“The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.”

—  Karl Popper

Variant translation: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear, and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)
Context: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance — the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be ou…" by Karl Popper?
Karl Popper photo
Karl Popper 82
Austrian-British philosopher of science 1902–1994

Related quotes

Dan Brown photo

“Knowledge grows exponentially. The more we know, the greater our ability to learn, and the faster we expand our knowledge base.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Niklas Luhmann photo

“Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Source: The reality of the Mass Media (2000), p. 1.

Agatha Christie photo

“Our weapon is our knowledge. But remember, it may be a knowledge we may not know that we possess.”

Agatha Christie book The A.B.C. Murders

Source: The A.B.C. Murders

John Archibald Wheeler photo

“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

Scientific American (1992), Vol. 267.

Dora Russell photo

“We do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction. We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance. Only by learning to love one another can our world be saved. Only love can conquer all.”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Challenge to the Cold War (1985) Vol. 3, Ch. 14

Francisco Varela photo

“[M]any people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Source: The Embodied Mind (1991), p. 142

Amitabh Bachchan photo

“We should learn from the mistakes and experiences of others, particularly from those less knowledgable than we are. If our experiences are not grounded in reality, our decisions can never be correct.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Source: Soul Curry for You and Me: An Empowering Philosophy that Can Enrich Your Life, P. 27.

Huston Smith photo

“In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

Part of this quote may actually be by Ralph Washington Sockman.
The World's Religions (1991)
Source: Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
Context: In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

Thich Nhat Hanh photo

“We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

Herbert A. Simon photo

“We will likely also find that the nature of the problem to be solved will be a principal determinant of the mix. With our growing understanding of the organization of judgmental and intuitive processes, of the specific knowledge that of the specific knowledge that is required to perform particular judgmental tasks, and of the cues that evoke such knowledge in situations in which it is relevant, we have a powerful new tool for improving expert judgment. We can specify the knowledge and the recognition capabilities that experts in a domain need to acquire, and use these specifications for designing appropriate learning procedures.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 137.

Related topics