Of Cats and Quanta: Paradoxes of Knowing and Knowability of Reality

Abstract: The legacy of Post-Modernism is renewed attention to the issues of knowledge production. Now that post-modernism is out of fashion, the emphasis is no longer on the "cursed" questions formulated by its adepts. The main issue is no longer whether it is possible to attain knowledge which corresponds to reality. Rather, the new set of questions addresses the issue of how we attain such knowledge. The discourse on knowability has also broadened and now involves a variety of disciplines that span the traditionally separate domains of sciences and humanities. The article focuses on the problem of paradox as it relates to the broader issue of knowledge production and the process of construction in general. It examines paradoxes in contemporary physics as they relate to how knowledge is produced and sees the resolution of the problem of paradox in a better understanding of the construction of knowledge. Viewed from this perspective, paradoxes no longer appear as structural limitations of human capacity to know, but rather they become powerful tools which help to make knowledge production more efficient. Key words: paradox, Schr\"odinger's cat, locality, non-locality, self-organization