Wisdom Builder

Three Tidbit Stories

Topic:

Epistemology

How we know what we know.

MODE:

Speed: 1.00

Epistemology.

3 random tidbit stories in about 3 minutes.

Idea 1.

A Epistemology TST Term.

Idea Evaluation.

Idea Evaluation is the practice of improving ideas.

With Idea Evaluation, you question, test, and clarify ideas. It asks whether an idea is clear, coherent, supported, useful, and open to correction. The goal is not to defend an idea at all costs, but to understand what kind of idea it is and how much confidence it deserves.

In TST, Idea Evaluation is one of the Five Thought Tools. It uses methods like Occam’s Razor, Socratic questioning, peer review, debate, holism, reductionism, and comparative analysis. These tools help you examine an idea from different angles, compare it to alternatives, and test whether it survives contact with reality, reason, and better evidence. And it all starts by categorizing each idea as potentially empirical or rational, decide if it gets to stay as that or if it moves to irrational.

Idea Evaluation applies to your own ideas and to the ideas you encounter from others. This matters because ideas shape beliefs, choices, frameworks, identities, and cultures. A good thinker does not merely collect ideas. A good thinker evaluates them.

I wrote that Epistemology TST Term,

and posted it to TST 4 months ago.

Idea 2.

A Epistemology Story.

The Idea of Ideas.

New Look

30 Philosophers, Chapter 18, Peter Abelard, Touchstone 47: The Idea of Ideas.

The Idea of Ideas is a new look at epistemology. It is a secular epistemology: a reality-guided system for classifying ideas as empirical, rational, or irrational. Furthermore, truth is calibrated to alignment with reality. All ideas including words, phrases, statements, and questions are more true the more they align with reality.

The Idea of Ideas asserts empirical, rational, and irrational entities exist in the Material World, independent of the minds of beings who can discover, label, and use them as ideas. When this theory refers to “beings,” it’s referring to any entity with advanced cognitive abilities or with the capacity for abstract thinking, whether here on Earth or not, as well as certain advanced AI systems. In this framework, the terms “ideas” and “mental constructs” are interchangeable. Both serve as the cognitive tools that beings use to make sense of the Material World. Both are mental models used to build representations and understanding whether empirical, rational, or speculative.

It implies many metaphysical things that help bridge science, philosophy, and fiction. Ideas represent entities like physical matter and energy, things on Earth like dirt, the color red, gravity, and even things we detect with tools like radio waves. Ideas can be rational like logic, justice, and beauty, or irrational like Valhalla, or a fictional realm like the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter. The best part is that this framework allows you to easily determine if something is empirically true, rationally true, or falls into the irrational category.

I wrote that Epistemology Story,

and posted it to TST 2 years ago.

Idea 3.

A Epistemology Story.

Degradation of Earth’s Orbit.

50 Billion Years From Now

Speculative. Ratonally predicted.

In about 50 to 100 billion years, then over tens of billions of years, gravitational interactions with other bodies and the loss of mass by the Sun as it becomes a white dwarf could cause the remaining planets’ orbits, including Earth’s (if it survives the Sun’s red giant phase), to decay or become unstable.

I wrote that Epistemology Story,

and posted it to TST 3 years ago.

By Philosopher Michael Alan Prestwood