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knowability

knowability

7.7
How much people can understand or find out about something
  • noun
  • /noʊəˈbɪləti/
translation icon : conocibilidad
  • The knowability of a subject is often determined by how much related information is available.

Examples

  • The question about the knowability of the universe raises questions about the very nature of things.

    Academic text (1991)
  • In our profession, this tends to coincide with a renunciation of a search for the truth, and this takes us far beyond the need to reflect on the limits of knowledge, knowability, and history.

    Academic text (1995)
  • Finally, the text of the History itself serves as the best evidence for Philostorgius's belief in the knowability of God's will.

    Academic text (2018)
  • This statement starts out with basic truth and ends with basic optimism, and I think describes the 'knowability' issue as much as it needs to be from within a scientific perspective.

    Blog text (24)
  • Moreover, he may have linked the importance of God's knowability to the writing of history in the first paragraphs of his History.

    Academic text (2018)
  • Schug and Western are correct when they write that the progressive teacher takes his or her cue not from a static set of lessons of knowability but from the students themselves.

    Academic text (2003)
  • Of course, natural science, in its theoretically most ambitious endeavors, like the quest for a Unified Theory in physics, is also dealing with unobservables; here, problems of "knowability" are similar to those facing social scientists.

    Academic text (1990)
  • One, the activist model, uses the unknowability of the remote to imply the knowability of the familiar, or at least its integrity (for one does not have to know oneself in order to deserve to be recognized).

    Academic text (1994)
  • His epistemological quest assumes the stable knowability of his world as he goes in pursuit of traces and fragments that will help him discover the metanarrative that holds the key to significance and meaning for all the clues, characters, and events.

    Academic text (2000)
  • Quite apart from what seems to be the still-open question of whether Hitler was a radical subverter of German national culture or the logical expression of certain strains of German thought, Will's analysis does not seem to take quite seriously enough the limitations of tradition as a source of knowability and consistency in political questions.

    Academic text (1999)

Synonyms

ascertainability
vsknowability
8.9

How easy it is to find out or know something

focuses on being understandable rather than only being found
explainability
vsknowability
4.8

How easy it is for people to understand how something works

is about general possibility of discovery or comprehension
interpretability
vsknowability
  • Specialized
7.3

The quality of being easy to understand or explain

is broader, not limited to technical explanation or fields
understandability
vsknowability
3.4

How easy something is to follow and make sense of

refers to the general ability to be discovered rather than ease
definability
vsknowability
  • Specialized
7.3

A quality that lets something be clearly described or explained

covers being discoverable or understood beyond formal definition
deducibility
vsknowability
  • Specialized
8.2

How well a claim or idea can be proved from facts

is broader, including being found or understood without strict inference
conceivableness
vsknowability
8.9

The ability to be imagined or understood

concerns real discoverability or understanding rather than mere imagination

Antonyms

A quality that makes facts and events impossible to find out or fully understand

How Knowable

clarity
152 3.0
knowability
7.7
vagueness
8 6.1
obscurity
5 7.4

Surface Forms

knowability singular
knowabilities plural

Morphology

knowability = knowable (transparent) = know + able + ity

Formed by adding the noun-forming suffix '-ity' to the familiar adjective 'knowable', yielding the state or quality of being knowable.

Etymology

Knowability comes from know, which means 'to have information', plus the ending -able ('can') and -ity ('state' or 'quality'). You can also see know in knowledge, so knowability is the 'state of being able to be known', or how possible something is to discover or understand.