uncertain knowledge Quotes

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

I did know once, only I've sort of forgotten.

The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

If you ask almost any of them, 'Do you stand behind your theory? Is this the answer?' I think almost everyone would say, 'No, no, no. I'm just trying to expand the range of possibilities.' We really don't know what's going on.

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

In real science a hypothesis can never be proved true...A science which confines itself to correlating phenomena can never learn anything about the reality underlying the phenomena, while a science which goes further than this and introduces hypotheses about reality, can never acquire certain knowledge of a positive kind about reality; in whatever way we proceed, this is forever denied us.

The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

It's something I've noticed with my two children - children frequently know and don't know at the same time. They are aware of aspects of the world that are a little bit shadowy, and they choose not to engage with them.

So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand.....

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

I am quite conscious that my speculations run beyond the bounds of true science....It is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw[s] & holes as sound parts.