One of my chief interests in philosophy has always been epistemology. I even wrote a really bad paper in high school about whether or not one could know religious truths (it has thankfully been lost to the sands of time). For those who do not know, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines epistemology as

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief.

While epistemology has, in many ways, been and probably will remain fun to study, one of the aspects of it that troubles me is that it often ends up fruitless. The arguments end up confusing practical people who use know-how in their careers and hobbies. On top of that, the arguments often seem never ending for the philosophers in question. Note, I am not claiming that they are fruitless, they only seem that way.

Personal Speculation

As an educator, I’ve come to view epistemology from a more pragmatic perspective (not like William James though). Epistemology, by nature, should outline the varieties of evidence and habits of reasoning that justify claims to know. In this sense, epistemology is a piece of pedagogical theory. So, the study of epistemology is ultimately and ideally the study of not only how one comes to know, but how one imparts knowledge and skill to others. This is important because it ends up connecting back to Aristotle’s rhetoric and dialectic distinction, the relationship of practice vs theory, and the fact that some people have differing levels of evidentiary rigor.

For instance, a deductive geometry proof will be absolutely demonstrative, for students who know logic or who have an intuitive grasp of how it functions. On the other hand, for students who do not grasp logic, a geometry proof will tell them nothing until A) they learn logic or B) they use the theorem in the physical world and then attempt it on paper.