Polyfacetic epistemology would answer the skeptic, provide how-to-think manuals, explain how we know, and more. To some it is the project of assuring oneself, of validating one's knowledge or supposed knowledge, turning it into real and assured knowledge, thus defeating the skeptic. To others it is a set of rules or instructions, a guide to the perplexed, a manual for conducting the intellect. To others yet it is a meta-discipline, but one whose purpose is not nearly so much guidance as understanding, understanding of what gives us the knowledge we do have, of what factors serve to justify so many of our beliefs well enough to make them knowledge.

What follows is epistemology as understanding, an attempt to understand the relation between epistemic coherence and intellectual virtue at the foundation of epistemology: between the comprehensive coherence prized in the thirst for understanding and the “reliability” that makes a faculty or procedure intellectually virtuous.

SUPERVENIENCE

The central concept of epistemology is justification: not the practical justification of action, nor even such justification of belief as may come of its being expedient or generous or charitable; but rather the cognitive justification required to distinguish belief that is knowledge from what is little more than a lucky guess.