Abstract
We begin by asking what fallibilism about knowledge is, distinguishing several conceptions of fallibilism and giving reason to accept what we call strong epistemic fallibilism, the view that one can know that something is the case even if there remains an epistemic chance, for one, that it is not the case. The task of the paper, then, concerns how best to defend this sort of fallibilism from the objection that it is “mad,” that it licenses absurd claims such as “I know that p but there’s a chance that not p” and “p but it there’s a chance that not p.” We argue that the best defense of fallibilism against this objection—a “pragmatist” defense—makes the following claims. First, while knowledge that p is compatible with an epistemic chance that not-p, it is compatible only with an insignificant such chance. Second, the insignificance of the chance that not-p is plausibly understood in terms of the irrelevance of that chance to p’s serving as a ‘justifier’, for action as well as belief. In other words, if you know that p, then any chance for you that not p doesn’t stand in the way of p’s being properly put to work as a basis for action and belief.
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Notes
Some epistemologists might feel uneasy about the claim that memorial beliefs are based on evidence (and similarly for perception). If so, they might prefer the following, still broadly logical, conception of fallibly knowing:
To fallibly know that p is to know that p on the basis of a justification the having of which fails to entail that p.
Both of the concerns raised for the standard logical proposal apply to this one as well. If p is necessarily true, then any justification is such that having it entails p. Thus, all knowledge of necessary truths would count as infallible. A disjunctivist might hold that when you know through memory that p (in a standard case), your justification—which needn’t be thought of as evidence you have—is your remembering that p. If this sort of disjunctivism is right, then your knowledge is counted as infallible on the current proposal, even though we want to say that there is a clear sense in which it is fallible.
Baron Reed (2002) construes fallibly knowing as knowing on the basis of a Gettier-proof justification, i.e., on the basis of a justification which is such that believing on that basis fails to entail that your belief is non-accidentally true. Since the Gettier condition is associated with the truth-connection, this conception seems very much in the spirit of the original logical conception. As Reed notes, it fares better than the latter on fallible knowledge of necessary truths. It is less successful, though, at handling the worries derived from disjunctivism and Williamsonian epistemology.
One might object to this argument on the grounds that the rationality of degrees of belief is what is relevant to rational choice between gambles but that a subject can be rational in having a degree of belief less than 1 for a proposition even though the proposition has epistemic probability 1 for her. We find this position hard to maintain. The subject, when asked why she turned down the high-stakes gamble on p, will be equally happy giving any of the answers: “I just cannot be absolutely sure,” “there is just a tiny chance,” “there is a remote possibility.” They all amount to the same thing for her. Moreover, suppose the subject gives the first answer only. We ask her, “why can’t you be sure?” A very natural answer to this question is to give one of the two remaining answers, invoking talk of epistemic chance or possibility. What would be very peculiar indeed, and we think incoherent, would be to say, “Of course it is impossible that p is false, and there is a zero chance that it is false, but I can’t be sure it is false.” Thanks to Ram Neta for discussion.
Rysiew and Dougherty suggested this response in correspondence.
Conee and Feldman (2004) endorse a “criminal standard”: knowledge requires justification beyond reasonable doubt for you. This is fine as far as it goes, but one would of course like to know, roughly, what it takes for a doubt to be reasonable. When it is very unlikely that p, can it still be reasonable to doubt that p, say, if the stakes are high?
References
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Fantl, J., McGrath, M. Advice for fallibilists: put knowledge to work. Philos Stud 142, 55–66 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9303-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9303-4