Daniel Dennett Quotes

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

The scientist knows that the ultimate of everything is unknowable. No matter What subject you take, the current theory of it if carried to the ultimate becomes ridiculous. Time and space are excellent examples of this.

If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

As a number of people have stressed over the years, I think it would be premature to assume science itself will explain everything.

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what do we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built--time and space, life and death, matter and mind?

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.

Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.