Nicholas Rescher was preoccupied in the mid 1970's since working on his book "Scientific Progress" with exploring the scope and limits of human knowledge from various points of view. Overall, this project has also resulted in such later books as "Limits of Science", "Epistemic Logic", and "Epistemetrics". Gradually, this preoccupation with various different aspects of the problem has led him to contemplate a systemic integration of his ideas on this important theme. The aim of the present book is to weave these diverse threads into a unified treatment of this overall terrain. Accordingly, the present discussion unites in systemic coordination various perspectives and aspects of our cognitive finitude. The result is a cohesive and perspicuous account of significant aspects of this critical feature of our cognitive condition.

Table of Contents

Finitude and Limitations (on Unrealisable Aspirations); On Cognitive Finitude -- Ignorance and Error; Scepticism and Finitude; Limits of Cognition (A Leibnizian Perspective on the Quantitative Discrepancy Between Linguistic Truth and Objective Fact); Cognitive Progress and Its Complications; Against Scientific Insolubilia; The Problem of Unknowable Facts; Epistemic Insolubilia and Cognitive Finitude; Can Computers Overcome Our Cognitive Finitude?; Conclusion.