Omniscience?

[The Stranger]

@ The Stranger

So if we make that statement a premise, which side do you fall into?

Many “well educated people” often fall into a trap of thing they already know everything worthwhile and need learn no more.

Do you think all things are provable and that conclusions are generally accurate?

if i understand this correctly you refer to the OP statement and not that of mark twain? in the first case i would stand side by side with reenk. maybe a little behind him, he is more radical in this case than i am i think. in the latter case of mark twain i would definitly fall in the category of stupid

i definitly dont think that science can prove all outside the paradigm of science. within it though perhaps it can, when as reenk has said, a theory of all can be formulated, this would take alot of time but that was part of the OP statement.

i have been thinking about it lately and somehow i have this intuition of domains in which certain methods have more validity than others, but i dont yet know how to make this a coherent thought.

i think i will have to suffice with the following: any attempt to understand and know the world in a coherent way (or kosmos in the sense of everything) following the rules of a certain method or paradigm will neccesarily fail to do so completely and truthful because there will always be elements of this world which will not fit in and will therefore be denied the right of existence or existence in total.

i will settle for the paradox.

ps

another thing that struck me as odd is this: Facts. They are quite troublesome. Because what are they exactly? If i would sit in a classroom full of people, am i then surrounded by facts or by people and things or images/impressions of those things? According to the analytic traditions facts are neither true nor false, only the claims made about facts are true of false. Which means that the facts are not the claims made about things and persons in the world, which would be the next logical step. Neither are they the statistic representation of events in the world as struck me a while ago when people kept talking about the evident or obvious nature of facts (the facts speak for themself is an expression in dutch, and this was at the centre of that debate). But when we look at a statistic we are not actually looking at the facts, we are looking at the representation of the facts, which means that there is a moment of interpretation that preceeds it. This leads me to believe that they cant be the facts because the facts are supposed to be undisputed. Can we actually know facts and what exactly are they or what do they consist of?