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These three epistemologies are all closely related in part because these thinkers (Socrates & Plato and Aristotle) were part of student/teacher relationships. In a larger sense, each view is in some ways reactionary to the one that came before it.

 

Socrates, for example, saw Sophists practicing social construction as they proposed the probable truths that pushed Greece into the devastating Peloponnesian War. He then took to the idea that there were supernatural absolute truths that no silver-tongued Sophist could mimic or misappropriate. While Plato internalized this epistemology, his student Aristotle began to swing back to a middle ground between the Sophistic and Socratic epistemologies.

 

Where the Sophists believed only generating in probable truths and Socrates & Plato believed only in preeminent absolute truths, Aristotle believed in the validity and necessity of both types of truth. In Aristotle's epistemology, much like the Sophists', probable worldly truths were generated by people (though with dialectic and rhetoric respectively).

 

There is also overlap between Aristotle and Socrates & Plato in that they all believed in preeminent absolute truths. The main difference between their conception of absolute truth is that Aristotle saw these truths as scientifically discernible, mechanisms that ruled the physical world while Socrates & Plato saw absolute truth as mystical and omnipotent. 

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Comparing Epistemologies

TL;DR?

Check out this infographic for a light overview!

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