Carl Sagan on Absolute Certainty in Knowledge

As a compendium to our discussion of induction in class yesterday, I found a terrific statement from the famed scientist Carl Sagan on the probabilistic nature of knowledge:

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend ... to have attained it. But the history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us."

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 28.

This is not a blog post that I want you to comment on (although you can if you like, just not for credit). Instead, I thought it would simply illustrate what we discussed in class yesterday.