Saturday, February 2, 2008

On Certainty

Given imperfect knowledge, certainty should be viewed as an argument against rather than an argument for. If one admits that there is some force with the potential capacity to act on the system supposedly being described with certainty, then one must admit that one's reasoning is somewhere mistaken or inadequate. This is not true of systems, such as mathematics, in which all relationships are syntactic, specified through given axioms. It is, however, true everywhere else.

But then again, maybe not . . . .

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