What if everything we know is fundamentally uncertain?

I used to think finding truth was simple: do research, make observations, think carefully, and the truth would be revealed. After all, that's how it worked in school.

But in the real world, knowing the truth is more complicated. There's missing information, people lie, and we get ourselves confused.

More than that, there are fundamental epistemological challenges to justifying what we think we know, like epistemic circularity, the Problem of the Criterion, the Löbian Obstacle, and more. Each of these is a major philosophical problem that, on the surface, seems unsolvable. Stare at them long enough, and it starts to feel like we're deceiving ourselves when we claim to know what's true.

But we're not. It's just that truth, like a great many things, is uncertain. And not just in that we might be uncertain about what's true, but that the very notion of truth is, itself, fundamentally uncertain.

Truth's fundamental uncertainty is more than a mere philosophical puzzle. It's the shadow that lurks behind every question we ask. Even seemingly simple questions like "what does this word mean?" and "what's the right thing to do?" are complicated by uncertainty. And for our most difficult questions, fundamental uncertainty is often why we cannot, despite our best efforts, find satisfying answers.

Thankfully, we can learn to work with, rather than against, truth's uncertainty. It's not easy, but by understanding the limits on our ability to know, we can finally begin to make real progress towards solving the world's most pressing problems.