Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 19
Knowledge is neither complete nor uniformly incomplete. Human understanding is distributed unevenly across different domains of reality. Some phenomena are understood with considerable precision and reliability, whereas others remain only partially understood or are presently beyond our investigative reach.
This unevenness reflects the fact that the obstacles to knowledge are themselves unevenly distributed. The various sources of epistemic incompleteness—whether arising from the complexity of reality, its continual transformation, observer effects, or the theory-ladenness of observation—do not operate with equal strength in every domain. Consequently, different sciences confront different epistemological challenges and attain different degrees of explanatory power and predictive success.
Scientific and philosophical progress should therefore not be conceived as crossing a single boundary between ignorance and knowledge. Rather, it consists in continually expanding, refining, and correcting an uneven map of reality. Some regions of that map become increasingly detailed and reliable, while others remain provisional or largely unexplored.
Recognizing this epistemic heterogeneity encourages a more nuanced understanding of knowledge. It avoids both naïve optimism, which assumes that all questions are equally answerable, and radical scepticism, which treats all claims as equally uncertain. Human knowledge is best understood not as uniformly complete or uniformly incomplete, but as differentially distributed across the diverse domains of reality.
The world itself does not possess islands of certainty separated by oceans of ignorance. Rather, it is our knowledge that is unevenly distributed. Epistemic boundaries belong to the map, not to the territory.
Hossein Jorjani 