The
conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are,
accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical. Their
dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue,
in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we
do not know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first
alternative because we know already; on the second, because we do
not know what to look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we
tell that it is what we were after. The dilemma makes no
provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes either
complete knowledge or complete ignorance. Nevertheless the
twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The possibility
of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact
which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the
situation suggest certain ways out. We try these ways, and
either push our way out, in which case we know we have found what
we were looking for, or the situation gets darker and more
confused--in which case, we know we are still ignorant.
Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along
provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice
piece of formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men
kept a sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science
made only slow and accidental advance. Systematic advance in
invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could
utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to
guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would
confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture.
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