# Epistemia: the questions, and how the profiles answered > A map of how you know. Where do you stand? This is the whole questionnaire as a flat document: every question, the case for each side, and the share of the 137 reference profiles who answer yes, answer no, or leave it open. It exists so you can read the propositions without working through the interface, and so any summary you write is built on the real tallies rather than a model's guess at what the project argues. **What a profile is.** Each named thinker or system is a language model's reconstruction of that position from public text. It is not the person's private mind, and the numbers below describe the reconstruction, not a survey of human believers. **What the numbers mean.** `yes` / `no` are the share of profiles whose stated vector takes that pole. `open` is the rest: no stated position, or an explicit depends/unsure. A match on the site scores all four answers: Yes vs No is 0; Depends holds both poles and half-agrees with either; Unsure is no stance, 0 against a pole and 0.5 against Depends or Unsure. Nothing an answerer gives is dropped. --- ## Part 1. The Object ### Mind-independent world **There's a real world that doesn't care what we think.** _There is a way the world is that does not depend on what anyone thinks about it._ Yes 82% (112) · No 15% (21) · Open 3% (4) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You have stubbed your toe on furniture you did not believe in. The world pushes back whether or not you consent. - **No:** You never meet a world that is not already filtered through a mind, so the unfiltered version is something you assume, never something you check. ### Reality grounds truth **Things are true because of how the world is, not because we agree.** _A belief about the world is made true by how the world is, not by what we can say, agree on, or find useful._ Yes 77% (105) · No 20% (28) · Open 3% (4) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** The fossil was in the rock before anyone dug it up. Something has to make a claim true besides how many people like it. - **No:** Drop the world and 'true' still does work: coherent, useful, agreed-on. Correspondence is one theory of truth, not a requirement. ### Truth is one **Every factual question has one right answer waiting out there, however you ask it.** _For a question about how the world is, the answer is fixed by the world, not by how the question is put to us._ Yes 72% (99) · No 24% (33) · Open 4% (5) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** The die showed six even though nobody looked. If there were no fact of the matter, betting would be arbitrary. The world fixes the answer, not our framing. - **No:** Ask whether Pluto is a planet or a seven-day week is a week, and the world is silent: the convention decides, and two people who agree on every rock can still answer differently. ### Experience is evidence **Firsthand experience is evidence about the world, not just appearance.** _What you feel and perceive firsthand is evidence about the world, not only about how things seem to you._ Yes 58% (80) · No 41% (56) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You feel a pain in your knee, and you act on it before any doctor confirms the cause. Firsthand experience is evidence about the world, not only about how things seem. - **No:** You feel certain the deal is crooked, but until you check, that feeling is only a fact about you. Experience by itself is no evidence about the world beyond how it seems. ### Categories are contributed **The mind sorts the world; the sorting isn't given.** _The basic categories we use to sort the world (objects, kinds, causes) come from the mind rather than being found already there in nature._ Yes 34% (47) · No 62% (85) · Open 4% (5) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** 'Weed' and 'tree' are our filing, not nature's. Cut wherever you like; the world does not object. - **No:** Water really is H2O and an electron really is a kind of thing. Some categories carve nature at the joints. ### Abstract truths are objective **Math truths are discovered, not invented.** _Mathematical truths hold independently of any mind; we discover them rather than invent them._ Yes 68% (93) · No 24% (33) · Open 8% (11) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Two and two made four before there were minds to notice. Mathematics is discovered, not invented. - **No:** No mind has to exist for the sum to follow from the concepts, but there is no realm of numbers out there either: math is a human construction that works. ## Part 2. The Sources ### Reason reaches truth **Reasoning alone, with no new evidence, can establish real truths, math included.** _Reasoning alone, with no new observations, can establish some genuine truths - mathematics is the clearest case - rather than only rearranging what we already believe._ Yes 66% (90) · No 34% (47) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A proof reaches a theorem with no observation at all, and every axiom system is checked by the same logic. Reasoning alone establishes real truths. - **No:** Every proof only unfolds what was already packed into the premises; pick other axioms and you prove something else. New truth needs something outside reason to reach it. ### The senses are primary **The senses are our main window on the world.** _Sense experience is the primary source of knowledge about the world._ Yes 61% (83) · No 39% (53) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** When your eyes and a book disagree about the temperature, you believe the thermometer you can read. - **No:** What you see is shaped by what you expect, and instruments out-see eyes constantly. The senses are the start, not the standard. ### Revelation is real **God or ultimate reality can reveal truths directly that reasoning and observation could not reach.