topic: [[ways of knowing]] created: 2023-04-23 *Can I recognize that "things are too complex, there's no way to know everything"?* This reminds me of [[Leader humility]] and [[ways of knowing]] It's kind of like [[don't believe everything you think]] and [[don't fall in love with your first idea]] This is a way of holding loosely to your ideas, even ideas you have strong versions of. Recognize that "things are too complex, there's no way to know everything." Epistemic humility matters because the [[scientific process]] requires that we update our ideas when we come across new data, and [[it's all data]]. When we know, or believe we know, we mistake ideas for [[Identity]], which causes us unintentionally to be stuck defending a bad idea. ##### What would the opposite argument be? when you have strong ideas, you should defend them! tags: #note/idea | #people/emmanualkant ##### Sources: In the philosophy of science, **epistemic humility** refers to a posture of scientific observation rooted in the recognition that (a) knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer, and that, as such, (b) scientific pronouncements must be built on the recognition of observation's inability to grasp the world in itself. The concept is frequently attributed to the traditions of German idealism, particularly the work of Immanuel Kant, and to British empiricism, including the writing of David Hume. Other histories of the concept trace its origin to the humility theory of wisdom attributed to Socrates in Plato's Apology. James Van Cleve describes the Kantian version of epistemic humility–i.e. that we have no knowledge of things in their "nonrelational respects or ‘in themselves'"–as a form of causal structuralism. More recently, the term has appeared in scholarship in postcolonial theory and critical theory to describe a subject-position of openness to other ways of 'knowing' beyond epistemologies that derive from the Western tradition. > [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic%20humility)