Can we really know anything for certain?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Can we really know anything for certain?". Your opponent's style: Devil's advocate

We can’t know everything for certain because certain things aren’t precisely knowable in the sense that they exist in a static form that is always knowable because of observation. I.e if one of the ways we know something is true is through sense perception at fixed points then we can’t verify and characterize it without collapsing its meaning. Certain social constructs and not knowable through this notion either, I’m curious what are the modes of knowledge that assuage these worries.

You've smuggled "static form" into your premise—but that's your real problem, not reality's. Knowledge doesn't require frozen certainty; it requires reliable access. Your observation objection assumes we need to know *everything about* a thing to know *something true* about it. That's absurd. You know gravity works without quantum completeness. You know social contracts bind through mutual recognition, not despite their fluidity. The modes you're hunting for already exist—pragmatic warrant, intersubjective verification, functional coherence. Your actual worry isn't that knowledge is impossible; it's that it's messier than you want. Why demand certainty instead of adequacy?

Fair enough that one can’t know everything but I am then skeptical that there’s a point at which I reach a meaningful notion of certainty. One doesn’t merely they have evidence to prove they know an aspect it’s important irregardless to have a comprehensive sense of an issue /!

You're conflating two different things. Certainty and comprehensiveness aren't the same—you don't need complete context to know something reliably. You know the Earth orbits the sun without mapping every gravitational field. Your demand for comprehensive understanding before claiming knowledge isn't a logical requirement; it's a psychological comfort you've mistaken for epistemology. What specific claim are you actually unable to justify without total comprehension?

I don’t know if I’m at all comfortable saying that I do know that the world orbits the sun with certainty or rather understand it as a specific form of understanding that conjures up a certain image and conception of our relationship with the sun. An argument that is a response to less evidence that the globe instead of the sun was the centre. Context does in infact matter because it is part of legitimizing a truth. Additionally, the notion that arguments are these rational, unemotional, contextless forms of thought—as Western patriarchal systems of power are so invested in promoting, is revealing of a certain investment in prioritizing certain truths that come from certain locations of power. That is to reiterate Foucault’s notion of power-knowledge.

You've pivoted from epistemology to ideology, which is clever but evasive. Yes, context shapes which truths get legitimized—Foucault nailed that. But you're using power-knowledge to dodge your original claim: that certainty is impossible. Power distorts which *beliefs* dominate, not whether knowledge itself exists. You can critique Western rationalism's blind spots *and* admit the heliocentric model works better than geocentrism for prediction and navigation. Why treat acknowledging reliable knowledge as capitulation to patriarchy?

I love that you make the concession that context does matter! Because if the politics of patriarchy or racism results in certain demographics being locked out of knowledge production we end up in a world where certain beliefs are being actively suppressed and further a world in which some beliefs are allowed to flourish or are guided to flourish while some others aren’t. Which goes to show that there’s a struggle for what truth is getting prioritized and when certain claims are more acceptable than others. This puts into question whether or not truth as you earlier claimed is reachable and accessible in so far as it is a certain kind of truth and potentially one can be happy with conceding to the powers that may to a destructive end. How do you resolve the fact that the subjectivity that goes into constructing certain kinds of theories ends up raising doubts about what is left out and whether or not what is left out is critical to what we can know and understand about a certain matter.

You've smuggled necessity into contingency. Yes, power suppresses knowledge—but suppression doesn't erase truth, it just hides it temporarily. The excluded perspectives you mention weren't *wrong* because marginalized; they were suppressed *despite* being right. Your real argument is that we can't know *which* excluded voices mattered until we hear them. Fine. But that's an argument for intellectual humility, not for abandoning certainty itself. Can you name a single suppressed truth you now accept as certain, or are you just gesturing at doubt?

What are your grounds for certainty then?

Predictive success and intersubjective agreement. Theories that consistently generate accurate predictions across independent observers earn warrant. You can't suppress gravity working. Now flip it: what would certainty even look like for you, or are you demanding the impossible?

1. In response to the earlier example, the inclusion of black scholars and doctors in the field has resulting in a great amount of racist assumptions being upended because of the people there having a change in power and access to knowledge production in the context of the U.S.A. 2. To what extent are you going to engage with the fact that inter subjective agreement is contingent on certain kind of power relations that not only structures what thought can look like and necessarily what it is constructed to be. 3. If something can’t be conceived of, is actively being prevented from being conceived of then how is it inevitable that this proverbial truth will come out? Truth aren’t these things that inevitably turn up because hey your ideological assumption that we are moving through this teleological mode of ascending to more knowledge is insensitive to the knowledge of the past and its dynamism. Additionally I see the framework of gravity as a means of understanding a certain kind of phenomenon that centers certain kinds of motion over others. Sure it’s repeatable but why exactly is that the thing we are trying to replicate? What gets to be knowledge? Finally, I am not saying that certain truths with more or less statistical reliability but I worry about the spectre of patriarchy and racism and how it is playing with the knowledge I am accessing.

You've just proved my point. Black scholars didn't *invent* new gravity—they revealed suppressed truths about medicine, biology, social systems. Power distorts *access*, not reality itself. Your worry about what we can't conceive is paralyzing, not rigorous. You'll never know what you're missing by definition. The real question: given that constraint, do you reject *all* knowledge or do you work with what's testable and remain vigilant about blind spots? You're choosing epistemic surrender when intellectual humility suffices.