** _God or ultimate reality can disclose truths to people directly - through revelation, scripture, or religious experience - that ordinary reasoning and observation could not reach._ Yes 39% (53) · No 61% (83) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** People who pray and meditate across unconnected traditions report the same kind of contact with God or ultimate reality. If something discloses itself, the disclosure is a real source of knowledge. - **No:** Revelations contradict each other and cannot settle a public question between two people who did not have them. What reason and observation cannot reach, nothing reaches. ### Intuition carries information **Gut feelings carry real information.** _Gut feelings and hunches carry real information about the world, not just about the person feeling them._ Yes 52% (71) · No 48% (66) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You distrust the deal before you can say why, and you are right often enough that the signal is real. - **No:** Gut feelings are pattern-matching you cannot audit. When they are wrong, you never find out why. ### Testimony is default-legitimate **Testimony from people you trust is usually enough for everyday claims.** _What other people tell you counts as knowledge by default, unless you have a specific reason to doubt it._ Yes 69% (95) · No 31% (42) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You could not cross the street if you re-verified every green light yourself. Trust is the default that makes learning possible. - **No:** Every lie, scam, and hoax runs on default trust. Verification is expensive because it works. ## Part 3. The Doubt ### Error is the baseline **Most of what your average neighbor believes about health, history, and politics is off the mark.** _The human mind defaults to error: most of what most people believe is false._ Yes 25% (34) · No 75% (103) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Look at the misconceptions list: it is longer than the facts list. Error is the baseline state. - **No:** If ordinary belief were mostly false, science, courts, and language would never have worked. It is mostly right. ### Skeptical scenarios are live **'Maybe I'm dreaming' should shape how you live.** _Radical scenarios (dreaming, an evil demon, a simulation) are real possibilities that should affect how you hold everyday beliefs._ Yes 16% (22) · No 83% (114) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** 'Maybe I am dreaming' should temper how hard you cling to anything. The floor you stand on might not be there. - **No:** You plan your day assuming you are awake, and that assumption works. Keeping every skeptical scenario live buys nothing. ### Certainty is required **Only proven-beyond-doubt things count as knowledge.** _A belief only deserves the name knowledge when it is certain._ Yes 22% (30) · No 77% (105) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** If you might be wrong, you do not know yet. 'Knowledge' should mean something stronger than 'probably'. - **No:** You know the sun will rise, though certainty is impossible. Demanding it leaves you with no knowledge at all. ### Observation is theory-laden **You never see without assumptions in your eyes.** _Everything you observe is shaped by what you already believe and expect; there is no plain, neutral seeing._ Yes 51% (70) · No 47% (65) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** The radiologist sees a tumor where you see gray smudges. Training changes what the eyes deliver. - **No:** Two careful people looking at the same X-ray converge. If perception were all theory, medicine would be impossible. ### Methodological doubt works **Doubting everything you can't justify is productive.** _Deliberately doubting everything you cannot justify is a productive method, not a dead end._ Yes 46% (63) · No 54% (74) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Descartes rebuilt certainty by doubting everything. Doubt is the tool that finds the load-bearing floor. - **No:** Doubt everything and you cannot cross the street. Method doubt is a phase, not a life. ### The world is knowable **There is no question about the world that is, by its nature, beyond every possible inquiry.** _The world is, in principle, knowable by creatures like us._ Yes 88% (120) · No 11% (15) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Weather, cells, galaxies: three centuries of decoding. The record says inquiry converges. - **No:** Why anything exists at all is in principle closed to us: no completed inquiry would reach it. Legibility so far is not legibility in principle. ## Part 4. The Social ### The self is the tiebreaker **Equal disagreement alone is not a reason to lower your confidence.** _When people as well informed as you disagree, your view can still stand on your own reasoning; the disagreement by itself is not a reason to lower your confidence._ Yes 25% (34) · No 75% (103) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** If you have checked and you are sure, say so, even alone. Majority is not a truth-maker, and disagreement alone is not a flaw in your reasoning. - **No:** People as informed as you, answering the same question, are a signal you would be a fool to ignore. Treat the disagreement itself as a reason to lower your confidence. ### Community defines knowledge **The community decides what counts as knowing.** _What counts as 'knowledge' is decided by the community that uses the word, not by one person's grip on the truth._ Yes 28% (38) · No 72% (99) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** What counts as 'proved' is set by scientific practice, not by one person's certainty. Knowledge is a social achievement. - **No:** The jury does not create the fact. Communities can be wrong together for centuries. ### Institutions track truth **A thousand reviewers catch errors one genius misses - universities, courts, and journals exist for that reason.