Are some things unknowable?

Word count: 828

This was a conversation I had with one of my closest friends. I have known her
since third grade and to this day we still keep in touch. Here, she asked me about my last
year’s grades and I did not know why she wanted to know or compare them, but I still
answered her. I chose this dialogue as my first object because though I have known her
for such a long time that I am able to guess what she wants or will do, it does not mean I
know what she actually or in truth, wants, will do, or even thinks about.

As I stated: “I am able to guess” thanks to me knowing her for a long time. That is
because she is a human being, a person with her own thought process, like I, which
means that the probabilities or chances that I actually know what she is thinking about are
very low. Therefore, her thoughts are unknowable to me, and they will always be
unknowable to anyone for that matter. However, thanks to social clues, facial expressions,
and tone & pitch of voice, I am able to know something closer to the truth. For example,
she might be talking about grades, like our conversation above, wearing a dejected
expression and I might guess that she maybe had a bad grade or school day, but I will not
be able to know what she is thinking about or what actually happened to her.

“The underlying assumption [is that] we can know with a reasonable degree of
accuracy what is going on in another’s mind” (Burton Robert A.), but that knowledge
would still be an uncertainty as we can never know the mind of someone else. This shows
that though my friend’s true thoughts are unknowable to me, I can still reason & try to
form ideas. The idea that I would have concluded at that time would then be considered
knowledge, but the true knowledge is unknowable: for example, I concluded that my
friend wanted to compare our grades since she shared hers too.
 My second object is my Quran: a holy book in Islam. I chose this because for us
Muslims, it is our “travel guide” to Heaven. We believe that by following Allah’s
instructions & guidelines, we will be rewarded with Heaven, and I do believe in this
philosophy. I believe in Allah (our God), angels, and in our Prophets. However, belief
does not necessarily equate to knowledge.

I may believe in a God, but I do not know whether He actually exists because I
have no way to physically see Him or His existence: no technology, science, or some sort
of mechanism on earth can prove the existence of God(s), which means His existence is
unknowable to me.

Knowledge means objective truth while belief means subjective truth. Both
aspects have a certain amount of truth in them, but when it comes to knowing whether
Allah truly exists, we simply do not know but rather believe in His existence. According
to Lewis Vaughn in his book the Living Philosophy, “for one to have knowledge: (1) the
proposition must be believed; (2) the proposition must be true; and (3) the proposition
must be supported by good reasons, which is to say, you must be justified in believing it.”
Though my belief is, to some extent, knowledge as I am a strong believer: the true
knowledge remains unknowable because I have no way to acquire such knowledge.

Therefore, I might believe in what the holy Quran has to say, but whether what is
written or said is actually true or not, is unknowable. My knowledge as a Muslim on
Islam is subjective so the truth is, in fact, unknowable. Hence, my belief becomes
knowledge to a certain extent: past that said-extent is unknowable knowledge.
 My third object is my bluetooth headphones. These recently broke and to this day,
I still do not know why or how. I chose this object because of the fact that I do not know
how it broke because of my ignorance in this field.

When one does not have previous knowledge or experience on some matter, that
matter is unknowable to them because they simply do not know about it. Same thing with
my headphones, I do not know how its mechanism worked so I do not know how it then
failed to work. Even if the knowledge does in fact exist, this matter is unknowable to me
in the present or as long as I do not go out of my way to know & understand how
headphones work.

Therefore, the matter, which is why my headphones broke, is indeed unknowable

in the present but seeing that there are infinite resources to learn from, it will turn
knowledgeable if I decide to acquire it. This shows that the “state” of a knowledge can
depend on its time frame: the knowledge of broken headphones is unknowable now but
possibly not later.
 Works Cited:

Burton, Robert A. “Think You Can Tell What Others Are Thinking? Think Again –
Robert A Burton: Aeon Essays.” Aeon, Aeon, 29 Apr. 2021,
aeon.co/essays/think-you-can-tell-what-others-are-thinking-think-again

Lewis, Vaughn, Living Philosophy. Chapter 4 Summary,

global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780190628703/sr/ch4/summary/