ABSTRACT
Data, and especially healthcare data, is interpreted by its organization with respect to the relations between its different elements. Data is a set of facts generated from direct or derived measurement or analysis that can be useful, irrelevant, or redundant, and that generally must be processed in some way to be interpretable. Contemporary epistemology appears to have passed through a number of phases and has arrived at a very fragmented and confused state. Epistemology appears to have fragmented into a large number of different approaches and schools of thought. These include: historicism, empiricism, idealism, rationalism, constructivism, pragmatism, naturalism, skepticism, contextualism, internalism, ethicism, and personal epistemology. Contextualism can be thought of an extended form of logical positivism in that it requires evidence to determine the truth of an assertion; it also asserts that the same statement may have different truth values depending on the context it is made or evaluated in.
