Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of the origins of knowledge. In ancient times, Plato had a theory of knowledge now dubbed platonic epistemology. According to Plato, perfect knowledge is innate in every human's soul. Thus, knowledge is not learned, but recovered from within. Functionally, this is the same as more modern schools of epistemology in that the things one must do to recover knowledge from within and to learn are the same. Contemporary philosophers have narrowed down the origin of knowledge into a dichotomy consisting of a priori and a posteriori. A posteriori knowledge consists of that which is gained through experience, whereas a priori knowledge is that which is innately true. These two theories of knowledge are not mutually exclusive and coexist. For example, take the sentence (Either the tree is dead or alive). The state of being dead excludes the state of life, and there is no middle ground. So one can deduce that something must be either dead or alive. If the truth of this statment is decided this way, then it would be classified as a priori knowledge because the statement is innately logically true. However, this statement can also be proven through experience. For example, one who is testing a bunch of trees for whether or not they are alive will see that regardless of the state of the tree, one side of the disjunctive is proven to be true, and thus the entire statement is true. From this example we can see that the same bit of information or knowledge can be obtained through either a priori or a posteriori methods.