And my claim to have two legs? How "tentative" is that?
Not very. But there is a small possibility that your legs are a hallucination, that you are really a disembodied brain hooked into the Matrix.
Tentativity looks like an asymptote; you can never actually be completely 100% certain that even what you directly observe is true. New evidence could always trump even the most solid theory.
Of course, at a certain point certitude is so
close to 100% that you may as well consider it to be completely verified for all
practicalconcerns. That's why we tend not to get caught up wondering whether we're figments of someone else's imagination, or simulations of the Matrix, or whatever.
That's why "proofs" exist only in mathematics, not science.
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