On January 3rd, 2025, I opened a new file in my writing app and wrote a single line, a question in Portuguese: Se as certezas são absolutas por que razões as dúvidas não são relativas?

If certainties are absolute, why aren’t doubts relative?

A year and two weeks later, I’m finally writing what comes after. The question needed time to “marinate” — or perhaps I needed time to stop expecting an answer. Some questions work better as companions than as problems to solve.

We say “absolute certainty” without flinching at the redundancy. All certainty aspires to be absolute — that’s what makes it certainty. The moment it admits degrees, it becomes something else: suspicion, hypothesis, educated guess. Certainty wants to stand alone, untethered and unbothered.

But we never say “relative doubt.” We say “I have doubts” as if doubt were also a binary state — either present or absent, on or off. Language betrays our assumptions: we’ve absolutised both poles and evacuated the territory between them.

We allow certainty its gradations. “Fairly certain.” “Reasonably confident.” “Almost sure.” We’ve built an entire vocabulary for approaching certainty without quite arriving. But doubt gets no such courtesy. You either doubt or you don’t. The moment you say “I somewhat doubt,” you’ve already conceded too much — you’ve revealed yourself as someone who might be persuaded, which is to say, someone who isn’t fully committed to either camp.

This asymmetry serves a purpose. In a culture that rewards conviction, doubt must be absolute to be taken seriously at all. A relative doubt is just weakness dressed in philosophical clothing. So we armour our uncertainties in the language of certainty: “I’m absolutely unsure.” “I definitely don’t know.” We make our doubts as rigid as the convictions they’re meant to question.

We go in an ironic full circle: in refusing to relativise doubt, we’ve made it another form of certainty — the certainty that we cannot know. Which is no doubt at all.