ABSTRACT
All agree that knowledge is valuable, but agreement about knowledge tends to end there. Philosophers disagree about what knowledge is, about how you get it, and even about whether there is any to be gotten. Some philosophers have begun with an account of the nature of reality and then appended a theory of knowledge to account for how we know that reality. It is hardly surprising that Plato and Aristotle produced vastly different theories of knowledge when they conceived of the objects of knowledge in such different ways. Their common approach, starting with metaphysics, authors might refer to as metaphysical epistemology. A critical epistemologist will eschew the bias of either starting point for a more balanced and symmetrical point of view, setting out with the premise that we have knowledge of the internal world of our ideas from consciousness and of the external world of matter from observation.
