Topic

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is the permanent condition of anyone who thinks carefully about anything that genuinely matters. The quotes gathered here make peace with that condition while also examining what it requires of those who must act in spite of it. The most useful voices here distinguish between uncertainty as an epistemic condition (we do not know, and cannot fully know, what will happen) and uncertainty as a psychological state (we feel unsettled, anxious, unmoored). The first is simply true and must be reckoned with honestly; the second is a response to the first that varies widely between people and that can be worked with. These reflections examine how to make good decisions without the certainty that would make decision-making easy, how to hold views provisionally without becoming paralyzed by relativism, and how to act with full commitment on the basis of incomplete knowledge — which is, ultimately, the only kind of knowledge available. Uncertainty, these voices suggest, is not the enemy of good judgment but its proper context.