The end of inquiry? How to overcome human cognitive limitations

What, if any, are the limits of human understanding? Epistemic pessimists, sobered by our humble evolutionary origins, have argued that some truths about the universe are perennial mysteries and will forever remain beyond our ken. Others have brushed this off as premature, a form of epistemic defeatism. In this paper we develop a conceptual toolbox for parsing different forms of cognitive limitation that are often conflated in the literature. We distinguish between representational access (the ability to develop accurate scientific representations of reality) and intuitive understanding (the ability to comprehend those representations). We also distinguish different modalities of cognitive limitation. If the scientific endeavor ever comes to a halt, will this feel like slamming into a brick wall, or rather like slowly getting bogged down in a swamp? By distinguishing different types and modalities of human cognitive limitation, we soften up the hypothesis of ‘cognitive closure’ and ultimate ‘mysteries.’ Next, we look at specific mechanisms and strategies for overcoming our innate cognitive limitations. For a start, we are not restricted by the limits of a single, bare, unassisted brain. One of the central features of human intelligence is the capacity for mind extension and distributed cognition. This enables us to radically extend our representational access, as witnessed by the history of science. Less obviously, scientists can extend their intuitive understanding as well. They do so by deploying different cognitive mechanisms which, importantly, are combinatorial and open-ended. In light of all these possibilities for extending the limits of understanding, we conclude that there is no good reason to suspect the existence of an outer wall of human comprehension, as several prominent epistemic pessimists have suggested