I cannot understand the meaning of as a first stab in the following sentence.
As a first stab, epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge: its nature, its requirements, and its limitations.
What does it mean?
When looking in a dictionary, I found out that the meaning of the word stab is as follows: the act of pushing a knife into someone, or an injury caused by stabbing (Cambridge Dictionary)
Best Answer
You've found a definition of stab, however, look carefully at the Cambridge Dictionary entry:
This is for the verb stab, not the noun. Since the sentence talks about making a stab at something, we need to check the noun definitions.
These definitions don't help either, but, if we keep scrolling down, we'll find the links to idiomatic expressions:
where we learn:
However, we may be able to solve the mystery even more quickly simply by consulting a different dictionary. For example, Macmillan's entry for the noun stab looks like this:
The meaning is found in Definition 2.
By the way, a good way to look up a word in multiple dictionaries is to use OneLook.