The Sin of Certainty

Bertrand Russell, if had done none of what he did except for saying the following, should still have been regarded as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. ”

This simple sentence is a great source of annoyance for a large number of sinners who are condemned in it. In this document, the author attempts to give a simple and concise explanation of how one can not be 100% certain about anything.

Many would also find the word sin quite incorrect, but they must be asked what could be an act called, if the person doing that particular act is told repeatedly, through rational arguments that his act is not correct, but he persists?

Karl Popper is quite famous for his critique on the myths of Scientific methods. He argued that Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single genuine counter-instance is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. For example, if all the crows we have seen so far are all black, doesn't confirm the universal statement that "All crows are black"; but if only one non-black crow is found, the statement is confirmed to be false.

To put this in the language of Propositional Calculus, this would be written as:

C₁ ∩ C₂ ∩ C₃ ∩ ... C_N ⊃ C

where C_i represents the proposition "Crow i is black", C represents the proposition "All crows are black" and N is the number of all Crows that exist.

For C to be true, all proposition from C₁ to C_N MUST be true.