(For other posts in this series, see here.)
An important question in any area of knowledge is being able to identify what is true and what is false. The search for what is true and the ability to know when we have discovered truth is, after all, the Holy Grail of epistemology, because we believe that those things that are true are of lasting value while false statements are ephemeral, usually a waste of time and at worst harmful and dangerous.
Aristotle tried to make a clear distinction between those things that we feel we know for certain and are thus unchanging, and those things that are subject to change. The two categories were variously distinguished as knowledge versus opinion, reality versus appearance, or truth versus error. Aristotle made the crucial identification that true knowledge consisted of scientific knowledge, and his close association of scientific knowledge with truth has persisted through the ages. It also made the ability to distinguish between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge, now known as the demarcation problem, into an important question since this presumably also demarcates truth from error. (This brief summary of this history is taken from the essay The Demise of the Demarcation Problem by Larry Laudan which should be referred to for a fuller treatment.)
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