Centre for Formal Epistemology

The aim of the project is to develop a formalization of epistemology in analogy to Frege's formalization of logic. On its way to formalization, logic had to undergo a series of fundamental changes and free itself from some deeply rooted convictions. Beliefs analogous to those that prevented the formalization of logic can also be found in epistemology. The core of the project centers around five theses setting out the path to a truly formal epistemology. These theses are based on a deeply held belief that the current trend in the formalization of epistemology is not radical enough.
The first thesis is the thesis of the necessity to bring epistemology into closer contact with mathematics, physics, and other exact sciences, and to study the processes of knowledge acquisition in these disciplines.
The second thesis is that the formalization of epistemology requires abandoning of the problems of everyday cognition and refocusing on the epistemic processes occurring in exact sciences (such as measurement, experiment, prediction, approximation, data analysis).
The third thesis is that formal epistemology is not to deal with epistemic acts of empirical subjects, but with objective relations between scientific theories.
The fourth thesis claims that it is necessary to extend the general scope of epistemology in a similar way as it was done by Frege in logic.
The fifth thesis affirms the need to study the mathematical (and not just logical) structure of scientific knowledge; which could lead to the discovery of mathematical structures of a novel kind.

 

The full description of the project can be found here.