The semantics of “(un)certainty” within the horizon of logic and faith

The chapter explores the complexity of “(un)certainty” across three dimensions: semantic, logical, and religious. Using Arthur Hughes’s painting Uncertainty (1878) as a visual metaphor, the author examines five forms of uncertainty: ontological, epistemic, axiological, volitional, and existential. The analysis shows how formal systems of logic — including Łukasiewicz’s many-valued logic, Hintikka’s epistemic logic, and Zadeh’s fuzzy logic — represent intermediate states between truth and falsity. In the religious dimension, drawing on the thought of Kierkegaard, Aquinas, and Scheler, the author argues that uncertainty is not a deficiency of knowledge or faith but their natural and productive condition. Faith thus emerges as “certainty within uncertainty”: a space in which reason encounters trust and logic is intertwined with love.