Epistemic Options in the Face of Epistemic Barriers

Abstract

Many philosophers in analytic tradition have attempted to examine the notion of ‘epistemic limits’. “Are we cognitively/epistemologically limited beings?” is a question that is answered positively in many philosophical debates. It is an uncontroversial fact that human beings face several types of epistemic barriers during their lifetime. The more significant question “What kind of epistemic position do/should we take towards epistemic barriers?” is less examined than the former. There are only a few options to take a position. Agnostic stance, which has been defended as a respectable epistemic position, is one of those. Appealing to ways other than rational and empirical methods is another. This paper, chiefly focusing on the latter question, first criticizes the agnostic stance on the grounds that it is neither compatible with human epistemic nature, nor practical in several circumstances. To justify such a claim, the paper builds several hypothetical scenarios, and through these scenarios, it reaches the conclusion that appealing to other ways of forming beliefs on what is beyond the epistemic barriers is epistemologically more tenable than taking an agnostic stance in many circumstances.