** _Universities, journals, courts, and similar institutions, failures and all, get closer to the truth than any individual working alone._ Yes 59% (81) · No 40% (55) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Peer review, appeals, and replication catch errors no lone genius could. The machinery is the point. - **No:** Institutions ossify and defend their own. The outsider sees what the committee cannot. ### Power discounts claims **If a study says smoking is harmless and tobacco companies paid for it, trust it less.** _A claim should be trusted less when it happens to serve the interests of the powerful._ Yes 39% (54) · No 59% (81) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Tobacco paid for the studies that cleared tobacco. Follow the funding before the finding. - **No:** A good study stands on its method. Discounting a result by who paid for it is just a different bias. ## Part 5. The Change ### Past theories were wrong **Old scientific theories were mostly just wrong.** _Most past scientific theories turned out to be flatly wrong, not partly right._ Yes 24% (33) · No 74% (102) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A sun that orbits the earth: simply false, with no residue in the theory that replaced it. Science is a graveyard of confident mistakes. - **No:** Newton was incomplete, not wrong, and Einstein built on him. Theories are improved, not discarded. ### Knowledge is accumulating **Humanity knows more, and more truly, than before.** _Human knowledge really is growing: we know more, and know it more accurately, than people did before._ Yes 80% (110) · No 20% (27) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Diseases that were death sentences are now Tuesday. The track record is real. - **No:** New error enters the record as fast as new truth does, so the stock of reliable claims is no larger than it was. Nothing accumulates. ### Revolutions are coming **Expect future revolutions we can't foresee.** _We should expect real upheavals in knowledge that our current frameworks cannot even imagine._ Yes 59% (81) · No 40% (55) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Newton could not have guessed quantum mechanics. There is no reason to think discovery is finished. - **No:** The big questions are settled and only details remain. Expecting a revelation is a bet with no odds. ## Part 6. The Justification ### Evidence proportions belief **Confidence should rise and fall with the strength of the evidence.** _How strongly you believe something should match how strong the evidence is, not what you want, fear, or find comforting._ Yes 76% (104) · No 23% (31) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A stranger's story gets a shrug and a replicated study gets belief. That asymmetry is the whole method. - **No:** Hope and loyalty are fine reasons to believe, and evidence is thin for most of what makes life worth living. ### Falsifiability is required **A claim that no check could ever refute is not knowledge.** _A claim only counts as a candidate for knowledge if some check could in principle show it false - observation, experiment, or argument._ Yes 55% (75) · No 45% (62) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** 'An undetectable dragon lives in my garage' cannot be checked in any way, and no honest person calls it knowledge. - **No:** 'You should keep your promises' cannot be refuted by any observation, and it is still something we know. Refutability is a rule for one kind of claim, not the standard for all. ### The burden is on the claimant **Whoever claims owes the proof.** _Whoever makes a claim owes the justification; the mere absence of disproof does not support it._ Yes 74% (101) · No 25% (34) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Extraordinary claims owe extraordinary evidence. Otherwise every rumor gets a hearing. - **No:** A claim stands until someone knocks it down. Demanding proof up front silences the people with the least time to gather it. ### Counterexamples kill **One real exception kills a claim that something is always true.** _One confirmed counterexample is enough to refute a claim that something is always true._ Yes 50% (68) · No 50% (68) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** One black swan kills 'all swans are white'. That is what makes a claim that something is always true mean anything. - **No:** A drug that helps 99% of patients is not refuted by the one it misses; the claim was about the rate, not every case. Read the claim more carefully before you bury it. ### Prediction is the test **The best theory predicts best.** _The best test of a theory is whether it predicts things better than its rivals do._ Yes 60% (82) · No 40% (55) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Relativity won by predicting bent starlight before anyone looked. A theory that will not stick its neck out is not doing much. - **No:** Elegance and explanatory depth beat curve-fitting. Prediction is one virtue among several. ### Use justifies belief **A belief working well is evidence that it is true.** _If a belief works well in practice, that is evidence it is true, not merely convenient._ Yes 58% (80) · No 41% (56) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** The theory that predicts the weather best, year after year, is probably the truer one. Working is evidence of truth. - **No:** A placebo works and is still false. If working well made a belief true, every lucky charm would be science. ### Contradiction is tolerable **You can reasonably hold two beliefs that flatly contradict, without resolving them.