I Shall Reconsider Human Knowledge By Starting

The Amount Of Knowledge Which We Can Justify From Evidence Directly Available To Us Can Never Be Large. The Overwhelming Proportion Of Our Factual Beliefs Continue Therefore To Be Held At Second Hand Through Trusting Others, And In The Great Majority Of Cases Our Trust Is Placed In The Authority Of Comparatively Few People Of Widely Acknowledged Standing.

I Shall Reconsider Human Knowledge By Starting From The Fact That We Can Know More Than We Can Tell.

The Process Of Philosophic And Scientific Enlightenment Has Shaken The Stability Of Beliefs Held Explicitly As Articles Of Faith.

I Shall Suggest, On The Contrary, That All Communication Relies, To A Noticeable Extent On Evoking Knowledge That We Cannot Tell, And That All Our Knowledge Of Mental Processes, Like Feelings Or Conscious Intellectual Activities, Is Based On A Knowledge Which We Cannot Tell.

We Could Not, For Example, Arrive At A Principle Like That Of Entropy Without Introducing Some Additional Principle, Such As Randomness, To This Topography.