OPERA: a result published with its own doubt attached, and the fault found in five months.
Fallibility
That any belief, however well supported, may turn out to be wrong - held as a working principle rather than as a counsel of despair.
- Theme
- Knowledge, truth and reason
- Tradition
- Pragmatist
- Term fixed
- 1878
In plain terms
Fallibilism is the position between certainty and scepticism, and it is where almost everyone who thinks about it seriously ends up.
The sceptic says that because we might be wrong, we do not know. The dogmatist says that because we know, we could not be wrong. Fallibilism says both moves are mistakes: you can know something, act on it, and still hold it in a way that admits it might be overturned.
What makes it a working principle rather than a mood is that it changes what you build. You record how you got a result so it can be checked. You publish the method along with the answer. You design so that a failure is detectable rather than silent. None of that follows from knowing you are fallible; all of it follows from taking it seriously.
As a philosopher would put it
Peirce's fallibilism holds that no belief is immune from revision and that enquiry is self-correcting over the long run - a position compatible with realism, since it says our access to truth is provisional rather than that there is no truth to access.
Popper's version is stronger and different. For him theories are never confirmed at all, only corroborated by surviving attempts to refute them, so science is a sequence of conjectures held provisionally rather than a growing stock of established results.
The difficulty is stating fallibilism without self-refutation. If every belief may be wrong, that one may be too; the usual answer is that this is precisely what a fallibilist should say and costs nothing. A sharper problem is the preface paradox: an author can rationally believe each claim in a book and also believe the book contains at least one error, which means a fully rational person holds beliefs they know cannot all be true - and that is not a puzzle anyone has dissolved.
Where you meet it
On 22 September 2011 the OPERA collaboration announced that neutrinos sent from CERN to a detector under the Gran Sasso appeared to arrive about sixty nanoseconds earlier than light would have.
The collaboration did not claim to have overturned relativity. The paper stated that the result was being released so that the wider community could scrutinise it, and its authors said explicitly that they expected an error they had failed to find. Some members declined to sign it.
In February 2012 two faults were identified: a fibre-optic connector that was not fully seated, and a clock oscillator running fast. Corrected, the neutrinos arrived on time. The result was withdrawn, the spokesperson and physics coordinator resigned, and the episode is now cited as an embarrassment. It was the opposite: a measurement was published with its own doubt attached, the community found the fault in five months, and the method worked exactly as designed.
What is actually disputed
Whether fallibilism gives up too much or too little.
Critics from the certainty side argue that if no belief is beyond revision then nothing anchors enquiry, and that some things - simple arithmetic, one's own existence - are not seriously revisable, so the universal claim overreaches. Fallibilists reply that unrevisable in practice is not the same as immune in principle, and that treating the difference as unimportant is how dogmatism starts.
From the other side, sceptics argue that fallibilism concedes their premise and then declines the conclusion. If you might be wrong about any given belief, on what basis do you claim to know? The standard reply is that knowledge never required infallibility, and that the sceptic has quietly imported a standard nobody uses - which is a good answer and has not ended the argument.
Commonly confused with
- Scepticism c. 200 Scepticism withholds belief. Fallibilism holds beliefs and acts on them while conceding they might be wrong.
Defined against
- Knowledge Fallibilism is a claim about what knowing does not require, so the pair is a disagreement about one term rather than a contrast between two
Philosophers
- Charles Sanders Peirce Coins fallibilism and makes it the governing attitude
- John Dewey Enquiry as continuous reconstruction rather than arrival
- Karl Raimund Popper Corroboration without confirmation
- William James The pragmatist context of provisional commitment
- Sextus Empiricus The sceptical position fallibilism is trying not to be
Works
- How to Make Our Ideas Clear Where fallibilism is set out
- Experience and Nature Enquiry as unending reconstruction
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery Conjecture and refutation
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Where the self-correction story is complicated
- Outlines of Pyrrhonism The stronger position it declines
Schools
- Classical Pragmatism Where the term originates
- Vienna Circle Where verification is preferred and then abandoned
- Academic Skepticism The ancient near-neighbour
- Nyaya Where cognitions are defeasible rather than certain
Related concepts
Knowledge c. 369 BC · Doubt 1641 · Scepticism c. 200 · Justification 1641 · Induction c. 330 BC
Peirce coined fallibilism and made it the governing attitude of enquiry: not that nothing can be known, but that no result is beyond revision.