Dear Ben, Stan, lists I agree Stan's interpretation of fallibilism here is far too colored by radical constructivism. Fallibilism is not equal to scepticism or constructivism at all, nor does it imply that all "knowledge" will change completely over time. Science is growing by the day, we achieve more and more insight in a large number of fields of reality, including those of history, sociology, arts, political science etc. Fallibilism is the realization that even if most of that knowledge is in all probability true, we have 1) no absolute assurance that is the case which is why 2) any single item of that knowledge may be subject to some degree of revision over time. Cf. Peirce's sane refusal of absolute, Carteseian doubt: we should only doubt any single result when we have some reason or other to actually do so (inconsistencies, missing data, new information, gut feeling or any other reason). But we should not doubt established knowledge tout court without any reason ...
Best F The main idea is not that of a long run. Instead the idea is that of sufficient investigation. Call it 'sufficiently long' or 'sufficiently far-reaching' or 'sufficiently deep' or 'sufficiently good' or 'sufficiently good for long enough', or the like, it's stlll the same basic idea. If in a given case you believe that you've reached the truth about a given kind of phenomenon after five minutes of investigation, then you believe that you have reached, after five minutes, the opinion that anybody sufficiently investigating, over whatever length of time, would reach about that kind of phenomenon. It's far from automatically preposterous to believe that. There is no absolute assurance that actual inquiry on a given question will not go wrong for millions of years, remaining insufficient for millions of years and leaving the actual inquirers not only ignorant but also erroneous all along the way. But fallibilism implies not that the objects or findings of inquiry are unreal and mere figments, but only that they may be unreal and figments, insofar as the real does not depend on what any actual inquirers think of it. On the other hand, do you really believe that there are no cases where we've reached truths about general characters of things, done good statistical studies on the distributions of such characters, and so on? The idea that we can succeed in inquiry does not drive us to the idea that we can't fail in it. Peirce was both a fallibilist and, to coin a word, a successibilist (he opposed radical skepticism and held that the real is the cognizable). Peirce took these ideas as presuppositions to reasoning in general and shaping scientific method. He regarded such presuppositions as collectively taking on the aspect of hopes which, in practice, we hardly can doubt. Really, one can reasonably believe that sharks have a general character without knowing a great deal about sharks. They would be like other kinds of things where investigation revealed only over time certain definite characters common to members of a kind, some of which characters also distinguish the kind, the characters together parts of a complex character called the general nature of the kind. Best, Ben
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