Anna’s Reviews > Central Questions of Philosophy > Status Update

The theory of knowledge has three main purposes: to arrive at a satisfactory definition of knowledge; to determine what sorts of propositions can be known to be true; and to explain how these propositions can be known to be true.

The more factual content a deductive system appears to have, the greater the likelihood that factual assumptions are concealed in the axioms or the definition.

If the system is logically rigorous, we can be assured that if any objects satisfy its premisses, they also satisfy its conclusions. but that there are objects which do satisfy the premisses is something that cannot be known a priori: it has in the end to be discovered by observation.

If the theory of knowledge discovers what it is in our power to know, it is but in the sense in which an encyclopaedia may be said to give a conspectus of our knowledge. It aims rather at establishing criteria for knowledge; criteria which may possibly set limits to what can be known.