If we have limited understanding can we know anything?

Question

One friend says we can know everything eventually, one says we actually know nothing only by knowing everything can we know anything. I'm stuck somewhere in between.

Answer 1

Knowledge, indeed any truth, is just a belief not yet refuted by anybody or otherwise. That is why our understanding is limited and the greatest limitation is time ........... we are bound by time and time is nothing but change or inconsistency (if there is no change, time can not be reckoned).

Answer 2

This is a question that has obsessed philosophers for eons. With the advent of epistemological limits which have been trends in this century and the last, it is generally thought that we cannot truly completely understand anything. One of the most far reaching examples of this is Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem. This theorem asserted that it was impossible to develop any logical system that was both complete and internally consistent. See this site for a variety of evaluations of this revolutionary idea:
http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html

Another idea that is completely different from Godel but is sometimes confused with it, is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. See:
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm:

The end result is that we live in a world where absolute knowledge is almost certainly impossible. One of the most coherent bit of writing on this dilemma is:
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/thread/2978

SO very long story short, I don't think I can really agree with either of your friends. Who know?

Answer 3

Yes we can know anything, but not everything. Ironically, the more you know, the more you realize that you don't know! Knowledge is infinite. God is omnipotent & omniscient. The rest of us have limited knowledge & understanding. There is always room to grow & more to learn. Most of us have specific knowledge in one area: whatever you studied and whatever interests you. For instance, I studied English, Drama & Art in university. The arts are my specialty but even within those subjects I'm limited. I can't possibly read every piece of literature ever written, study every play, know every work of art. & there are subjects which I know almost nothing about (sports, politics for instance) because they bore me to tears. They are not relevant to me. Did your friend who thinks we can know everything eventually mean in this life or in an afterlife? Even if you were a MENSA member with an IQ off the charts who studied from morning until night 7 days a week, you could not possibly know everything! Look at the span of history! Look how many subjects there are & how much there is to learn in each subject. It's mind-boggling.

Anyway, I'm the first to admit I don't know everything. Far from it! I know what I know & it's served me well. I'm always willing to learn. It keeps life interesting. Every day there is something new to discover. How boring life would be if we did know everything! No more surprises or discoveries...

The only danger is someone who doesn't admit their limited knowledge. Someone who knows very little yet thinks that they know everything. Beware of these people! Ignorance, arrogance and small-mindedness are crippling. If someone believes they know everything, they will never bother to learn the truth & they will try to poison others with false information.

Answer 4

Ultimately, we can only know something for certain if we have a complete, perfect knowledge of everything. As every variable directly or indirectly affects another, we would have to know everything to be able to know something for certain. Everything we "know" as we are is merely the most likely solution we are presented with, yet all these mathematical and scientific rules may not be true.
However, this really places people in a rut, a sort of paradox. If we are unable to know anything without knowing everything. Yet, without knowing this inormation which could be anything, which we can't, we would never be able to know everything.

Answer 5

I agree with both of your friends but there's a legitimate reason why I feel this way and I will explain why. I agree with your first friend because we go to school for a number of years (we go to regular school from preschool to twelfth grade for fifteen yrs.), college for four yrs. depending on your major (but if your major was a doctor or lawyer, you include another four years totaling up to twenty-two yrs. of education), plus your job will teach you things you never knew before. Your life teaches you more lessons that no school or job will ever teach you. I think a person can save a life and do much more for this world and this country if he does all of the above.
I also agree with your second friend because when Judgment Day comes, we won't have our knowledge of what we learned in this world. I mean, we'll just be souls and spirits and only know of what this world has offered us. We'll only know what God needs us to know to be part of his elite team of angels.
In plain english (and what most people come to the conclusion from what they're saying is): Friend #1 is saying is; If we are the type of person who pays attention to what life tells us and what we learn from school, we will know everything and I believe you will if you choose to pay attention to what life offers.
Friend #2 is saying is: those who show off what they know are only trying to prove something to those around them and themselves.

Answer 6

Everything can never be known... The capability to know anything can be acquired... or rather, it happens, when the perception deepens way beyond the sensory levels.... !
It is enlightenment ultimately, and on the way, many things come within the perception range, and the very process is overwhelming !

Answer 7

It is said that all knowledge is second-hand that has been around for centuries. What we learn at schools and Universities, read in books and in media is all second-hand knowledge, nothing is new in a sense that we come up with original knowledge because knowledge is thought and ultimately, thought is from the past, memories and experience.

Answer 8

in every generation comes the day that changes the way thinking is thought: we have doors and windows and we keep tabs on variables in extending limits, great books and learning centers are the quest of only a few, the small voice of democracy is screaming ing the face of history to let my people go. two super powers have to stand the cold war of negative and positive like the 1950's again to alter the loose ends of total fear, with out mega-monster ruling the middle east in the middle would never be what it is today

Answer 9

Your friends are both right. Their individual statements are paradoxically interconnected pointing at the same conclusion – that we do not know everything, and we also know nothing.

The first important fact to note is that however limited our understanding could be, our capacity to understand, or to know is limitless. Presumably speaking, we can know everything – everything as a singular body of knowledge in our mind. Now, if we know everything, so much so that our knowledge of everything is also inclusive of our own self then there is nothing left out of our knowledge for us to observe, or there is nothing left to know. And as all that we can know we could know due to what we already know, and if we have nothing to know then that will inversely imply that we know nothing.

Our mind not only knows what is sensually comprehensible, or understandable and therefore explainable, but it also know what we do not know. We like to know what we do not know, and there is nothing that we would not like to know. This is our awareness of things that is beyond the ever-spreading sphere of our knowledge. And if there is nothing but knowledge in existence then nothing will be known. I know myself because I know what I am not.

If I ever want to know something, I will have to know nothing first. And the paradox is that in order to know nothing, I will have to know everything – as in order to know anything I will have to know something at least; or for example, I would not know the number one without knowing the existence of zero on the number line; and then to know everything is to be inclusively everything myself, and for this I will have to become nothing. And since I am not nothing, and I do not know everything either, I therefore do not know nothing. I do not really know what I know because I do not know what do not know, and this is all I can know for sure.

Answer 10

Yes because a limited understanding does not in itself make you know nothing it just means that your knowledge is limited. Now knowing nothing that makes you know nothing. But then if you you knew nothing then at least you wouldn't care because you would know nothing! Right?