Fallibilism
Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: fallibilis, "liable to error") is the philosophical principle that propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or justified,[1][2] or that neither knowledge nor belief is certain.
[3] The term was coined in the late nineteenth century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, as a response to foundationalism.
Theorists, following Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, may also refer to fallibilism as the notion that knowledge might turn out to be false.
[6] The term, usually attributed to Pyrrhonist philosopher Agrippa, is argued to be the inevitable outcome of all human inquiry, since every proposition requires justification.
[8] Philosophers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, would elaborate further on the concept.
[11] In the mid-twentieth century, several important philosophers began to critique the foundations of logical positivism.
The claim that all assertions are provisional and thus open to revision in light of new evidence is widely taken for granted in the natural sciences.
[12] Furthermore, Popper defended his critical rationalism as a normative and methodological theory, that explains how objective, and thus mind-independent, knowledge ought to work.
[18][19] Though, even Lakatos himself had been a critical rationalist in the past, when he took it upon himself to argue against the inductivist illusion that axioms can be justified by the truth of their consequences.
[16] In summary, despite Lakatos and Popper picking one stance over the other, both have oscillated between holding a critical attitude towards rationalism as well as fallibilism.
[15][17][18][20] Fallibilism has also been employed by philosopher Willard V. O. Quine to attack, among other things, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.
[22] Critical rationalist Hans Albert argues that it is impossible to prove any truth with certainty, not only in logic, but also in mathematics.
[26] Mathematical fallibilism differs from quasi-empiricism, to the extent that the latter does not incorporate inductivism, a feature considered to be of vital importance to the foundations of set theory.
[27] In the philosophy of mathematics, a central tenet of fallibilism is undecidability (which bears resemblance to the notion of isostheneia, or "equal veracity").
In 1877, Cantor introduced the diagonal argument to prove that the cardinality of two finite sets is equal, by putting them into a one-to-one correspondence.
From the fact that we can err, and that a criterion of truth which might save us from error does not exist, it does not follow that the choice between theories is arbitrary, or non-rational: that we cannot learn, or get nearer to the truth: that our knowledge cannot grow.Fallibilism claims that legitimate epistemic justifications can lead to false beliefs, whereas academic skepticism claims that no legitimate epistemic justifications exist (acatalepsy).
[42][43][44] Historically, many Western philosophers from Plato to Saint Augustine to René Descartes have argued that some human beliefs are infallibly known.
