Fallibilism and Decoupling of Knowledge & Truth

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I will assume familiarity with the concept of knowledge as justified true belief and the Gettier problem. If you’re not acquainted with these topics, I encourage you to read my previous blog post on the same, I am putting a link below:

[embed]What is knowledge? Gettier Problem and more In his several dialogues like “Theaetetus” and “Meno”, Plato discusses the question, “what is knowledge?”. Plato…gauravcy19.medium.com

Also just want to mention this initially, the ideas in this blog are influenced by the work of Karl Popper and David Deutsch.

Knowledge & Truth:

When discussing knowledge, there’s a common presumption that “knowing” something implies that it is “true”, distinguishing it from mere belief by the token of truth. It is highly influenced by Plato’s historic definition of knowledge, but that is just not correct. Knowledge & Truth are two different things & we can attain objective knowledge without it being the final truth.

This decoupling of Knowledge and Truth is important.

Consider the example of fictional works. When discussing Harry Potter, based on the books or films, it’s clear that this knowledge of Harry Potter doesn’t mean that it is true, it’s implicitly understood.

I can possess knowledge about Harry Potter even though it isn’t true; these statements can coexist without confusion. This applies equally to literature, films, religious texts, and myths. A reasonable person recognizes that knowledge of these subjects doesn’t equate to knowing the truth.

The confusion often arises with scientific or mathematical knowledge. There’s an expectation that a scientific theory must be definitive. This is a misconception.

For centuries, Newton’s laws of gravity were accepted as the definitive understanding of gravity until Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity came as a better one.

This doesn’t mean that pre-Einstein, we knew nothing about gravity or that our understanding was same like some religious dogma. Now, obviously it was not the ultimate truth but Newton’s theory contained more truth than the older theories which came before it.

Einstein’s theory, while closer to the truth than Newton’s, is also not final. Our understanding will continue to evolve, we will have better explanation than this also.

We will never reach a final theory, but our explanations of reality will continuously improve and we will have better and truer explanations.

Explanations which will go towards the “Truth” but they will not reach there, so we can always improve and have better explanations and more progress.

This idea is discussed in detail in Karl Popper’s work and in David Deustch’s book, “Beginning of Infinity”. I highly recommend this book if you want to explore this or Epistemology.

Dogmatism & Relativism:

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People can be divided broadly in two categories, Dogmatic or relativist.

Dogmatic is the one who is sure about themselves, someone who is sure that his knowledge about the world is the true one or the principles he aspires to follow are absolutely right. Often, instead of themselves, they rely on some authority, which they believe have the ultimate answer.

It happens in multiple forms, someone could be sure about their own principles or it can be in various ways like religious, ideological or philosophical. In these cases it is easy to see the dogmatism, specially in religion.

But dogmatism is not limited to religion, it becomes the nature of a person, you can see, so called “progressives” and “liberals” who will think themselves open minded and “believe in science”. If these people were born 1000 years ago, they would have found religion instead or science to believe in. Their beliefs are less about liberal principles and more about the circumstances of their birth and era.

Science is not a doctrine of principles in which you have to believe, it is a method(the best one we invented in human history) by which we try to find better explanations about the world and acquire knowledge by conjectures and refutations.

On the other end of the spectrum are the relativists, who deny the possibility of objective knowledge, confusing knowledge with absolute truth.

They believe that knowledge and morality are relative to cultural, societal, or historical contexts and are not objective. This leads to the problematic notion that no culture can be objectively better than another, equating modern, free societies with barbaric tribal practices and religious fanaticism without distinction. And we can see many problems in today’s world because of this notion.

They don’t understand that, indeed, some cultures are better than others.

The problem with this idea this gives the illusion that morality is relative and objective knowledge is not possible, so we can not be right or wrong about anything objectively and all claims are relative.

Both relativism and dogmatism say that they can’t be objectively wrong. They essentially claim infallibility. Dogmatist think that anyone who disagree with them is wrong and relativist say that everyone else is just as wrong as they are, asserting that objective knowledge is unattainable.

Now remember, I talked about “Justified true belief” definition of Knowledge?

Now the problem here comes with justification also. It’s possible that one could see some form of justification in their dogma by some form of evidence, and they can think they have justified true belief when they are trying to justify their conjectures, this creates an illusion of knowledge and leads to dogmatism in practice.

So, what is a better approach? Rather than seeking justifications, we should seek explanations through creativity, formulating conjectures and subjecting them to rigorous criticism (such as scientific experiments). If these conjectures withstand scrutiny, we consider them knowledgeable theories, though not the final truths.

These theories remain valid until a new critique or experiment proves them insufficient, leading us to the development of improved theories. This is an ongoing cycle; we will never find the final truth, but we can always improve our knowledge and theories and approach towards this truth.

When one says that they know something, then it doesn’t mean that they know the final truth about it, what it means is, that they have a knowledge about something for which they haven’t found a good criticism yet.

Relativism and Dogmatism become kind of two sides of a same coin or you can understand it by horshoe theory, where two extremes are more closer to each other then they appear.

This happens with fascism and communism too, where both ideologies which seems opposite of each other but practically becomes similar in their authoritarian approach, where individual is less important than collective, the collective changes in both cases, but this underlying principle doesn’t.

Now, what is Horshshoe theory?

This basically suggests that far-left and far-right, are not at opposite ends of a linear continuum of political spectrum, they closely resemble each other, something like opposite end of a horshshoe.

Dogmatists are the one who could mistakenly fight till death to defend the evil they think is good, while relativists are useless when they are faced against these dogmatists, so we need an alternative. Opposite of both, Relativism and Dogmatism. Which leads us to, fallibilism.

Fallibilism:

Fallibilism is the idea which says that of course we can not find the final truth, because we can always be wrong about something. This is both contrast to Dogmatism that says we can know we have absolute truth at hand and relativism that says it is impossible to have objective knowledge at all.

Now, you can be individually wrong about something or everyone else also can be wrong about something, we just have to recognise that there is always something to be wrong about and hence improve and make our understanding of reality better and attain knowledge.

So objective knowledge is possible, but there is always something to be wrong about, objectively. Even about Fallibilism.