As science, philosophy, and politics collide, the idea that we can truly know the world is under mounting pressure. From radical pragmatism to object-oriented ontology, leading thinkers now question whether truth is something we discover, construct, or abandon altogether. Anticipating the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn festival on 25th May and the questions permeating so many of the upcoming debates, IAI Contributing Editor Omari Edwards argues that what is at stake is not just knowledge, but whether inquiry itself can survive without it.

Imagine you are standing at the shoreline of a vast ocean. You can see as far as the horizon, but you know that the horizon is not the edge of the world. It is merely the edge of what your height allows you to see. Is the ocean beyond the horizon real? Of course, but what else lies hidden beyond that edge?

So much of our world relies upon our ability to overcome uncertainty, and yet the more we learn, the greater the ocean of knowledge beyond the horizon. This expanse reaches into the foundations of science, politics, and the quiet assumptions we make every time we say the words “I know.”

For centuries, the Western intellectual tradition operated on a kind of promissory note. Enlightenment figures insisted that reason was the master key. Given enough time, better methods, more rigor, every mystery would yield. The limits of knowledge were merely temporary, edges of a map waiting to be filled in. The universe was, in principle, legible.

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The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps.

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That confidence has taken a battering. Heisenberg showed that at the quantum level, the act of observation disturbs the thing observed. Hawking spent decades confronting the limits of what any theory of everything could actually tell us. And in the humanities, a quieter but no less devastating critique was building. Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Kuhn argued that science doesn't accumulate truth so much as periodically overturn its own frameworks. Feyerabend went further still, insisting that methodology itself is a kind of mythology. Across every domain, progress is being made, but like Zeno’s paradox of the man crossing a room, to reach the truth, each step reveals that there are many more steps between us and that final account.

Before turning to the figures who will try to resolve some of these questions in Hay, we should look back to Richard Rorty, one of the last century’s principal theorists of this question of the limits of our knowledge.” In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that knowledge is not a matter of mirroring an objective reality, but rather “a matter of conversation and of social practice.” Building not only on the American pragmatists and critically minded analytics but a wider mood in philosophy outside the Anglosphere, Rorty argued that the mind is not a faithful reflector of a world “out there.” Instead, it is a tool for coping, a generator of useful fictions. “Truth,” he wrote with characteristic provocation, “is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” And if that weren’t enough: “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”