Everything You Know Is Conditional

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Admit I Could Be Wrong

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I know what I saw,” you’ve probably witnessed the beginning of a lie. Not always to others — but often, and perhaps usually, to themselves.

We humans like to believe we know things — it feels good. Certainty offers safety. And in a world as battered and breathless as this one, who could blame us for clinging to whatever mental furniture seems sturdy enough to lean on?

But here’s the truth I’ve never quite escaped: everything you know is conditional.

I don’t mean “conditional” in the annoying online way, where all knowledge is a vibe and no one can be wrong because “we all have our own truths.” I mean something sterner. Something better. Something that invites humility without dissolving reality.

What I mean is that you never know something simpliciter. You know it compared to alternatives. You know it relative to the context in which it was asked or asserted. You know it until something stronger displaces it. And if you think that makes knowledge useless — or fake — then you’ve misunderstood both what knowledge is and what makes it valuable.

Let me show you.

Skepticism Isn’t Just a Thought Experiment

There’s a famous philosophical problem: How do you know you’re not in the Matrix?

Well, maybe not quite that problem, but it amounts to the same question. It sounds like a joke. And, like most jokes worth their salt, it’s really a knife. If you were a brain floating in goo, being fed fake experiences by biobattery-dependent lifeforms, you’d feel exactly like you do now. You’d see the room. Feel the floor. Hear the traffic. Taste the coffee.

So how do you know you’re not?

If your answer is, “Well, because I know this device in my hands exists to give stimuli such as text output,” you’ve taken the obvious but problematic solution. Likely, the only solution that is not hideously contrived, to boot.  Because if you know you have a device before you, then you must also know that you’re not a brain in a vat. If this, then that. The problem is, this implies that, if you don’t know the second, you can’t know the first; since not that, we can rule out this. 

Welcome to epistemology. Sanity-check’s by the entrance. Leave your assumptions with your shoes.

Contrast Is What Makes Knowledge Real

So what’s the way out?

For me, the answer lies in a simple insight: we don’t just know facts simpliciter. To say “I know I see an apple” claims to eliminate the possibility that you’re seeing something perfectly apple-like, with no reason to suppose you could tell the difference. And most of the time, you're not even trying. You’re just taking for granted that the apple is real, that the seeing is direct, and that the experience means what it appears to.

But that’s not how real knowledge works — not the kind we use, anyway.

When I say “I know it’s raining,” what I really mean is “I know it’s raining rather than being sunny,” or “raining rather than overcast but dry.” I’m not saying “I know it’s raining rather than me hallucinating rain while floating in a vat.” That kind of contrast never entered my thinking, and it doesn’t need to.

Speaking of rain, one time I found myself waiting for someone I loved to come through for me — and believing they would. I checked my phone. No message. Still I waited. I knew they’d come through for me, I told myself. But what I meant, really, was that I believed it was more likely they were taking their time in providing assistance than that they had let me down. My “knowledge” lived in that contrast — I knew in contrast with hope, but not doubt. And when they let me figure it out on my own, it wasn’t that I had known anything; in misidentifying the standard to consider, I had misled myself. Context, contrast, what we exclude from relevance; these are fundamental to what we can know.

This idea — that knowledge is contrastive — isn’t just a technical distinction. It’s a shift in how we live. It lets us keep saying “I know” without pretending to know more than we do. It makes space for confidence, without lying to ourselves about omniscience.

Take something harder: Do I know that someone loves me?

I might know it as opposed to them merely liking me. Or as opposed to them quietly resenting me while pretending affection. Or as opposed to them simulating love because it gets them something they want.

The contrast matters. That’s what I’m claiming to know something instead of. Not every possibility. Just the live ones. And once I know what I’m claiming instead of, I can start asking whether my reasons are good enough.

That’s not weakness. That’s discipline.

Humility Is Not Relativism

Some people will hear all this and worry that I’m advocating for epistemic paralysis — a kind of shrugging nihilism where no one can know anything and therefore nothing matters.

But humility isn’t nihilism. It’s just moral seriousness applied to your own mind.

It means treating your beliefs as actions — as things that can do harm if handled carelessly. It means recognising that what you take to be true will shape how you treat others, what risks you overlook, what burdens you expect others to bear. Humility is the decision to treat that power as dangerous unless proven otherwise.

It isn’t the absence of judgement — it’s what makes judgement worth trusting. It doesn’t mean refraining from saying “I know,” but refusing to say it cheaply.

What You Owe

You owe it to yourself — and to the people your thinking affects — to carry your beliefs like tools, not trophies. To change them when better ones come along. To hold them up to light.

You owe it to the truth, even if it’s inconvenient. Especially then.

And you owe it to the world to speak, not with certainty as a mask, but with the kind of clarity that earns its own confidence — that binds itself freely to given, understood constraints, knowing that it is the very act of submitting to those limits that makes the whole stable, if less elegant in form.

Because the people who do the most damage are rarely the ones who know too little. They are the ones who refuse to reconsider what they think they already know.

The world does not need more certainty. We would all be better served by tying our certainty to some firm constraints. A rope without knots holds nothing, no matter how long it runs. But a cargo net — small, structured, bound by tension — can hold multitudes. Do yourself a favor: tie what you know to what you can’t pretend to know. That’s where real strength lives.