Western epistemology: a stranger in a strange land?

Westernization in the Pacific, as in the world, brought with it many old truths and new ideas. It brought new belief systems that were widely accepted and technologies that mostly proved useful. But it also brought something that it never fully put into words, although the brightest of students attending the best of schools may have had a glimpse of it. It's not a secret but, somehow, it's rarely discussed. When Westerners came they claimed to know an awful lot of things. But how did they know what they claimed to know? What was their way of knowing things? This paper discusses the various ways of knowing, with special reference to scientific knowledge and its epistemological basis, and to the nature of the body of knowledge it generates and protects. The objective is to provide a short history of western thought and a foundation for young scientist who need more than the successes of technology to understand how they know the things they claim to know.