Human Fallibility and Fallibilism about Knowledge

This chapter distinguishes between fallibilism and infallibilism by appeal to entailment: infallibilists hold that knowledge that p requires evidence which entails that p; fallibilists deny that. It outlines some of the recent motivations for infallibilism, including the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions, the threshold problem, closure, and the knowledge norm of practical reasoning. Further, we see how contemporary infallibilists attempt to avoid scepticism by appeal either to a generous conception of evidence or a shifty view of knowledge, such as contextualism. The chapter explains the book’s focus on non-shifty versions of infallibilism which defend a generous conception of evidence. It ends by defending the entailment definition of infallibilism over other potential definitions, and outlining the chapters to come.

Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge

This book examines the prospects for infallibilism about knowledge, according to which one can know that p only if one has evidence which guarantees or entails that p. In particular, it focuses on the possibility of a non-sceptical infallibilism which rejects any kind of shifty view of knowledge, whether contextualist, relativist, or subject-sensitive invariantist. The availability of a non-shifty non-sceptical infallibilism seems to depend on whether such a view can defend a generous enough conception of evidence to allow us to have the knowledge we ordinarily take ourselves to have. In particular, such an infallibilist needs to allow that our evidence extends well beyond how things seem to us in our experience and includes claims about the external world. Thus, the infallibilism which is the focus of this book is committed to a generous conception of evidence. More precisely, I argue that infallibilism is committed to the following claims about evidence and evidential support: if p is evidence, then p is true; and if one knows that p, then p is part of one’s evidence, and p is evidence for p. However, I argue that these claims about evidence and evidential support are problematic. Furthermore, I argue that fallibilism can overcome the most serious objections levelled at it, which concern closure, concessive knowledge attributions, practical reasoning, and the threshold problem. So, I conclude that epistemologists who aim to avoid both scepticism and a shifty view of knowledge should be fallibilists.

Knowledge, Chance, and Practical Reasoning

This chapter considers well-known objections to fallibilism from practical reasoning and the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions. In reply, it argues that, in fact, fallibilism and infallibilism face similar puzzles and have the same broad options of response. Since the fallibilist and the infallibilist each take their views to allow that most of our ordinary claims to knowledge are correct, they both face the puzzle that, as stakes rise, one no longer seems to be in a good enough epistemic position to rely on what one knows in one’s practical reasoning. Further, it argues that they both have the same broad options of reply to this puzzle, depending on what notion of probability they hold is relevant to practical reasoning. Relatedly, they have the same broad options for explaining the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions of the form ‘I know that p, but it might be that not-p’.