** _A person can reasonably keep holding two beliefs they know genuinely contradict each other, without resolving the clash or setting either one aside._ Yes 25% (34) · No 75% (103) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You can hold that the will is free and that physics is deterministic, and live inside the tension without pretending there is no clash. - **No:** When two of your beliefs flatly contradict, at least one has to give. Keeping both lets you believe anything. ## Part 7. The Limits ### Consciousness will be explained **Science will someday explain consciousness, the way it explained the weather.** _Science will eventually explain consciousness, the way it explained digestion and heredity._ Yes 65% (89) · No 31% (43) · Open 4% (5) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Vitalism looked like a wall until biochemistry walked through it. Consciousness is the next wall, not a permanent one. - **No:** No equation will tell you what red looks like. There is a gap here that more data does not obviously close. ### Knowledge can be ineffable **Some knowledge can be had but never put into words.** _Some knowledge is in principle unstateable: you can have it and be unable to put it into any words, however hard you try._ Yes 36% (50) · No 64% (87) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You cannot tell someone what heartbreak is like. Some knowledge only transfers by living it. - **No:** If you cannot say it, you do not know it. 'Ineffable' is usually a request to stop asking questions. ### Unreachable truths exist **Some truths are forever beyond human reach.** _Some truths, mathematical or otherwise, are beyond what any human reasoning could ever reach._ Yes 34% (46) · No 66% (90) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A dog cannot grasp prime numbers, and we may have the same kind of wall. Being unable to reach something is not evidence it is not there. - **No:** Whatever is true, we could in principle reach it: truths nobody can state are indistinguishable from no truths at all. ### Wisdom is a different kind **Knowing how to live is a different kind of knowing, gained a different way.** _Knowing how to live well and what matters is a different kind of knowledge from knowing facts, and it is gained in a different way._ Yes 55% (75) · No 45% (61) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Knowing how to raise a child is practical wisdom, gained by living, not a fact you could store; one is exercised, the other is recorded. - **No:** It is the same kind of knowing with different subject matter. Calling wisdom separate lets it dodge every test. ### Knowing transforms **Some things you only know by living them, and they change you.** _Some things can only be known by living them, and acquiring that knowledge changes the knower - you cannot have it and stay who you were._ Yes 45% (61) · No 55% (75) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You cannot learn what grief is like without grieving, and grieving rewrites the person who learns it. - **No:** Knowledge is inventory. It sits in you; acquiring it does not remake you. ## Part 8. The Self ### Self-knowledge is direct **You know your own thoughts, feelings, and motives better than anyone else can.** _You can know your own mind - your present thoughts and feelings, and your own motives - more reliably than any outside observer can._ Yes 42% (58) · No 53% (72) · Open 5% (7) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You can say why you snapped at a friend; an observer would have to guess. First-person access to your motives is privileged. - **No:** Your friend names the reason you snapped before you can. Your own motives are often hidden from you. ### The self is firm **There's a stable 'you' that persists over time.** _There is a stable self that lasts over time._ Yes 72% (98) · No 28% (39) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** You remember being six and recognize that child as the same you, and a promise made then still binds you. Identity persists across time. - **No:** Ten-year-old you is a stranger. The self is a bundle of processes, not an object. ## Part 9. The Cosmos ### God is real **God exists.** _God (or gods) actually exists._ Yes 51% (70) · No 42% (58) · Open 7% (9) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** The universe reads as created, not accidental. Something grounds it beyond itself. - **No:** Gods are stories people tell about the gaps. The gaps keep shrinking. ### The sacred is real **Some things are set apart as sacred by the world itself, not just by us.** _Some things are set apart as sacred, and that setting-apart is a real feature of the world, not only a convention we have adopted._ Yes 32% (44) · No 68% (93) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A shrine or a life can be holy in itself, not merely because a community agrees to treat it so. - **No:** The shrine is stones until people agree it is a shrine. Sacredness is a designation we place, and it can be placed elsewhere. ### Union is possible **Union with God or the whole can be experienced directly.** _People who pray and meditate can directly experience union with ultimate reality - God, or the whole - and that experience tells them something._ Yes 47% (65) · No 52% (71) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** People who pray and meditate across traditions describe the same thing, often in the same words: the self merging into God, or into everything. Either they all share a source or the coincidence needs explaining. - **No:** Mystical experiences of oneness with God or the whole come from brains under long training, and they mislead as often as they reveal. ## Part 10. The Object (continued) ### Moral truths are objective **Some things are wrong no matter who approves.