Epistemology, teleology and eschatology

My knowledge is incomplete.

The incompleteness of my knowledge extends to my knowledge of its incompleteness: I don’t know what I don’t know. Plato believed this meant it was impossible to find anything out.

But maybe you know what I don’t know I don’t know? We cannot predict what we can learn from each other. We rely on each other to point out what we may have overlooked ourselves.

This means we must measure, derive, discuss, disagree and debate in a collaborative way to learn about the world. Science and progress are fundamentally social rather than solitary activities.

But when we finally reach agreement, how can we be certain that everything we think we agree on about the world isn’t just a coincidence?

How do I know (rather than just believe) that what you think I mean and what I actually mean (or, for that matter, what I think you mean and what you actually mean) aren't two entirely different things which we both just think are the same? The fact that knowledge is necessarily a social artefact makes this question crucial to our epistemology. Even if it wasn't, the interlocution is our individual encounter with the universe itself and the dilemma still exists.

Certainly, circumstances can arise which make it obvious. But, although we can be certain of a misunderstanding once this becomes apparent, we cannot be certain we fully understand each other if it hasn't, not without an infinite amount of time to eliminate every possible cross-purpose. Agreement is a gross and fictitious thing and reality resides in the eternal subtleties of our confusion.

The scientific method is the most efficient way possible to generate circumstances that reveal our misunderstandings, and its power is derived precisely from the way the incompleteness of the task is formalised in its procedures. Science is a contradiction factory. What a scientist calls "certainty" does not have the eternal significance of theology or popular parlance. It has a heavily qualified, tightly technical meaning of the sort journalists rejoice in disregarding.  

Put it another way: there can be no final theory until every other possible theory has been rejected. A falsehood may fail to stand in the full passage of time, but proving something is final, seeing it stand time's toughest test, can only be achieved once time has ended. Until then every object is an illusion and all truth is useless, indistinguishable from lies. We reside in error until the End of Days.

You have heard people say that they “agree to disagree”. We have to acknowledge that the rest of the time we don't agree, we merely “agree to agree,” in precisely the same sense that we "agree to disagree". There are only unknowns and everything else is a story we tell ourselves to help us get on with things until we inevitably cock up.

The choice between whether the universe is meaningless or miraculous is then just point of view. We can take a statement about the universe and flip it between paradox and axiom with successive iterations of self-referentiality. What it all means is a matter of choice. Indeed, this choice is the only aspect of the universe in relation to which we are truly and completely free.