Rules

A slice of Bacon, please....
Epistemology is a mouthful that means the rules for discovering truth.  Science has used a scientific method to find natural truth since Aristotle; we will use the improvement due to Francis Bacon, a standard which has unfortunately been abandoned by modern science. 
Bacon's scientific method:
Testing - "Mere argument is never sufficient; it gives no satisfaction or certainty, which can only be evinced by immediate inspection or intuition, which is what experience gives by verifying hypotheses and conclusions by direct experiment."
Four common causes of error are : authority, custom, the opinion of the unskilled many, and the concealment of real ignorance by a pretense of knowledge.

..... seasoned with Popper.
Karl Popper established criteria for scientific logic, which we will follow.
Falsifiability:  exclusion of theories outside the scope or possibility of testing in space or time or technology 
Consistency: no logical conflict among premises, hypothesis, conclusions and predictions
Sound reasoning: logically valid argument form and true premises
Testing: empirical applications of the conclusions and predictions