The study of how you know what you know — and whether what you call knowledge actually earns the name.
Most people never examine the mechanism that produces their beliefs — they argue about conclusions while the process that generated them goes unexamined. Epistemology is the discipline built to interrogate that process directly: not what you believe, but how belief gets justified, verified, or manufactured in the first place.
The word comes from the Greek logos (an account, or rational principle) joined to episteme (knowledge) — literally, “an account of knowledge.” Modern analytic philosophy treats the field’s founding problem as the “Gettier case”: a scenario where someone holds a belief that is true and justified, yet isn’t knowledge because the justification connects to the truth only by luck. The 1963 paper that posed this is three pages long and remains one of the most cited papers in 20th-century philosophy — proof that “justified true belief” was never as solid a definition of knowledge as it looked.
A separate, older tradition answers the same question differently. Qur’anic epistemology treats revelation as the primary source of knowledge, integrated with reason (aql) rather than opposed to it — *‘ilm* (knowledge) is defined not as a static fact held in the mind but as something encompassing theory, action, and education together, incomplete until acted on. Ibn Khaldun identified three levels of knowledge-seeking building on each other: personal self-development, social actualisation, and ontological pursuit in the divine realm. Read against each other, the two traditions aren’t answering the same narrow question — one asks what makes an individual proposition warranted, the other asks what knowledge is for.
Source: Gettier, E.L. (1963). “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, 23(6), 121–123. Azram, M. (2012). “Epistemology – An Islamic Perspective.” IIUM Engineering Journal, 12(5). Hosein, I.N. (n.d.) The Continuity of Iqbal’s Qur’anic Thought — cited here as a scholarly, non-peer-reviewed source.