"Liberalism is
fallibilism," Gopnik avers, and at the end of the book he maintains that "No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom." (Apropos of the latter, I'm puzzled that Gopnik devotes more space to monarchical Belgium's devastation of the Congo than to America's Vietnam war, which was, sad to say, mostly the responsibility of many deluded members of this nations liberal elite.)
such freedom would rest more securely upon a foundation of tolerance which does not depend upon relativism,
fallibilism, or skepticism.").
Focusing on the value of diversity in decision-making, there are three commitments that are central to democratic pragmatism: first,
fallibilism, which requires that the decision-makers know they do not have all the answers and be willing to engage in debate and argument to find the answers; second, anti-skepticism, which requires that the decision-makers believe that there is a possibility of achieving a correct decision; and third, consequentialism, which requires that the decision-makers consider the consequences of their decisions on future activities.
While we can appreciate the
fallibilism built into such a conjecture, we should not lose sight of the fact that a hypothesis is not made any less hypothetical by virtue of being called metaphysical.
The desire to find out new things relates to
fallibilism, which is Peirce's idea that one must be "at all times ready to dump his whole cart-load of beliefs, the moment experience is against them" (CP 1.55 [c.
At least for those of us committed to
fallibilism about our epistemic capacities, it seems unmotivated to think that rational agents are always reliable about whether some response is favored by certain aspects of a situation.
Scott: <<Simon on Realism,
Fallibilism, and the Power of Reason>> en Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, vol.
Fallibilism views mathematics as the outcome of social processes.
I think, for example, of Peirce's reconception of metaphysics as not a priori but empirical, about the world, not just our ideas, but as requiring not experiments, voyages of exploration, archeological digs, and the like, but only the kind of experience everyone has every day--provided we pay sufficiently close attention to it; (41) of James's (42) and Dewey's moral
fallibilism; (43) of Mead's conception of human mindedness as the joint product of nature and culture, physiology and socialization (44)--among many, many other fruitful suggestions.
Among their topics are criticism as paradoxatism: the Heraclitean critique of the notion of opinion, conversation and conservation: two kinds of anti-dogmatic criticism in the philosophy of politics and their antecedents in ancient Greek forms of skepticism and
fallibilism, rationality and criticism in the views of the philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School and K.
If certainty is not possible then this does not mean that all is lost, only that an experimental
fallibilism is called for.