Not Using "Agnostic" Anymore

[Angrboda]

Agnosticism sounds like a tautology to me, as if you could be sure about anything...

I'm not well read on epistemology, despite having a fondness for the subject, thus I can't produce sound reasoning for my view, but regardless. The nature of the scientific worldview, to my mind replaces questions of certainty versus uncertainty with questions of relative probability (and likely probability thresholds, as well as framing knowledge in disjunctive terms, in line with falsifiability and incompleteness). My hunch is, that once you realign along such axes, the nature and definition of what constitutes "knowledge" realign as well, thus permitting us to speak of the high probability of a proposition being true being justification for us saying that we "know" the proposition to be true. I think ultimately, the idea that we can ever "know" something in modus tollens form is a futile hope, as ultimately everything rests on unprovable assumptions, thus depriving any chain of ultimate justification. I think we need to replace the ideas of "knowledge" as in some sense being related to complete certainty with something else, or the words are going to stop being meaningful and useful. (And I haven't touched on the topics of "justified true belief," Gettier problems, foundationalism, the problems of vagueness wrt probability classes and so on. That will be in my next book. )