How do we know what we "know"? How did we –as individuals and as a society – come to accept certain knowledge as fact? In Human Knowledge, Bertrand Russell questions the reliability of our assumptions on knowledge. This brilliant and controversial work investigates the relationship between ‘individual’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge. First published in 1948, this provocative work contributed significantly to an explosive intellectual discourse that continues to this day.

Russell's classic examination of the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a rigorous examination of the problems of an empiricist epistemology.

Russell's classic examination of the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a rigorous examination of the problems of an empiricist epistemology.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psycholo gy through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial in telligence and to computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these prob lems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. The perspective that prevails in artificial intelligence today suggests that the theory of computability defines the boundaries of the nature of thought, precisely because all thinking is computational. This paradigm draws its inspiration from the symbol-system hypothesis of Newell and Simon and finds its culmination in the computational conception of lan guage and mentality. The "standard conception" represented by these views is subjected to a thorough and sustained critique in the pages of this book. Employing a distinction between systems for which signs are signif icant for the users of a system and others for which signs are significant for use by a system, I have sought to define the boundaries of what AI, in principle, may be expected to achieve.

Why discovering the limits to science may be the most powerful discovery of allHow much can we know about the world? In this book, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, like religion, is fundamentally limited as a tool for understanding the world. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we face the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know. Gleiser shows that by aband.