The Joy and Pain of Uncertainty

The Joy and Pain of Uncertainty
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In his famous "Apology," Plato cites Socrates as saying: "That which I may not have known-through-seeing in no way I imagine myself to have known-through-seeing." In other words, Socrates (Figure 1) says that he doesn't imagine to know with absolute certainty what he actually doesn't know. This has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean that Socrates said that he knew nothing.

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Figure 1. A Roman marble bust of Socrates, in the Louvre. Credit: Eric Gaba.

Be that as it may, this ancient admission of uncertainty was in stark contrast to the theological traditions that followed, which assumed (essentially in all religions) that everything worth knowing has already been written, either in the scriptures, or in the legacies of very wise men of the past.

The dramatic revival of the importance of uncertainty, and of not knowing, had to await the start of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century. That was when modern science, with its acknowledgement that there are many questions to which we don't know the answers, and that all answers are only provisional, was born.

You may ask, however, what was, and maybe still is, the role of philosophy in all of this?

If theologists assumed they knew all the answers, and scientists admitted that no scientific theory has an absolute and permanent value, which position did philosophy adopt?

As in many other cases, I found Bertrand's Russell's (Figure 2) position on this issue to be the most compelling.

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Figure 2. The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Image is in the public domain.

In his History of Western Philosophy Russell wrote:

"Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales... To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it."

Even if one doesn't formally study philosophy, one can adopt this concept of living happily with uncertainty, with the knowledge that as new data become available, they are most likely to either refute old theories, or at least to cause them to metamorphose into new forms that will (under the best circumstances) incorporate some of the older ideas.

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