Science and philosophy

Bertrand Russel (1872 - 1970) wrote:

A man might say, with enough truth to justify a joke: 'Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know'.

The paradox there is however that the more we know, the more we ignore. In other words, ignorance grows with knowledge.
Yet we need to manage our ignorance, because we have to do choices in the context of restricted knowledge, on the basis of partial information.
This is part of what Herbert Simon called bounded rationality, and an alternative to delegating knowledge, which doesn't scale.
It implies to form models for one's ignorance, to try to reduce it, or to structure it.


Managing Ignorance ToC
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Marc Girod
Last modified: Tue Dec 14 15:51:10 EET 2004