Ignorance, Doubt, Uncertainty

I've just finished Richard Feynman's book What do You Care What Other People Think: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. The last chapter is his lecture, "The Value of Science". In it, one of the very important things he says is this:

The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

... What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of experience? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel.

And there is a difference between speculation and uncertainty, and between ignorance and humility. Science knows this. So do all philosophers after Kant, and if not by then, then certainly after Mill (if they bothered to read On Liberty with even one eye open). What drives me up a wall is when people think that uncertainty - the kind of doubt that Feynman talks about - is a bad thing, and a discredit to a good idea.

I do not know anything with certainty, but only because there is no such thing as certainty (though of course, I suppose I can't be certain that's the case). But I do know that suggestions that are worth it - and we can line up a whole slew of criteria for each area of thought - deserve the limelight. We can indeed be more sure of one thing than another.

Talking to a friend recently, she seemed to indict the suggestion that we try on (and I say buy in 10 colors!) gender equality in Judaism, due to the fact that we don't entirely know what the future of Judaism will look like under those conditions. Besides the fact that I do have a fairly good picture of it (since at least in my personal life I already live it), why would such uncertainty be a problem? We never know what the future will look like; everything is an experiment - a theory that we take on until some new data confounds it.

The gender equality thing is a no-brainer, to me at least. But Feynman's point that the embrace of inevitable uncertainty is a social value that we cannot do without is terribly under-appreciated in our culture(s). I don't valorize doubt (I once heard an entire High Holy Days sermon, and have heard of many others, about how doubt is a fantastic thing - to me that's all nonsensical apologetics); but I do embrace its inevitability and the humility that inevitability engenders. And the calm. And the sense of equality among human beings, and religions, and lovers.

I think.