The feeling that systematic knowledge is impossible stems from uncontrollable modern events, not epistemology

Evidence

The disorientation which expresses itself in the feeling that systematic knowledge about social organisation cannot be obtained, I shall argue, results primarily from the sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control. To analyse how this has come to be the case, it is not sufficient merely to invent new terms, like post-modernity and the rest. Instead, we have to look again at the nature of modernity itself which, for certain fairly specific reasons, has been poorly grasped in the social sciences hitherto. Rather than entering a period of post-modernity, we are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalised and universalised than before. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 19

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my framework: this is Giddens’s account of why individuals abandon knowledge-seeking, which parallels Stevens’s deference to the Darlington institution rather than forming his own judgments. — connects to: Modernity institutionalises doubt, making all knowledge claims inherently circular — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 408; Modernity’s core is an irreducible enigma that cannot be overcome — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124; The gravest modern dangers are counterfactually unreal and thus numbing — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 325 (+5 more)

Related

• Modernity’s core is an irreducible enigma that cannot be overcome (similarity 0.87)
• Modernity institutionalises doubt, making all knowledge claims inherently circular (similarity 0.85)
• New social knowledge alters the social world rather than merely describing it (similarity 0.81)
• Under modernity no knowledge is certain, in any science. (similarity 0.81)
• Modernity’s reflexivity subverts reason’s claim to certitude. (similarity 0.80)
• Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling (similarity 0.79)
• Contemporary transformations are modernity’s self-radicalization, not its ending (similarity 0.79)
• Modernity is defined by wholesale reflexivity, not merely love of the new. (similarity 0.79)
• Modern expert systems allow no one to opt out of their influence. (similarity 0.79)
• Knowledge of the social world makes that world inherently unstable (similarity 0.78)