1. Introduction

Facing Uncertainty

Leaving childhood means losing a world that carried us, and entering one that requires orientation.

As children, much of life simply happens to us. As adults, we are expected to decide and act. We are asked to take responsibility for outcomes we cannot fully foresee, and to justify commitments we did not freely choose in the first place.

Are our actions determined, or do we genuinely decide? Do our choices matter, or are they just motions in a larger mechanism?

Whatever the answer, we still have to act.

We plan, we judge, we promise, we accuse, we excuse. We assign praise and blame. We enter contracts, pursue projects, and hold one another responsible. All of this presupposes that thinking can guide action in some meaningful way.

Yet certainty is rare, if it exists at all.

Some claims are easier to assess than others. Statements about the near future can be checked when the result arrives. Claims about the past rely on evidence and testimony. Harder still are counterfactuals: what would have happened if things had gone differently. Counterfactuals never occur. And yet they are indispensable. Without them, planning collapses, forensic reasoning breaks down, and responsibility becomes unintelligible.

So what, exactly, can our thinking accomplish?

Often our actions do bring about the goals we set. Not always, but often enough that total skepticism rings false. And yet we regularly find ourselves unable to decisively justify why one course of action was right and another wrong, why one belief was warranted and another merely convenient.

This uncertainty does not stay in the study. It reaches into courts and contracts, into politics and ethics, into how we understand ourselves as agents over time.

The problem is not that the question of truth has been settled and forgotten. It is the opposite. There is a long history of attempts to fix truth once and for all, and a long history of those attempts failing. Skepticism has never quite won. Neither has certainty.

Instead, we oscillate. At times convinced, at times doubtful. When pressed for reasons, we often discover that what we took for grounding was little more than habit, inheritance, or momentum.

We live with commitments we cannot fully justify, and doubts we cannot fully sustain.

Is truth still worth caring about? If not, what could take its place? And if it is, what kind of truth could survive the conditions we actually live under?

If neither certainty nor skepticism can be sustained, something else has to carry the weight. Not a final answer, but a way of standing in the world that allows thinking and acting to continue without pretending that the great questions have been settled.

What matters then may not be fixing truth once and for all, but cultivating the ability to orient ourselves under uncertainty. To reason as well as we can, to test our convictions in practice, and to revise them when they fail.