Epistemology is the science of how we come to know stuff.
At the bottom, it’s extremely simple. I know my perceptions, sensations, or whatever. I experience a pattern of sounds, 2D images, and so on. I construct my idea of 3D space, other consciousnesses, and everything else out of those. 3D space is simply a particular pattern of 2D images or whatever. And so forth. I mean, that isn’t simple (how we move from 2D images to 3D space or whatever), but the epistemology is. It’s nothing but the totally obvious point that I don’t experience anything but my sensations or whatever. And that’s where the epistemology stops. It’s just the fact that if you’re not talking about one of my perceptions, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. They would just be a bunch of words to me. Point it out, or forever keep it to yourself.
But at the higher levels of analysis, it gets a lot messier. We find deduction, apriorism, methodological individualism, methodological dualism, and so on. Ultimately we see a whole bunch of words that we feel as if we understand, but can’t really even begin to reduce to our perceptions. Whatever they mean, it slipped deep into our subconsciousness many years ago. And it takes a lifetime of effort to have any chance of digging them up, and really understand what’s going on. So most people stick to the higher level of analysis. And at that level, epistemology is basically just a bunch of rules or something for how to “gain knowledge”. Methodological individualism and so on. I’m not really sure how to characterize it exactly.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. I hardly articulated this very well.