I'm trying to formulate an idea of epistemology and I would like to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Imagine you have three sources of authority in your model of epistemology, A, B and C. Sometimes those sources disagree or contradict each other, so you use another source, which we'll call D, to adjudicate the disagreement and decide which one is correct. Given that type of scenario, would it be logically sound to say D has a higher tier of authority than A, B, and C?
Assuming that's true, a simplified secular epistemology might look like this:
And a simplified religious epistemology might look like this:
>1. The Bible
>
>2. Intuition, outcomes, authority figures (pastor, theologian), sense data
Regardless of what you put in the #1 slot, there must be only one authority source in that slot because it there were two authorities there, they might disagree, which would require another higher authority to adjudicate the disagreement.
Lucid4321 t1_jdfv7kl wrote
Reply to /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | March 13, 2023 by BernardJOrtcutt
I'm trying to formulate an idea of epistemology and I would like to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Imagine you have three sources of authority in your model of epistemology, A, B and C. Sometimes those sources disagree or contradict each other, so you use another source, which we'll call D, to adjudicate the disagreement and decide which one is correct. Given that type of scenario, would it be logically sound to say D has a higher tier of authority than A, B, and C?
Assuming that's true, a simplified secular epistemology might look like this:
>1. Reason
>
>2. Intuition, sense data, outcomes, authority figures (doctors, scientists, etc.)
And a simplified religious epistemology might look like this:
>1. The Bible
>
>2. Intuition, outcomes, authority figures (pastor, theologian), sense data
Regardless of what you put in the #1 slot, there must be only one authority source in that slot because it there were two authorities there, they might disagree, which would require another higher authority to adjudicate the disagreement.
Does that make sense?