ellauri096.html on line 204: Frederic Fitch (1963) reports that in 1945 he first learned of this proof of unknowable truths from a referee report on a manuscript he never published. Thanks to Joe Salerno’s (2009) archival research, we now know that referee was Alonzo Church.
ellauri096.html on line 206: Assume there is a true sentence of the form ‘p but p is not known’. Although this sentence is consistent, modest principles of epistemic logic imply that sentences of this form are unknowable.
ellauri096.html on line 221: is unknowable.
ellauri096.html on line 223: The cautious draw a conditional moral: If there are actual unknown truths, there are unknowable truths. After all, some philosophers will reject the antecedent because they believe there is an omniscient being.
ellauri096.html on line 225: But secular idealists and logical positivists concede that there are some actual unknown truths. How can they continue to believe that all truths are knowable? Astonishingly, these eminent philosophers seem refuted by a pinch of epistemic logic. Also injured are those who limit their claims of universal knowability to a limited domain. For instance, Immanuel Kant (A223/B272) asserts that all empirical propositions are knowable. This pocket of optimism would be enough to ignite the contradiction (Stephenson 2015).
ellauri096.html on line 229: The conclusion that there are unknowable truths is an affront to various philosophical theories, but not to common sense. If proponents (and opponents) of those theories long overlooked a simple counterexample, that is an embarrassment, not a paradox. (2000, 271)
ellauri096.html on line 233: Those who believe that the Church-Fitch result is a genuine paradox can respond to Williamson with paradoxes that accord with common sense (and science –and religious orthodoxy). For instance, common sense heartily agrees with the conclusion that something exists. But it is surprising that this can be proved without empirical premises. Since the quantifiers of standard logic (first order predicate logic with identity) have existential import, the logician can deduce that something exists from the principle that everything is identical to itself. Most philosophers balk at this simple proof because they feel that the existence of something cannot be proved by sheer logic. Likewise, many philosophers balk at the proof of unknowables because they feel that such a profound result cannot be obtained from such limited means.
ellauri096.html on line 236: Church’s referee report was composed in 1945. The timing and structure of his argument for unknowables suggests that Church may have been by inspired G. E. Moore’s (1942, 543) sentence:
ellauri096.html on line 283: Although (iii) is consistent and might be knowable by others, (iii) cannot be known by the student before Friday. (iii) is a blindspot for the students but not for, say, the teacher’s colleagues. Hence, the teacher can give a surprise test on Friday because that would force the students to lose their knowledge of the original announcement (A). Knowledge can be lost without forgetting anything.
ellauri142.html on line 611: Starting either from religious belief or from science, Spencer argued, we are ultimately driven to accept certain indispensable but literally inconceivable notions. Whether we are concerned with a Creator or the substratum which underlies our experience of phenomena, we can frame no conception of it. Therefore, Spencer concluded, religion and science agree in the supreme truth that the human understanding is only capable of 'relative' knowledge. This is the case since, owing to the inherent limitations of the human mind, it is only possible to obtain knowledge of phenomena, not of the reality ('the absolute') underlying phenomena. Hence both science and religion must come to recognise as the 'most certain of all facts that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.' He called this awareness of 'the Unknowable' and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a positive faith which could substitute for conventional religion. Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last anthropomorphic vestiges.
ellauri144.html on line 584: Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
ellauri219.html on line 771: In the practice of meditation, a beginning may be made by fixing the attention upon some external object, such as a sacred image or picture, or a part of a book of devotion. In the second stage, one passes from the outer object to an inner pondering upon its lessons. The third stage is the inspiration, the heightening of the spiritual will, which results from this pondering. The fourth stage is the realization of one’s spiritual being, as enkindled by this meditation. An interior state of spiritual consciousness is reached, which is called “the cloud of things knowable”. Tietämättömyyden pilvi. (tyhjää) puhekuplassa.
ellauri248.html on line 93: Can you write a mystery story that ends with uncertainty? Where you never know who really did it? You can, but it’s unsatisfying. It’s unpleasant for the reader . There needs to be something at the end, some sort of resolution. It’s not that the killer even needs to be caught or locked up. It’s that the reader needs to know. Not knowing is the worst outcome for any mystery story, because we need to believe that everything in the world is knowable. Justice is optional, but answers, at least, are mandatory. And that’s what I love about Holmes. That the answers are so elegant and the world he lives in so ordered and rational. It’s beautiful.”
xxx/ellauri128.html on line 597: The teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff played an important role in Anderson's life. Anderson met Gurdjieff in Paris and, together with Leblanc, began studies with him, focusing on his original teaching called The Fourth Way. Along with Katherine Mansfield and Jane Heap, she remains one of the most noted institutees of Gurdjieff´s, Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at Fontainebleau, near Paris, from October 1922 to 1924. Anderson studied with Gurdjieff in France until his death in October 1949, writing about him and his teachings in most of her books, most extensively in her memoir, The Unknowable Gurdjieff. By 1942 her relationship with Heap had cooled. Anderson sailed for the United States. Jane Heap had moved to London in 1935, where she led Gurdjieff study groups until her death in 1964. With her passage paid by Ernest Hemingway, Anderson met on the voyage Dorothy Caruso, widow of the singer and famous tenor Enrico Caruso. The two began a romantic relationship, and lived together until Dorothy´s death in 1955. Anderson returned to Le Cannet, and there she died of emphysema on October 19, 1973.
14