Philosophy has been described as the ultimate search for knowledge. Yet most of the subjects discussed are unknowable(Is there a god?..What is reality? etc).
So if philosophy is the search for knowledge why do we insist on discussing subjects we will be unable to find any knowledge about?
Is the search itself the provider of knowledge?
Base two logic variables 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-0
Base three logic variables 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/!0/!1/!2/!3/0
Base five logic variables 123456789*!0*!1*!2*!3*!4*!5*0
there is no such thing as knowledge seek but to be, this value of knowing that men seek is the proof of men acts to hate the truth of thier feelings not being in saying that they are much more
Hello Oldman:
Duck!!
Grrrreat 
mwah, that reminds me of uncle leo…
OP:
People try to understand the “unknowable” because they feel that there is a chance they will atleast be able to partially understand the unknowable. They really want to learn what was hard to learn. Learning is part of the human condition.
what gets my goat is when they were talking about quantum physics. so much huge paragraphs,huge words. so my dictionary in hand i went through most of it. afterward,it was so empty. like junk-reading.
there is a speacial border of talking about what you do not know, and not figureing out what you do not know as you talk about it. i dont like that.
i am thinking of my reading months ago when i was newer to the forum. quantum physics stuff written by future man…
it probly still happens though.
That which is fundamentally unknowable is only junk philosophy. “Is there any truth that we can never know?” Since that question is fundamentally unanswerable, even asking the question is stupid. Sadly, it is the kind of question we have to leave alone ENTIRELY - not because it’s hard, or because it takes too much courage to look at it and we’re all scared to change the norm - but because it’s ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE TO ANSWER.
On the other hand, questions like “does god exist” are tackleable. We’ve never observed a god, and there’s no good logical or physical argument for a god, so until we see evidence, the answer is “probably not”. If god shows up tomorrow and says “yo - worship me”, we’ll grit our teeth and say, yes, there is a god.
(Interestingly, the issue of god is a half-answerable question. If god shows up, we have an answer. If god never shows up, no amount of searching can possibly disprove him, since he could always ::waving hands around like a crazy person:: be in another universe somewhere. That somehow still can affect this one. ::eyes darting about like a crazy person:: )
Philosophy - and all of human inquiry - can only honestly concern itself with fundamentally answerable questions.
Hi Twiffy,
How would you know if a question is answerable unless you first ask and consider it?
For example, mathematicians don’t know whether or not Goldbach’s Conjecture is answerable (i.e., mathematically provable). If mathematics were played by your rule, Goldbach’s Conjecture would be cast out of mathematics altogether. Would doing so move human inquiry in a desireable direction?
Karl Popper once commented that if scientists were primarily interested in truth, they’d only ask simple, easily answered questions. And yet scientists don’t collect truths in the way that philatelic’s collect postage stamps. Scientists don’t merely seek truth or truths; they seek answers to fiendishly difficult questions - some of which appear to be unknowable, at least for the present.
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?” Einstein
Epistimologically speaking, there are many ways of knowing things. Tautological truths are known with certainty. All else is known provisionally. In philosophy, the ability to ask pertinent, or incisive questions counts as knowledge. Philosophy advances, in part, by our asking better questions.
“Wittgenstein once wrote:’ 'Wherof one cannot speak, therof one must be silent.” It was, if I remember rightly, Erwin Schroedinger who replied: “But it is only here that speaking becomes worthwhile.” Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p70
Popper corrected himself in a later edition; it actually wasn’t Schroedinger that said this, it was his friend Franz Urbach. Schroedinger later told Popper that even though he hadn’t said it, nevertheless, he liked the remark.
I most want to think and talk about the ideas that I can’t seem to get my mind 'round. It’s the problems in philosophy that fascinate me. I judge them as “solved” only once they’ve become trivial or even boring. On “doing” philosophy, Nelson Goodman remarked:
“…the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality. An answer, once found, is dull; and the only remaining interest lies in further effort to render equally dull what is still obscure enough to be interesting.” The Structure of Appearance
Wherof I cannot speak is precisely what most interests me. It’s what I most want to speak about.
Bertie Russell famously wrote
“To teach how to live without certainty…is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy…can do for those who study it.”
Regards,
Michael
We should make a thread about how to practice the socratic method of argument.
Why want to know the unknowable?
Can we want what we do not comprehend? No!
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
When ever a person has want, they already have dreampt of the thing that they have wanted, therefor what they want already exists within their mind. They then wish to find this in the outside world somewhere.
Noone can want the unknowable, because they cannot know it exists, therefor cannot want it.
There are those who believe that there is only the known and the unknown (yet) Some believe that there is also the unknowable, or at least the inexpressible.
What can be considered in philosophy depends on which construct is chosen. There is no limit to the questions that can be asked - including the question whether there are questions that cannot be answered. (shrug)
I was once chastened for this observation, but once again, pick a card, any card…
Polemarchus,
You’re simply misunderstanding exactly what I mean. I was careful to stress this - I’m talking about questions that are fundamentally unanswerable.
That’s an interesting question, and one worth pursuing - but it is beside the point I was making. If you already KNOW a question to be fundamentally unanswerable, then don’t ask it. If you aren’t sure, by all means, ask away - just be sure to also ask the meta-question “is question X even answerable?”
No, not at all. 1) We don’t KNOW whether Goldbach’s Conjecture is provable or not. That’s very different from knowing that it ISN’T provable. 2) Even if Goldbach’s Conjecture is unprovable, all unprovable sentences in Set Theory still have truth values. Goldbach’s Conjecture is definitely either true or false - the debate is about whether it’s provable. Thus even if it’s unprovable, we can still ask the question, and expect an answer - although it would require some funky meta-math to get to it.
Does that make sense?
Ridiculous, of course. The easy questions, if previously unanswered, are quickly answered - soon (like now), only hard questions remain. Since scientists are interested in FURTHERING UNDERSTANDING, more precisely, they keep going and tackle the hard shit.
Again, I point you to my very important caviat - FUNDAMENTALLY UNKNOWABLE. Almost none of the questions asked by science are fundamentally unknowable. “Why does the universe exist” might be fundamentally unknowable - but we don’t know forsure, so we can’t strike the question off the books. “Why are we conscious?” Clearly knowable, even though not practically knowable right now.
Wittgenstein’s quote is a good one, and Urbach’s response is also correct. The correction to Wittgenstein’s quote that makes it correct is “whereof one could never possibly speak, thereof one must be silent.” The point of pursuing the unknown is to know it. If something is FUNDAMENTALLY unknowable, by definition, that pursuit is fruitless, and thus should not be attempted at all.
Terrific quote.
Another terrific quote. I think you and I agree completely, and that you just misunderstood how I was using the term “unknowable”. Please let me know if you disagree!
-Tristan
Sometimes i talk about quantum physics.
But the stuff writes itself! There’s no reason to think that … the collapse of the wave function 
… is …temporally constrained … like cause and effect is.
i’ll just have to trust you on that…(?_?)