Broadly speaking, fallibilism (from Medieval
Latin: fallibilis, "liable to err") is the
philosophical claim that no belief can have
justification which guarantees the truth of
the belief.
However, not all fallibilists believe that
fallibilism extends to all domains of knowledge.
== Usage ==
The term "fallibilism" is used in a variety
of senses in contemporary epistemology.
The term was coined in the late nineteenth
century by the American philosopher Charles
Sanders Peirce.
By "fallibilism", Peirce meant the view that
"people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning
questions of fact."
Other theorists of knowledge have used the
term differently.
Thus, "fallibilism" has been used to describe
the claim that:
No beliefs can be conclusively justified.
Knowledge does not require certainty.
Almost no basic (that is, non-inferred) beliefs
are certain or conclusively justified.Additionally,
some theorists embrace global versions of
fallibilism (claiming that no human beliefs
have truth-guaranteeing justification), while
others restrict fallibilism to particular
areas of human inquiry, such as empirical
science or morality.
The claim that all scientific claims are provisional
and open to revision in the light of new evidence
is widely taken for granted in the natural
sciences.Unlike many forms of skepticism,
fallibilism does not imply that we have no
knowledge; fallibilists typically deny that
knowledge requires absolute certainty.
Rather, fallibilism is an admission that,
because empirical knowledge can be revised
by further observation, any of the things
we take as empirical knowledge might turn
out to be false.
Some fallibilists make an exception for things
that are necessarily true (such as mathematical
and logical truths).
Others remain fallibilists about these types
of truths as well.
Susan Haack, following Willard Van Orman Quine,
has argued that to refrain from extending
fallibilism to logical truths—due to the
necessity or a prioricity of such truths—mistakes
"fallibilism" as a predicate on propositions,
when it is a predicate on people or agents:
One needs, first, to get clear just what is
meant by the claim that logic is revisable
- and, equally importantly, what is not meant
by it.
What I mean, at any rate, is not that the
truths of logic might have been otherwise
than they are, but that the truths of logic
might be other than we take them to be, i.e.
we could be mistaken about what the truths
of logic are, e.g. in supposing that the law
of excluded middle is one such.
So a better way to put the question, because
it makes its epistemological character clearer,
is this: does fallibilism extend to logic?
Even this formulation, however, needs further
refinement, for the nature of fallibilism
is often misunderstood.
The critical rationalist Hans Albert argues
that it is impossible to prove any truth with
certainty, even in logic and mathematics.
This argument is called the Münchhausen trilemma.
== Proponents ==
Historically, fallibilism is most strongly
associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, John
Dewey, and other pragmatists, who use it in
their attacks on foundationalism (the view
that any system of rationally justified beliefs
must rest on a set of properly basic beliefs—that
is, beliefs that are accepted, and rightly
accepted, directly, without any evidence or
rational support whatsoever).
However, fallibilist themes are already present
in the views of both ancient Greek skeptics,
such as Carneades, and modern skeptics, such
as David Hume.
Most versions of ancient and modern skepticism,
excepting Pyrrhonism, depend on claims (e.g.,
that knowledge requires certainty, or that
people cannot know that skeptical hypotheses
are false) that fallibilists deny.Another
proponent of fallibilism is Karl Popper, who
builds his theory of knowledge, critical rationalism,
on falsifiability.
Fallibilism has been employed by Quine to
attack, among other things, the distinction
between analytic and synthetic statements.
== Moral fallibilism ==
Moral fallibilism is a specific subset of
the broader epistemological fallibilism outlined
above.
In the debate between moral subjectivism and
moral objectivism, moral fallibilism holds
out a third plausible stance: that objectively
true moral standards may exist, but they cannot
be reliably or conclusively determined by
humans.
This avoids the problems associated with the
relativism of subjectivism by retaining the
idea that morality is not a matter of mere
opinion, while offering an account for the
conflict between differing objective moralities.
Notable proponents of such views are Isaiah
Berlin (value pluralism) and Bernard Williams
(perspectivism).
== Criticism ==
Nearly all philosophers today are fallibilists
in some sense of the term.
Few would claim that knowledge requires absolute
certainty, or deny that scientific claims
are revisable (though some philosophers recently
argue for some version of infallibilist knowledge).
But many philosophers would challenge "global"
forms of fallibilism, such as the claim that
no beliefs are conclusively justified.
Historically, many Western philosophers from
Plato to Augustine to René Descartes have
argued that some human beliefs are infallibly
known.
Plausible candidates for infallible beliefs
include beliefs about logical truths ("Either
Jones is a Democrat or Jones is not a Democrat"),
beliefs about immediate appearances ("It seems
that I see a patch of blue"), and incorrigible
beliefs (i.e., beliefs that are true in virtue
of being believed, such as Descartes' "I think,
therefore I am").
Many others, however, have taken even these
types of beliefs to be fallible.
== See also ==
Infallibilism
Infallibility
Logical holism
Perspectivism
Probabilism
Problem of induction
Pancritical rationalism
Philosophical skepticism
Underdetermination
