|
|
|
This question about what we can know dates back more than 22 centuries. Recently, a writer named Nassim Nicholas Taleb has dresses up the question with an example of a person seeing white swans, concluding that all swans are white and then - surprise - he sees a black swan, the title of his book. Taleb wants to warn people against assumption and to be prepared for the unexpected. Addressing the ability to know, he refers to World War One and writes:
Just image how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next. (Don't cheat by using the explanations drilled into your cranium by your dull high school teacher.)
Indeed, a lot of people in 1914 were surprised by what unfolded in 1914, including the generals who led their nations into battle. The generals and others went to war with faulty assumptions but also with some of the obscurantism. Going into 1914, blindness as to what lay ahead was not absolute. There were intellectuals who were giving warnings, while military men were forced to speculate about the future in laying out basic strategy. It was all rough approximation, some getting it better than others.
In his book The Black Swan, Taleb, writes of not being interested in bookish philosophy but in the practical side of the question of the question of uncertainty. He writes that "Half the time I am a hyperskeptic; the other half I hold certainties and can be intransigent about them, with a very stubborn disposition." But he goes back to the old problem of induction, the gathering of data that is called the inductive method never providing absolute certainty that what happened previously will repeat. The key word here is absolute, and we can also hold to the word practicality. Perhaps Taleb really does not understand science. Science is practical and deals with approximation. Absolute knowledge requires a grasp of the whole, and science does not pretend to know the whole. Reverting to absolutism, Taleb denounces the assumption of cause. He claims that we cannot compute the probabilities of an event occurring to us in real life. He trashes statistics as a tool for understanding, and also the bell curve. Statistics is measurement that gives us an approximation of development, and the bell curve is merely a display of measured distribution.
Science has what it calls an uncertainty principle. It is not a philosophical statement. It is concerned with limitations in measurement. To measure with certainty one needs to know the whole, which is impossible. The scientists who hold to the theory do not claim that because of its limitations measurement should be discarded entirely. Reverting to the practical side of science these people believe in measuring as best one can. They believe in accumulating detail and putting it into a map of reality, the finer the lines in the map the better.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/com/uncertainty.html