Epistemology is the study of knowledge. When you ask “how do I know this is true?” or “what counts as evidence?” or “why should I trust this source over that one?” — you’re asking epistemological questions. Everyone operates with assumptions about knowledge, whether or not they’ve examined those assumptions. Epistemology is the practice of examining them.
The word comes from the Greek episteme (knowledge) and logos (study). The central questions are: What is knowledge? How do people acquire it? What makes a belief justified rather than a lucky guess?
Western philosophy has organized much of its epistemological history around two broad positions. Rationalism holds that knowledge comes from reason — that careful thinking can reveal truths about the world independent of sensory experience. Rene Descartes, who began by doubting everything he could and found that thinking itself was undoubtable, is the canonical rationalist. Empiricism holds that knowledge comes from experience — observation, experiment, sensory engagement with the world. John Locke argued that the mind starts as a blank slate and all knowledge is written on it by experience.
Both positions share an assumption: that the knower is a generic, interchangeable subject. Standpoint epistemology challenges this by arguing that what someone can know depends on where they stand — their social position, their lived experience, their relationship to power. A factory worker knows things about production that a factory owner doesn’t, not because the worker is smarter but because the worker’s position makes certain realities visible.
Indigenous epistemologies go further. Knowledge isn’t just shaped by social position; it’s shaped by relationships — to land, to other-than-human beings, to ancestors, to ceremony. In many Indigenous traditions, knowledge is not something an individual mind possesses but something that lives in relationships and is accessed through responsible participation in those relationships. This is not a lesser or earlier form of knowing; it’s a different account of what knowing is.
This vault’s grounding in Lakota epistemologies is an epistemological commitment. It means the formal structures developed here — the semiotic universe, the semioverse hierarchy — aren’t built on the assumption that knowledge is what a disembodied mind can prove. They’re built on the assumption that knowledge is relational, situated, and constituted through practice.
Related terms
- Ontology — the study of what exists; epistemology and ontology shape each other
- Constructivism — the position that knowledge is constructed, not discovered
- Phenomenology — the study of experience, which supplies epistemology with its raw material
- Perspectivism — the position that knowledge is always from a perspective
- Relational Ontology — if relations are prior to things, then knowledge is relational too