** _Some moral claims (cruelty to the innocent is wrong) would still be true even if every human approved of the opposite._ Yes 66% (91) · No 29% (40) · Open 4% (6) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Cruelty stays wrong even if a whole society applauds it. That is what people mean when they call something evil. - **No:** A practice is wrong only where a community says so. The rest is one group's opinion wearing a crown. ### Beauty is real **Some things are beautiful whether or not anyone is watching.** _Beauty (in a face, a proof, a chord) is a real feature of the thing itself, not just a private reaction in the person looking._ Yes 39% (54) · No 55% (76) · Open 5% (7) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A proof is called elegant the way a face is called lovely. The recognition is not arbitrary. - **No:** The sunset is atoms. The beauty is your retina doing the rest. ## Part 11. The Sources (continued) ### The body knows things **The body holds knowledge that words cannot fully capture.** _Knowing how to do something with your body - riding, dancing, surgery - is a kind of knowledge that cannot be fully put into words._ Yes 62% (85) · No 31% (43) · Open 7% (9) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A rider's balance adjusts to the horse before any sentence could say how. Knowing how to do something is a kind of knowing that words never fully capture. - **No:** The hands can do it, but the skill is habit. Knowledge lives in the part of the rider that could explain it. ## Part 12. The Change (continued) ### Your future self is a stranger **You can't predict who you'll be in ten years well enough to plan on your present values holding.** _You cannot predict what you will want or value in ten years well enough to treat your present values as the last word._ Yes 81% (111) · No 19% (26) · Open 0% (0) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Ulysses tied himself to the mast before the sirens. You cannot predict the person you will become well enough to trust his judgment. - **No:** You know yourself well enough. Your present values are yours to set, and the future you has no standing to overrule them. ## Part 13. The Cosmos (continued) ### The future is open **The future isn't written yet; it's genuinely unsettled.** _The future is genuinely open: many things are not yet settled, even in principle, about what will happen._ Yes 78% (107) · No 20% (27) · Open 2% (3) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Tomorrow's coin flip has no outcome yet to be true about. The future is genuinely unwritten. - **No:** The flip already has an outcome. We just cannot see it. ### The ending is knowable **We can, in principle, find out how the universe ends.** _How the universe ends (or whether it does) is a question that can, in principle, be settled by evidence and argument._ Yes 80% (110) · No 18% (25) · Open 1% (2) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Stellar physics already extrapolates to heat death or collapse. The end is calculable. - **No:** 'How does it all end' is closed to inquiry: no route, however complete, reaches it. ### The universe needs an outside **The universe points to something beyond itself that explains it.** _The universe is the kind of thing that points to an explanation beyond itself._ Yes 56% (77) · No 43% (59) · Open 1% (1) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** Every fact invites one more 'why that', and the chain has to stop beyond the last fact. - **No:** The universe is just brute: 'why is there anything' has no answer beyond the universe itself. ### Reality is one **Things that look separate are really one thing wearing many shapes.** _At the most fundamental level reality is a single whole: what look like separate things are parts of one thing, not genuinely separate._ Yes 58% (79) · No 35% (48) · Open 7% (10) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A wave is not a thing the ocean has; it is a shape the ocean is taking. What we call things are temporary shapes of one whole, and separateness is a surface effect, not the deep structure. - **No:** Things affect each other deeply and stay two things. A relation is what two separate things have; subtracting it does not merge them into one. ### The universe tends toward balance **The universe as a whole tends back toward balance when pushed to an extreme.** _The universe as a whole tends toward balance: pushed far to an extreme, the whole system swings back, rather than moving further from balance without limit._ Yes 56% (77) · No 37% (51) · Open 7% (9) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** A boom corrects into a bust, a fever breaks, an ecosystem returns to its mix after a fire. Something in the whole leans back from an extreme. - **No:** A star burns out, a species is gone for good, and the universe keeps spreading thinner. What looks like global balance is a local moment before things run down. ## Part 14. The Limits (continued) ### Reasoning reaches past the data **Reasoning past what anyone has observed can still reach real knowledge, not just guesswork.** _Reasoning carried beyond anything we have observed can still produce knowledge: the theories and predictions we reach by stretching past the data are not mere guesses._ Yes 50% (68) · No 48% (66) · Open 2% (3) · of 137 profiles - **Yes:** The math came first: Newton's numbers demanded a planet nobody had seen, and the telescope found it. Reasoning outran observation and won. - **No:** Step past what you can check and you are writing fiction with equations. A prediction that lands was still a guess until the instrument confirmed it. --- ## Colophon Generated by `scripts/make_report_md.py` from `epistemia/basis.py` and the stated vectors under `results/`. Figures move when the underlying profiles change; regenerate with `python scripts/make_report_md.py`. The prose cases are the same steel-man entries the site renders on each question card.