Pure Agnosticism and the Regulation of Certainty: A Philosophical Reconstruction in Motion

WINNER OF THE 2026 S. I. HAYAKAWA BOOK PRIZE, INSTITUTE OF GENERAL SEMANTICS.

Humans form beliefs easily—and a sense of certainty even more easily. This book examines how successful explanations in science, mathematics, philosophy, and religion can harden into claims about reality. Pure Agnosticism proposes a disciplined alternative: pursue knowledge with full rigor and adopt a provisional stance, or “lean,” while resisting the impulse to treat even our best models as final truths. It is an argument for clarity, restraint, and intellectual proportion.

Traditions touching on epistemic restraint have been around for a long time in fragmented or domain-specific ways. What is new here is their unification into a clear, structured system for evaluating inferences across domains—including everyday reasoning. Pure Agnosticism identifies a consistent pattern of escalation. By describing two distinct epistemological tiers, it identifies the error as “tier collapse.” It focuses on the unwarranted escalation from Tier 1 (operational success) to Tier 2 (conclusive ontology).