Relation to truth· Belief and knowledgenamed middle
Fallibilism
Axis: Relation to certainty — Can we reach definitive certainties?
We can hold firm, well-justified beliefs while knowing they might be wrong. Between a certainty that forbids all doubt and a skepticism that doubts everything, fallibilism embraces knowledge that is always open to revision: we proceed on our best reasons, ready to correct ourselves.
Movements 1
The Enlightenmentexplicit
The inaugural gesture is critical: against the of school metaphysics and revealed truths, the task is to measure reason against its own limits. But this distrust is not the destructive of : tempers his doubt into a mitigated, workable scepticism, and turns it into a critique that bounds knowledge the better to ground it. Certainty now aims at what withstands examination, not at what imposes itself by authority, a stance.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (preface) · Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. XII
Philosophers 1
Charles Sanders Peirceexplicit
Against the Cartesian craving for indubitable foundations, Peirce erects fallibility into a principle: we can never reach absolute certainty nor perfect exactitude about anything. Yet far from sliding into , he draws from it the strength of science, which advances only by knowing itself correctable: a belief is worth holding not because it is safe from doubt, but because it belongs to a process able to detect and repair its own errors. is not a concession wrung from the skeptic, it is the very engine of inquiry, which would be missing in anyone who believed himself already arrived. Hence an assumed middle position, leaning slightly toward the skeptical avowal of uncertainty, yet without renouncing knowledge.
Collected Papers, I, 8-14 (Fallibilism) · The Fixation of Belief (1877)
Argument
- Look at how science proceeds, our most reliable form of knowledge: it lays down no untouchable dogmas, it puts forward theories and exposes them tirelessly to the test of the facts.
- When a theory fails, it is corrected or replaced: Newton's mechanics, long held to be definitive, gave way to Einstein's, without knowledge collapsing for all that. It progressed.
- Such knowledge is therefore neither a dogma nor a doubt: it holds its best results to be true as far as can be established, while knowing them revisable. Revision is no weakness here, it is its very method.
Therefore So one can know in earnest without claiming definitive certainties: is no soft compromise, it is the very attitude of our surest knowledge.
See the pageObjection
- The fallibilist wants two things at once: to keep knowledge, and yet to admit that none of his beliefs is certain.
- But "to know" usually carries a more demanding sense: I do not say I know a thing if I grant at the same time that it might be false. At that point it is no longer knowledge, it is a cautious opinion.
- The fallibilist then seems to waver without settling: either he genuinely trusts some of his beliefs, and he rejoins the ; or he holds them all to be uncertain, and he rejoins the .
Therefore So the middle way risks being not a position, but a hesitation between the other two.
See the pageObjection
- The fallibilist trusts the method of the sciences, which generalizes from experience: the sun has always risen, so it will rise; this remedy has cured, so it will cure.
- But showed it: this passage from past to future cannot be demonstrated. That nature will remain tomorrow what it was yesterday, no experience can establish, since every experience already belongs to the past.
- Our confidence in therefore rests on mere habit, not on proof. The fallibilist thought himself reasonable; he finds that his best-grounded knowledge hangs on an act of faith he cannot justify.
Therefore So the revisable knowledge the fallibilist vaunts rests, at its base, on a belief that nothing grounds: his assurance was premature.
See the page- DescriptiveJustify, how far?
Every reason rests on another reason: does the chain stop at a foundation, turn in a circle, or run off to infinity? This is the skeptic's lever.
the chain of reasons - DescriptiveThe world, or our representations?
Even granting our perceptions are coherent, do they reach things as they are, or only our representations, with no way to compare the two?
the external world