Practical Limits For Obtaining Knowledge
What we hold to be knowledge is often derived by a combination of reason from either traditional, authoritative, or scientific sources. Many times such knowledge is not verifiable; sometimes the process of testing is prohibitively dangerous or expensive. For instance, some physics theories about the nature of the universe, such as string-theory, require the construction of testing equipment currently beyond our technology. Since such theories are in principle subject to verification or refutation, they are scientific; since they are not proven experimentally, they are not considered certain knowledge. Rather, in such cases we have certain knowledge only of the theory, but not of what the theory describes.
"Of the three ways in which men think that they acquire knowledge of things—authority, reasoning, and experience—only the last is effective and able to bring peace to the intellect." (Roger Bacon, English alchemist, astrologer, philosopher and a major progenitor of modern science.
Read more about this topic: Descriptive Knowledge
Famous quotes containing the words practical, limits, obtaining and/or knowledge:
“When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped.”
—Laura (Riding)
“Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don’t happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data ... and yet we don’t understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The pathetic thing about the great wellintentioned mass of college and highschool students is that they have been so badly educated they have no knowledge or understanding of the complications of the world we live in and they have been so conditioned and prejudiced by generations of ill-taught teachers that they refuse to see a fact when they are confronted with one.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)