Fallibilism: Thesis
about man or human knowledge to the effect
that these are fallible - they may be mistaken, even if human beings have good
evidence and have done their sincere rational
best. There is much good evidence that
fallibilism in the above sense
makes sense. And there is also a positive side: Presumed knowledge is
corrigible, extendible, partial, incomplete, perfectable, and perhaps outside
mathematics and logic never fully certain, precisely because it is revisable.
("What is empirical is not certain. What is certain is not empirical."
Einstein.)
Rational men tend to be fallibilists in principle, though they also will
insist there are degrees of uncertainty, and more or less fundamental or
well-founded theories. But they know they may be mistaken, even in their
dearest opinions.
Believers in a faith, fanatics for an ideology,
and followers of parties or
creeds tend not to be fallibilists where their
faith, ideology, party or
priests are concerned, which is the reason they
often are, in practice if not in their own eyes,
totalitarian.
Here is a great experimental physicist on the subject:
"Nothing is more difficult and requires more care than
philosophical deduction, nor is there any thing more adverse to its
accuracy than fixity of opinion. The man who is certain he is right is
almost sure to be wrong; and he has the additional misfortune of
inevitably remaining so. All our theories are fixed upon uncertain
data, and all of them want alteration and support. Ever since the
world began opinion has changed with the progress of things, and it is
something more than absurd to suppose that we have a certain claim to
perfection; or that we are in the possession of the acme of
intellectuality which has, or can result from human thought. Why our
successors should not displace us in our opinions, as well as in
persons, it is difficult to say; it ever has been so, and from an
analogy would be supposed to continue so. And yet with all the
practical evidence of the fallibility of our opinions, all and none
more than philosophers, are ready to assert the real truth of their
opinions."
(Michael Faraday, quoted in
L.
Pearce Williams)
|