So I've been working on a blog post called the Epistemology of Investing for about the past year. Now, epistemology is a ten-dollar word that those -- like me -- with five dollar brains rarely sling around, but sometimes I think investing could be called applied epistemology.

As investors -- specifically, investors in opaque, illiquid markets -- we spend our days asking the epistemological questions: what do we know about our investments, companies, markets, people?  How do we come to know what we know?  What are the sources and limits of our knowledge?  How are our beliefs different from The Truth?  Said another way: what investing hypotheses do we form?  How do we form them?  And how do we seek out, analyze, and integrate the data we use to test those hypotheses?