All Knowledge Is Provisional

All knowledge is provisional, because it has to be encoded in language. This is a fragile arrangement.

Knowledge and knowing does not exist without some degree of circularity, because the mesh of language is built upon itself, like a sweater woven into multiple dimensions from a single line of string. This means that knowledge is foundationally dependent on the language or symbology that encodes it. And symbols are always lossy representations of the base reality that they reflect.

Limitation is always present. There is always a gap between the thought and the word, between the word and the action. And compression into language is a very human form of knowledge, because the languages we share are uniquely ours — created only by humans, understood only by humans. Always being finished, but never complete.

There is a deep optimism imbued in this incompleteness. We are not yet done. We may never be.