Here, as usually in philosophy, the first difficulty is to see that the problem is difficult. If you say to a person untrained in philosophy, "How do you know I have two eyes?" he or she will reply, "What a silly question! I can see you have." It is not to be supposed that, when our inquiry is finished, we shall have arrived at anything radically different from this unphilosophical position. What will have happened will be that we shall have come to see a complicated structure where we thought everything was simple, that we shall have become aware of the penumbra of uncertainty surrounding the situations which inspire no doubt, that we shall find doubt more frequently justified than we supposed, and that even the most plausible premisses will have shown themselves capable of yielding unplausible conclusions. The net result is to substitute articulate hesitation for inarticulate certainty.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Here, as usually in philosophy, the first difficulty is to see that the problem is difficult. If you say to a person untrained in philosophy, "How do you know I have two eyes?" he or she will reply, "What a silly question! I can see you have." It is not to be supposed that, when our inquiry is finished, we shall have arrived at anything radically different from this unphilosophical position. What will have happened will be that we shall have come to see a complicated structure where we thought everything was simple, that we shall have become aware of the penumbra of uncertainty surrounding the situations which inspire no doubt, that we shall find doubt more frequently justified than we supposed, and that even the most plausible premisses will have shown themselves capable of yielding unplausible conclusions. The net result is to substitute articulate hesitation for inarticulate certainty." in the context of "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 11
• quoted in "The Socratic Method: What it is and How to Use it in the Classroom", Speaking of Teaching - Stanford University Newsletter on Teaching, vol. 13 no. 1, fall 2003, page 2" to mean that wisdom is timeless.