Unknowability: An Inquiry Into the Limits of Knowledge

by Nicholas Rescher

The realities of mankind's cognitive situation are such that our knowledge of the world's ways is bound to be imperfect. None the less, the theory of unknowability―agnoseology as some have called it―is a rather underdeveloped branch of philosophy. In this philosophically rich and groundbreaking work, Nicholas Rescher aims to remedy this. As the heart of the discussion is an examination of what Rescher identifies as the four prime reasons for the impracticability of cognitive access to certain facts about the world: developmental inpredictability, verificational surdity, ontological detail, and predicative vagrancy. Rescher provides a detailed and illuminating account of the role of each of these factors in limiting human knowledge, giving us an overall picture of the practical and theoretical limits to our capacity to know our world.

Genres: Philosophy

124 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Cain S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rescher demonstrates, from within the interstices of traditional Logic, the essential class of unknowable truths to be a necessary feature borne out of finite cognitive abilities. His classification of unknowabilities according to their origin in evolutionary impredictability, verificational surdity, ontological excess, and vagrant predicates is built into a robust formal logical, and multi-value semantic-pragmatic, account of the individuated unspecifiability, unexemplifiability, and noncountability that determine the outermost reaches of reason.

Notable for its general sobriety, this towering work of philosophy cuts down science's claims to explanatory ultimacy while simultaneously appealing to the inability of present science to rule out other more efficient modalities of explanation presently considered "unscientific", e.g. teleology for accounts of causal relations between indiscernables, that will inevitably expand the very domain of science due to newer conceptual possibilities that emerge in the wake of still unforeseeable developments.

This is a book that delivers the goods that all "theory of everything" books routinely fail to. Agnoseology, the study of the epistemic-ontological rift between propositionality and experience, or the limits of knowledge and the facts of reality, as a project certainly goes a long way to rehabilitate the status of metaphysical problems as actual problems that demand logico-philosophical solutions.