Ignoramus et ignorabimus
30
Jun
The phrase of the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond in his work meant
that in his Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens meaning that in scientific knowledge there was ignorance and the Latin translation is ignored and we will ignore.
The first big reaction would come from David Hibert in 1930 when he said: “We need to know and we will know”, said at an annual meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Doctors, but at a round table at a Conference on Epistemology, Kurt Gödel provisionally announced his incompleteness theorem, which showed that elementary axiomatic systems are self-contradictory and contain logical propositions that are impossible to prove or disprove.
At a conference of mathematicians in Paris in 1900 he had announced the famous 23 problems that mathematics was supposed to solve, including the famous incompleteness theorem that would prove that a mathematical system is either complete or open.
However, the biggest problem was closing the questions around mathematical theorems and axioms, and the next big debate is the difference between human and social systems on the one hand, and systems of nature, physical or mathematical on the other.
So if we say that 2 plus 2 is four and this is accurate, it means that we are in the field of mathematics, just as geometric figures can be perfect, no “natural” system is exactly perfect, planets are not exactly round, light and waves Electromagnetic waves do not walk in a straight line in the universe and neither is any natural surface perfectly flat.
What we ignore means that our system of interpretation is limited to certain models and metaphors that do not correspond exactly to nature, and on the social level not only is man extremely complex but the nature that is where the set of human relationships takes place is still more complex, since it is the sum of individual complexities.
The epitaph on the grave of David Hilbert is his famous phrase:
“Wir müssen wissen.
Wir werden wissen ”. (photo above)
