Human Ways of Forming Answers to Questions
| Type | Description | A Principal Use | Strength | Weakness |
| Authoritarianism | Composite of opinions of other human beings | To know one’s mother tongue | Easiest | Often wrong |
| Rationalism | Deducing an answer from accepted premises | Balancing one’s checkbook | Very sure if premises are correct | Premises must be taken on faith |
| Empiricism | Directly sensing something to know it | Finding the exit | Helps us to relate to our immediate environment | Many important things cannot be sensed |
| Statistical Empiricism | Forming a conclusion on the basis of arrays of data | Which ball bearing lasts longest | Very good masses of empirical data | Biased sample gives wrong impressions |
| Pragmatism | Calling what works “the truth” | When a baby cries, it is picked up and comforted | Great last resort | May be coincidence |
| Fabrication | Inventing a hypothesis | Detective work Theory in science Mathematics | Hypothesis helps in recognizing evidence | We may begin to believe our hypotheses, shutting off further thought |
| Mysticism | Substituting “immediacy” for noetic knowing | Religious satisfaction? | Very satisfying | Intellectually empty |
| Scholarship | Forming ideas about past on basis of authoritarianism, rationalism, and fabrication | Biography of Napoleon | Gives a rational thread to accounts of the past | Often in error because of bias of extant documents |
| Science | Forming ideas about the universe on basis of authoritarianism, rationalism, statistical empiricism and fabrication | Creation of the periodic table | Helps to discover and control nature | Cannot deal with the non-empirical |
| Revelation | Forming ideas on basis of communication with the supernatural | Learn the nature of God | Most productive means for the most important questions in life | Two sources, one good, one evil |
| Knowledge of Good and Evil | Feelings of the heart which differentiate righteousness from selfishness | Differentiate revelation from God from revelation from Satan | Priceless key to all knowing | Variable from person to person, because some are not honest in heart |