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Deception and Epistemology

Deception is a serious problem for the theory of knowledge. It broadly encompasses the subjective issues of delusion, illusion, faulty reasoning and such, and the objective issues of misleading evidences, phenomenal ambiguity, and the like.

Descartes resolved his skepticism by recourse to God as the ground for certitude of knowledge. God cannot decieve us, so knowledge can have certainty.

The Advaitins pondered on the aspects related to states of consciousness and presented the doctrines of turiya and maya.

Buddhist philosophers had from the beginning mused upon the issue of senses deluded by phenomena, including the delusion of the self-conscious self.

There is also the butterfly or man dream or reality paradox.

Some ex-occultists and mystic power seekers have testified that there are evil forces and demons that decieve humans to believe their doctrines. They speak of a power encounter between demons and the Spirit of Jesus.

Another inductive issue regards claims of UFO and spirit sightings and such phenomena that is not apparent to all. Some organizations have been collecting and keeping records of these cases.

A good epistemic theory must be able to pose criteria to ensure knowledge is deception free.

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