Isaiah Berlin would recognise the expert who “knows”:
“Happy are those … who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.”
As would Jose Saramago:
“assuming he has been wise and prudent enough not to believe blindly in what he thinks he knows, because this rather than ignorance is the cause of the greatest blunders”.
The pursuit of certainty–the desire for certainty–what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls “the reduction of truth to certainty” affects the way we use words and language.
Through powerful normative stories of success and achievement, many of our patients are consigned to life stories of failure and unhappiness. But these are rigorously censored stories, surrounded by what Gadamer has described as “the infinity of the unsaid”, which is also represented by the millions of stars left out in the naming of the constellations:
“Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.”
Iona Heath, http://mh.bmj.com/content/27/2/64.full?eaf