Knowledge

"In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance” (Henry Miller). Is this true?

Comments

No.

OK, the following more prosaic thought is true: increasing our knowledge can reveal new areas of ignorance. Before you discover Australia, you don't know that there is a wild continent still to be mapped. Before you discover that there are protons, you don't know that there's a question of what happens when we smash them together in a particle collider. And so it goes.

But the fact that increasing our knowledge can reveal new areas of ignorance obviously does not imply that our new knowledge (as far as it goes) isn't knowledge after all. You can come to know Australia is there even though you've not mapped it all yet.

So it would be fatuous to aver (as Miller seems to do) that expanding the field of knowledge is nothing but increasing our ignorance.

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