"A hundred years ago, it seemed we could measure nature more and more precisely, and that there were no limits on our knowledge," says physicist Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, USA. But the last century brought the first hints of fundamental, inherent limits on the knowable.
Kurt Godel discovered that some statements in mathematics can be neither proved nor disproved. And physicists showed that the laws of quantum mechanics prevent us from knowing simultaneously both the position and the momemtum of a subatomic particle.
'We grow up thinking more is known than actually is,' says Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In genetics, for instance, it's becoming clear that knowing the entire genome of an organism will still not tell you all of the creature's physical traits. Knowing someone's future health, let alone personality or intelligence, based on a genetic readout may be impossible.
In more down-to-earth fields, scholars suspect that where and when an earthquake will strike is knowable even though it's currently unknown. Whereas, the future of markets may be unknowable because the future depends upon what's in other people's minds.
The assumptions/beliefs that are in each of our minds are:
-Something whose truth status is uncertain; may or may not be true
-Shapes the world in which we live
-Drives our default behavior
-Creates certainty--we know how the world works
-Difficult to separate ourselves from our perspective (we are inclined to feel that the assumption/belief is 'the world' rather than "our way of looking at the world")
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Sources: The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2003 and "How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work:Seven Languages for Transformation" by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Jossey-Bass)