Common Epistemology and Its Natural Limitations for Analysis and Interpretation of Religious Epistemological Thought

As the psychological tendency to accept a proposition as true, belief has two aspects; on the one hand, it leads to practical consequences. When we hold a belief, other psychological tendencies emerge as a result. A belief can not only change our behavior but also affect our life to a large degree. This is called the “pragmatic” aspect of belief. On the other hand, a belief can lead or at least bring us closer to the truth or falseness of a preposition. It is called the “epistemological” aspect of belief in this paper. Ignoring the second aspect, epistemological philosophers only address truth or falseness and reason or process. In their viewpoint, it is only truth or falseness, reference to facts, permissibility or impermissibility, and reliability or unreliability that make a belief epistemologically significant. Therefore, epistemology fails to address such Islamic principles as “faith”, “atheism”, “polytheism”, and “discord”. As the main terms and notions stated in the Holy Qur’an, they are the combinations of the two aspects of belief and have to lose this feature to enter the realm of epistemological research.