Sect.1.1</sup> [[Bertrand Russell|Russell]] viewed it as a mix of psychology and logic.<ref name="Kitchener2007" /> William Alston presents a similar contemporary perspective, but in a historically 'oriented' manner: for him, epistemology has historically always been a part of cognitive psychology.{{refn|group=note|name=AlstonEpistemologyVsPsychology}}

The claim that psychology is a background for epistemology is often called its [[Naturalized epistemology|naturalization]]. The epistemology of Russell and Quine in the 20th century were naturalized in that way. More recently, [[Laurence BonJour|Laurence Bonjour]] rejects that there is a need for that kind of psychologism in contemporary epistemology.<ref name=Bonjour2010 /> His argument is that, nowadays, the required part of psychology, which he refers as ''minimal psychologism'', ''conceptual psychologism'', and ''meliorative psychologism,'' are self evident within contemporary (traditional) epistemology, "involves at most a quite minor departure from traditional, nonnaturalized epistemology" or "poses no real threat to traditional epistemology".<ref name=Bonjour2010 /> In this view point, naturalized epistemology has integrated all required psychological aspects, which are considered non controversial, and can be severed from psychologism.

For [[Luciano Floridi]], "at the turn of the [20th] century there had been a resurgence of interest in epistemology through an anti-metaphysical, naturalist, reaction against the nineteenth-century development of Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealism." In that perspective, contemporary epistemology, which in Bonjour's perspective does not need to be "naturalized" through psychologism anymore, emerged after a naturalization that rejected meta-physical perspectives associated with Immanuel Kant and [[G. W. F. Hegel]].<ref name=Floridi2003 />

Historians of philosophy traditionally divide the modern period into a dispute between [[Empiricism|empiricists]] (including [[Francis Bacon]], [[John Locke]], [[David Hume]], and [[George Berkeley]]) and [[Rationalism|rationalists]] (including [[René Descartes]], [[Baruch Spinoza]], and [[Gottfried Leibniz]]).<ref name="Britannica Epistemology" /> The debate between them has often been framed using the question of whether knowledge comes primarily from [[Experience|sensory experience]] (empiricism), or whether a significant portion of our knowledge is derived entirely from our faculty of [[reason]] (rationalism). According to some scholars, this dispute was resolved in the late 18th century by [[Immanuel Kant]],{{Citation needed|date=August 2021|reason="Some scholars" is too vague for such a big statement. It should be attributed and sources provided. Also, Kant's view is presented here out of context, so it's not clear in which way this resolved the dispute in the mind of these scholars. Having sources will help.}} whose [[transcendental idealism]] famously made room for the view that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all [knowledge] arises out of experience".<ref name="Carus1891" />
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