Fool (v.2)

As a person, there is something fundamentally upsetting about discovering that I am wrong.  My confidence in my ability to asses and describe the world is shaken and, what's often more distressing, I am shamed before my fellow persons as a fool.  And yet rationally, I know that I don't know everything; philosophically, I've even determined that the idea of such a feat of knowledge is inherently untenable; that truth is not one final fact or facts, but rather a series of discoveries, points describing a path of increasing knowledge along an ever-widening, circular course broadening out from the known to the better-known.

Still, a teacher shuts down my suggested answer in calculus class, and my face goes red; my carefully thought out structuring of some chunk of (un)reality runs up against an insurmountable contradiction, and depression ensues.

Discovering personal error is not fun; the sensation of cognitive dissonance, recognition of a deeply fundamental error in one's thinking, is downright painful.  And yet such experiences are essential to the discovery of new knowledge, the creation of new wisdom.

It is tempting, in recognizing the ultimate ineffability of pretty much everything, to throw up one's hands in frustration at the uselessness of attempting to draw conclusions.  We must inevitably be wrong, or at least inadequately right, so why bother trying?  Should we not just accept that we can never know, or at least never really know, and thus enjoy the unassailable position of the agnostic with regard to all things?  To be sure, this can be a very comfortable position, much as any renunciation of hope affords certain freedoms; you'd never need worry that you'll be proven wrong, and no new discovery can ever rattle your cage for, lo and behold, you have no cage to rattle!  Free from any and all illusions, yes sir!

For one, this notion of one's position is itself illusory; any sane person stands on certain assumptions about the world (that time is sequential, for example, or that you can't fall through the ground if you forget it's solid) which would shatter that sanity were they disproved.  But even were one to maintain a lifetime of such delusory fence-sitting, it would be a lifetime wasted on comfort.  Before an idea can be criticized and defined as false, likely, partially salvageable, etc., it must be accepted as true, at least provisionally.  To say that an idea is definitely true or false because (insert argument here), while maintaining that future evidence or arguments may very well reverse one's position on said idea, is real skepticism and the path of increased knowledge and wisdom.  To assert that one can never really know, and so should not even try, is an honest apprehension of reality met with laziness and/or cowardice.  It's a sort of cheating, try to be always right by claiming nothing more than one's own ignorance; possibly one of the few positions for which the claim could be accurate.