Fallibilism

My Positions

1. All knowledge is conjectural and subject to revision in light of new evidence or better reasoning.
2. No belief, including this one, is immune from the possibility of being wrong.
3. Fallibilism is not scepticism about everything. A belief can be well justified and worth acting upon while remaining, in principle, revisable.

Notes

• The term is most associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, and the attitude is central to Karl Popper's philosophy of science: a theory earns its keep by surviving attempts to refute it, not by being proven (Popper's Razor).
• Fallibilism is the natural consequence of accepting that we have no direct access to reality, only models built from sense data and reasoning, both of which are fallible.
• It is also the reason I preface my positions with the note that all of them are subject to change. This is not a hedge. It is the position.
• Fallibilism should be distinguished from relativism. That I might be wrong does not mean that every view is equally likely to be right.

Also see

• Brain in a vat
• Evil demon
• Plato's Cave
• Certainty
• Justified True Belief
• Münchhausen trilemma