Knowledge Constraints Quotes

What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

Our perceptions of truth are built around what is practical, not what is true. Even the smartest human brain doesn't have the capacity for discerning true facts. That's why so many of us settle for scientific facts. It's the best we can do.

'Tis certain that our senses are extremely disproportioned for comprehending the whole compass and latitude of things.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.

All I know is what I have words for.

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

Let's imagine again an observer looking at us without any preconceptions. I think he would be struck by the fact that although human beings have the capacity to develop scientific knowledge, it must be a very limited capacity because it is only done in very narrow and specific domains.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future.

It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.

Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.

The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background . This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veilhangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.

Expert knowledge is limited knowledge