We’re doing Fantl/McGrath in my grad seminar, and it is really great stuff–I’ve had a very high opinion of the book since it came out, but it is interesting to see how blown away the students have been by it. Very neat!
Anyway, the first chapter is about fallibilism, and I’ve been working on the distinction between fallibilism and infallibilism for a bit, finding it perplexing. And there is something really interesting here that I noted.
First some quick background. My interest arises because I’d like to see a characterization of fallibilism and its denial that are both exclusive and exhaustive, making every epistemic theory one or the other and not both. It used to seem simple to do so: one talked about entailing evidence and the failure of such, and that was that. But then along came the Cheap Infallibilisms: Disjunctivism in the theory of perception, the Williamsonian identification of evidence with knowledge, etc. (I’ll add an addendum that shows my own cheap version as well, one that doesn’t endorse E=K, but is built off a deduction theorem in epistemic logic. It’s very cool (perhaps, or in part because, trivial), I think, but you’ll have endure to the end to see it (or skip if you prefer)).
So usual construals of fallibilism fail the exclusive and exhaustive test, settling for a sufficient condition for fallibilism only. That’s fine if all you want to do is make sure you embrace the true view(!), but I want more. And I found something perplexing and interesting in F/M on this score, which I’ll report below the fold.