p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.
5px Helvetica} span.s1 {font: 7.0px Helvetica} Epistemology, belongs to the materialism area in philosophy, insists that human’s thoughts are reflectionsof the real world and human’s experiences and knowledge comes from their diverse interactions with thereal world around them. Epistemology affirms human’s ability to objectively cognize the reality of theworld. In epistemology theory, human’s cognition activities encompass two stages:1. Initial stage: people acquire knowledge simply and directly from what they see and hear from theworld around them. People have a superficial understanding of the world from the simple knowledge.2.
Advanced stage: based on a great deal of simple knowledge learnt at stage one, people analyze andinduce general principles and theories that interpret the knowledge. By analyzing and inducing, peoplemaster the essences behind the superficial phenomenon.Epistemology theory encourages people to pursue the advanced stage when studying the real world andexamine the theories they induce in this stage by employing them in real-world practices. Epistemologyobjectively reflects human’s cognition process and has been successfully applied to many artistic andscientific research. One of the successful cases is the Johannes Kepler’s scientific discovery about themovement principles of planets.Johannes Kepler was a talented mathematician, physician and astronomer in 15th century. He was famousfor his scientific genius in an early age and was invited to be an assistant for Tycho Brahe, a greatastronomer who devoted to astronomical observation over twenty years.
Kepler had strong interests inthe movement pattern of planets. After Tycho was dead, he began to study the pattern based on a greatdeal of data from Tycho’s records on his astronomical observations. At the beginning Kepler induced themoving principles of the planets on the basis of the main astronomical theories in 15th century and thelong lasting popular astronomical concept, which was accepted by almost all astronomical scholars andtheories at that time, that the planets did uniform circular motion around the sun. But after several yearsof studying on Tycho’s accurate data, Kepler found the theories and concept didn’t coincide with Tycho’sobservations. Thus Kepler audaciously abandoned the theories and concept, proposing new hypothesizesand examining them through calculating Tycho’s data.
After eighteen years of hard work, Keplereventually established a new theory, Kepler’s Law, that generalized the moving principles of the planetsin solar system. Kepler’s theory was a landmark in astronomical history and laid a solid foundation forlater studies of astronomy and astrophysics. His thoughts and research methodology inspired laterscientists including Newton and Galileo.
