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 ====== Vico on Probable Knowledge ======
+{{ :vico:vico_01.jpg?300|Giambattista Vico - Lucian of Samosata Wiki}}
 About a week or so ago, Rod Dreher, writing at his blog at the American Conservative website, recorded some of his observations from a lecture presented in New York by Philip Blond.  Dreher called particular attention to an insightful comment offered by one of the audience members following the lecture, to the effect that a civil community requires the possibility of citizens “asserting things they can’t prove.”  Reading this, I was reminded of a short work by Giambattista Vico, called On the Study Methods of Our Time, in which Vico argues for the inescapably probable nature of our knowledge concerning human affairs, and the importance of educating youth in a way that prepares them to accept verisimilitude as a proper standard for political and ethical debate.  It is a work that is highly relevant to our own intellectual predicament, not least because it effectively explains why we now find it impossible to assert things which we cannot prove, and why, as a result, our public arguments continue to be so sterile and discordant.