Epistemology (ἐπιστήμη, knowledge, science, and logos, speech, thought, discourse), in a most general way, is that branch of philosophy which is concerned with the value of human knowledge. The name epistemology is of recent origin, but especially since the publication of Ferrier's "Institutes of Metaphysics: the Theory of Knowing and Being" (1854), it has come to to be used currently instead of other terms, still sometimes met with, like applied logic, material or critical logic, critical or initial philosophy, etc. To the same part of philosophy the name criterioloqy is given by the authors of some Latin textbooks and by the Louvain School. The exact province of epistemology is as yet but imperfectly determined, the two main views corresponding to the two meanings of the Greek word episteme. According as this is understood in its more general sense of knowledge, or in its more special sense of scientific knowledge, epistemology is "the theory of the origin, nature and limits of knowledge" (Baldwin, "Dict. of Philos. and Psychol.", New York, 1901, s.v. "Epistemology", I, 333; cf. "Gnosiology", I, 414); or "the philosophy of the sciences", and more exactly, "the critical study of the principles, hypotheses and results of the various sciences, designed to determine their logical (not psychological) origin, their value and objective import" ("Bulletin de la Societe francaise de Philos.", June, 1905, fasc. no. 7 of the Vocabulaire philosophique, s.v. "Epistemologie", 221; cf. August, 1906, fasc. 9 of the Vocabul., s.v. "Gnoseologie", 332). The Italian usage agrees with the French. According to Ranzoli ("Dizionario di scienze filosofiche", Milan, 1905, s.v. "Epistemologia", 226; cf. "Gnosiologia", 286), epistemology "determines the objects of every science by ascertaining their differentiating characteristics, fixes their relations and common principles, the laws of their development and their special methods". Here we shall consider epistemology in its first and broader meaning, which is the usual one in English, as applying to the theory of knowledge, the German Erkenntnistheorie, i.e. "that part of philosophy which, in the first place, describes, analyzes, examines genetically the facts of knowledge as such (psychology of knowledge), and then tests chiefly the value of knowledge and of its various kinds, its conditions of validity, range and limits (critique of knowledge)" (Eisler, Wörterbuch der philos. Begriffe, 2d ed., Berlin, 1904, I, 298). In that sense epistemology does not merely deal with certain assumptions of science, but undertakes to test the cognitive faculty itself in all its functions.