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  • Getting to the Trooth
  • Stuart Firestein (bio)

the title of this piece is based on a cartoon by the late new yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti in which two itinerant philosophers come upon a sign that points to the right and reads "TROOTH." The lead philosopher says, "Close enough, let's go." (The cartoon can be found at https://condenaststore.com/collections/charles+barsotti.)

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in 1927, j. b. s. haldane, the evolutionary biologist and polymath, famously noted, "Not only is the universe queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose" (299). This statement is often taken to suggest that we simply don't have the cognitive capacity to even imagine some of the things we don't know. But in fact, in the 90-plus years since, we have imagined a great number of very queer things—from a host of quantum particles to epigenetics and microbiomes, nanoparticles, dark matter, and materials with, so to speak, barely imaginable properties. Oh, and there is the Internet. Who was thinking, even 50 years ago, that connecting two computers together was any more sensible than connecting two refrigerators? Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether Haldane's cognitive humility is really accurate.

Or perhaps this is not the correct interpretation of Haldane's statement. One could imagine that what he intended was simply to describe the current state of science and to use it as a challenge to think beyond queer, if you will. That is, no matter how rapid progress might appear to be occurring, we should recognize there are things not yet even thought of. In fact, that statement, the one that gets quoted all the time, was preceded by, "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine" (298). Haldane was looking forward to being surprised. And that is the optimistic nature of science. [End Page 113]

If by "unknowability" we are given to mean a fundamental epistemological attribute, a cognitive limit imposed by the hardware of the brain, then I believe this is a red herring. There is no evidence to support the existence of such a limit, and it seems merely to be grist for a sophomoric debate. At best one could interpret it as showing humility. Philosopher Nicholas Rescher coined the term "cognitive Copernicanism" (2009) to suggest that it is hubristic to believe we occupy a mental landscape any more privileged than our physical one. Edwin Abbott's Flatland parable (1884) may also serve to suggest that we are trapped in a world of belief and understanding bounded by our cognitive biases and mental limitations. But the very fact that someone could write a book as ingenious as Flatland suggests that we are all too cognizant of these biases—and can overcome them. Certainly a bit of humility in the face of the universe's mysteries is not unwelcome, but there is no reason to turn it into a principle.

This is not to say that unknowability does not exist. There are unquestionably things that possess the property of being unknowable, or being so close to it as to be functionally unknowable or not worth the effort or cost to know entirely or precisely, or beyond manageable or currently imaginable resources to know. Of these various reasons for unknowability, only the first is of scientific interest—that is, unknowability as a property. These primarily occur in physics and mathematics, and are discussed by other, more capable scholars elsewhere in this volume. I will not consider them further here but will return to some examples in modern biology.

One sort of unknowability that can be managed or even exploited is the "unknown unknown"—that is, what we aren't even aware that we don't know. This phrase was most recently brought to public attention by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of Defense who engineered the ill-conceived post-9/11 military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. In testimony before a Senate committee investigating what went wrong, Rumsfeld noted that there were not only unknowns involved in plotting a strategy but that there were "unknown unknowns"—things we didn't know we didn't know...

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