Jorge asked:

Do the answers to questions about things that have no way to be proved actually exist? If so, can we
say that it is a lost truth?

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Your question relates to the clash between realismand anti-realismwhich has appeared in these
pages on previous occasions. (There are too many references to list here: check the indexes to the
previous 'Answers' pages.) However, your way of formulating the question raises issues that have not
been discussed before.

I first came across the idea of 'loss' and 'insides' as philosophical concepts or categories in a book by
Douglas Browning Act and Agent(University of Miami Press 1964):

The universe is opaque in the respect that it allows objects to close themselves off from others by
hiding insides. In fact all objects in the world necessarily have insides. However, the tendency to
objecthood admits of degrees. Some objects close half-heartedly, some thoroughly. The point is that
closure is natural. The process of the universe tends to knot into objects which are facts of turning
away from the world as well as turning a face to the world...

The fact of loss presents a similar picture. What is lost is always a particular, a particular situation or a
particular person. Universals are never lost...The universe has a way of closing itself off from others,
and time is one of its most marvelous mechanisms of opacity (p. 113).

(At the end of his concluding 'Acknowledgements', p. 131, Douglas Browning mentions the work of
Paul Weiss, who also discusses the question of insides.)

One example of 'insides' would be the way things are subjectively for me, or for you. I have come
round to the idea that there is a category of knowledge, which I call 'subjective knowledge' which is
not knowledge of facts, and therefore not capable, even in principle of being communicated, or
uncovered from the outside (Truth and Subjective Knowledge). The inner state of an organism, for
that organism, is one factor in the attunement between that organism and its surroundings which
cannot be extracted by any external inquiry, however searching that inquiry might be.

Browning would argue that within this realm of objective inaccessibility, there remains a further
distinction of level between the insides of a mere organism that behavesand an agent who acts.I am
not sure of this, however. I am more inclined to say that an agent, in giving reasons for his/ her
actions, is able to make his/ her subjective states accessible to others in a way that brute animals are
not able to do. The behaviour of animals is an indecipherable enigma. However, once we are in realm
of language and reason, we are no longer talking about that inaccessible core of the subject's
experiences which I have called subjective knowledge.

Now, the really startling fact is that you can be an anti-realist — in other words, you can hold the view
that it makes no sense to talk of an unprovable or 'undecidable' question's havingan answer in reality
— while fully accepting that the world is so constituted as to allow entities to have 'insides' or to allow
possibilities of knowledge to be lost with the passage of time. The phenomena of loss and insides are
natural facts about the universe, and the anti-realist does not make any claim that can be tested by
appeal to natural facts. According to the anti-realist, whenever we are faced with a question which
cannot be answered, all one can say is that there aresuch-and-such possibilities. Any attempt to
convey the idea that the real answeror the actual possibilitywhich we can never know is 'out there',
is to utter sounds without meaning.

I would like to see a refutation of that shocking claim, but I have not yet come across one.

Geoffrey Klempner