Unknowability: An Inquiry Into the Limits of Knowledge
Rescher, Nicholas. Unknowability : an inquiry into the limits of knowledge / Nicholas Rescher.
The realities of man’s cognitive situation are such that our knowledge of the world’s ways is bound to be imperfect. Nonetheless, the theory of unknowability—agnoseology as some have called it—is a rather underdeveloped branch of knowledge. And it seems destined to remain so since most of us would prefer to “accentuate the positive” and focus attention on human abilities and powers, rather than disabilities and incapacities.
Granted, the task of identifying individual unknowable facts as such is inherently impracticable. (If they are supposed to be identified as such—as facts—then how can they be unknowable?) But their treatment at the level of generality is something else again. And as the deliberations of the book will endeavor to show in detail, there are four prime reasons for the impracticability of cognitive access to certain facts about the world: developmental impredictability, verificational surdity, ontological detail, and predicative vagrancy. The role of each of these factors will be explained and examined by exploring the prospects and possibilities of knowledge, with particular focus on its limits, practical and theoretical alike.