The Logic of the Moment: Knowledge is Approximate

The history of knowledge can be read, with only slight exaggeration, as a compendium of errors. Aristotle’s physics endured for centuries; the Earth occupied the centre of the cosmos; Newtonian mechanics appeared to describe a universal and absolute order; atoms were once treated as indivisible; and by the end of the nineteenth century some physicists believed their discipline was approaching completion, with little left beyond greater precision and the resolution of a few anomalies. Within a few decades, relativity and quantum mechanics had profoundly altered the conceptual structure of physics, including assumptions that had previously appeared fundamental. None of this means that earlier knowledge was useless. Newton still gets spacecraft where they need to go. It means that knowledge is conditional: extraordinarily reliable within some domains while remaining incomplete, approximate or wrongly framed beyond them. What we call error, looking backward, was often knowledge produced under different conditions: different evidence, concepts, instruments, languages and inherited assumptions. There is little reason to imagine that our own moment has somehow escaped this pattern. Future knowledge will not simply add facts to what we presently know. It will almost certainly reveal that some things we currently regard as obvious, fundamental or settled were artefacts of the particular conceptual world from which we were looking.

This changes what it means to know something. Knowledge does not arise after uncertainty has been eliminated; it arises because uncertainty remains. It takes form at the boundary between what can be articulated and what cannot yet, or perhaps cannot ever, be fully known. Knowledge need not be permanently true to be meaningful; it needs to organise our relations with the world well enough to persist through observation, use, criticism and change. From this perspective, an idea is not a little piece of eternal truth extracted from reality, but a relatively stable pattern of relations: between observations, concepts, instruments, other ideas and the larger field of what remains unknown. A pattern can persist even while its particular contents, language and supporting theories change, provided enough of the relations that make it intelligible are reproduced. Some such patterns endure for centuries because they continue to work; others lose coherence when new observations or concepts introduce relations they can no longer accommodate. What we call progress in knowledge is consequently less like constructing a building upon immovable foundations than repeatedly reorganising a structure while already living inside it. We inherit distinctions, categories and assumptions through language and culture, discover where they cease to work, and construct new ones that will themselves eventually encounter their limits. The error is not that our knowledge changes. The deeper error is mistaking the knowledge of the moment for knowledge exempt from the uncertainty and conditions that made it possible in the first place.