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Infallible Fallibilism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Hugo Meynell
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I believe that a thoroughgoing fallibilism, which is supposed to apply actually to the statements constitutive of fallibilism themselves, is self-destructive, and consequently absurd. I wish to propose a less radical, but I think perfectly self-consistent, kind of fallibilism, which I shall argue is not self-destructive. A first-order fallibilism — applying to the natural science, history, and hermeneutics — may issue in, and in my opinion ought to issue in, a second- order infallibilism — applying to epistemology and metaphysics. More concretely, fallibilism is in general an infallible way of getting at the truth about the real world; or perhaps rather, fallibilism is an absolutely infallible way of tending towards the truth.

The issue is not merely a technical one within philosophy, but seems to be of some general cultural importance. Fallibilism is in effect an attempt to set out foundations for knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, to provide a way of distinguishing between knowledge which is adequately grounded, and so amounts to ‘knowledge’ properly so-called, and what merely makes some pretensions to be ‘knowledge’. As a result of the alleged failure of fallibilism and of other attempts to provide foundations for knowledge, the conviction has got about that knowledge neither has nor needs any such foundations. If this principle is once seriously accepted and consistently applied, the urgent question of how much of what anyone claims to be knowledge actually is so, and how much is not, can only be settled at the level of dogma and prejudice. If it is not, this can only be due to saving inconsistency; since to provide criteria in virtue of which any claimant to the title of knowledge can be rationally vindicated as such is nothing else than to provide foundations for knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 63 , Issue 745-746 , July 1982 , pp. 333 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 I believe that this remains so, for all that Popper professes to be hostile to such ‘foundations’, apparently as redolent of the kind of attempt to ‘justify’ one's position which is anathema to a conscientious falsificationist.

2 Cf. Bryan Magee, Popper condon 1973, 43); Popper, , Objective Knowledge (Oxford, 1972) 12Google Scholar.

3 Magee, 45–6. Cf. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1972), 37–8Google Scholar; The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1968), 278Google Scholar.

4 Objective Knowledge, 12.Google Scholar

5 Objective Knowledge, 14.Google Scholar

6 Objective Knowledge, 21.Google Scholar

7 Cf. note (1) above.

8 This has been suggested to me in conversation by Bryan Magee.

9 Objective Knowledge, 39–42.

10 Cf. Strawson, P. F.. The Bounds of Sense (London 1966), 250Google Scholar.

11 First Meditation

12 Of course, as Popper rightly points out, this is not ‘probability’ in the sense at issue in the ‘probability calculus’ (Objective Knowledge, 40). The same point was made by Bertrand Russell (see Ayer, A. J., Russell, London 1972. 96)Google Scholar.

13 Perhaps the whole business of attending to data, asking questions, coming to conclusions, and reflecting on this process, might at a pinch be said to be a matter of ‘experience’ in a very extended sense; in which case one could be said to come to know such things by experience.

14 This is of course the usual, and in my opinion quite justified, objection to Kant's conception of the Ding an sick For a modern work which repeats this error of Kant's, see Munitz, Milton K., The Mystery of Existence (New Yoik, 1965)Google Scholar.

15 Objective Knowledge, 28.Google Scholar

16 Objective Knowledge, 27–8.

17 Cf. e.g. B xx of the Critique of Pure Reason. (Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, N. Kemp (London and Basingstoke 1978), 24Google Scholar.

18 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature. I, III, xiv; Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section V, Part I.

19 Complete scepticism must ensue, if we do not judge it to be certain that whateuei method we have determined upon at least tends to get at the truth to a degree that rival methods do not. This would not be inconsistent with the truth being arrived at by way of exception through arbitrary means (eg. the contemplation of tea‐leaves or the entrails of birds) where the application of appropriate methods had failed.

20 Objective Knowledge, 29.

21 Cf. S. Haack, Two Fallibilists in Search of the Truth', I (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume II, 1977), 68.

22 Kolenda, K., ‘Two Fallibilists’, II, 85.Google Scholar

23 Objective Knowledge, 86.Google Scholar

24 Haack, , ‘Two Fallibilists‘, 82.Google Scholar

25 Kolenda, ‘Two Fallibilists’, 85. Cf. 92: Percepts are visual data, perceptual judgments are thoughts. The former are ‘absolutely dumb’ (Peirce), ‘lifeless’ (Wittgenstein), the latter are interpreted, understood. To ponder these remarks, by both philosophers, is to be drawn away from the idea of a correspondence of thought to reality'.

26 Adjukiewics, A., Problems and Theories of Philosophy (Cambridge 1975), 11Google Scholar.

27 Hampshire, S., Thought and Action, (London, 1965), 39.Google Scholar

28 Objective Knowledge, 47.Google Scholar