Cognitive Vulnerability, Repetition, and Truth

Funding note: This paper has been written as part of the research project Cognitive Vulnerability, Verisimilitude, and Truth (FFI2017 – 84826-P) of the National Program for Research, Development and Innovation of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research.

Abstract

Debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science have regarded fallibilism to be a central characteristic of our beliefs and scientific theories. Two antagonistic attitudes have arisen from this starting point: realism and anti-realism. I will argue that this dichotomy can be avoided by replacing fallibilism with the more neutral notion of cognitive vulnerability. Our search for knowledge is vulnerable for three reasons: (i) we can make mistakes of various sorts; (ii) we can identify our errors by improving our research methods and the quantity and quality of the relevant data; and (iii) we can express certain truths about the world. The first two points are relatively uncontroversial. The third, however, presents more difficulty. Nevertheless, by changing our theories under certain conditions, we can enhance their cognitive verisimilitude and the possibility of achieving cognitive success. The notion of cognitive vulnerability can counterbalance both realism and anti-realism.

1 Fallibilism and “Successibility”

Since Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term “fallibilism” in the nineteenth century, this notion has been at the center of contemporary debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science. However, philosophers’ prolonged use of the term has led them to attributing it a plurality of meanings some of which are uncontroversial, but some others are highly contested.

Fallibilism has mainly been taken to apply to our cognitive and perceptual faculties, our beliefs, our knowledge claims, our justifications for knowledge claims, and our certainty that we have knowledge. In all such cases, fallibilism has different consequences and implications. For instance, it is uncontroversial to say that our faculties (memory, perception, logical and mathematical reasoning, practical decision-making, etc.) are fallible. Our individual and collective experience tells us that the use of any of these faculties in particular circumstances can lead us to hold false beliefs. What is much less clear, however, is what it means to say that we have fallible knowledge. If “knowledge” is a success term implying truth, then saying that we have fallible knowledge is tantamount to saying that what is true might turn out to be false. Of course, there are cases in which a sentence that is true in a particular context turns out to be false in another context. The temporal dimension might play a decisive role in this change—if I feel pain in one of my teeth and claim that “I have a toothache,” I am saying something true even though it will not be true an hour after I take a drug to alleviate my suffering. Likewise, it will not be true if someone else who does not have a toothache utters that sentence. The truth-value of the sentence “I have a toothache” changes with the context and the subject who utters it. But this is not what those who claim that our knowledge is fallible mean. What they mainly mean by fallible knowledge is that our claims to knowledge are such that, ceteris paribus, when we say “I know that p,” we are entitled to say that we know p even though p might not be the case when and where we have made the claim. However, under this interpretation, “fallible knowledge” seems like an oxymoron, because fallibility in this context is in complete opposition to the idea that knowledge implies truth.

Another issue is the fallibilist notion that what we currently take to be knowledge might not be knowledge after all. This interpretation is less controversial. If you hold that knowledge and truth apply to those beliefs that have warranted assertibility as the result of intelligent inquiry, as John Dewey did in his Logic, then it makes sense to say that our knowledge is fallible. It is fallible because what has been settled as warranted, i. e., as justified at a particular stage of intersubjectively controlled inquiry, might change after further inquiry. In this context, “fallible knowledge” is no longer an oxymoron. Dewey says:

The general conception of knowledge, when formulated in terms of the outcome of inquiry, has something important to say regarding the meaning of inquiry itself. For it indicates that inquiry is a continuing process in every field with which it is engaged. The “settlement” of a particular situation by a particular inquiry is no guarantee that that settled conclusion will always remain settled. The attainment of settled beliefs is a progressive matter; there is no belief so settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry. […] In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry. (Dewey 1938/1986, 16)

These different uses of the term “fallibilism” lead to the emergence of the idea that saying that a belief is fallible operates as a warning sign to suggest that the state of affairs “represented” in the content of the belief might not be the case. Hence, saying that our beliefs are fallible expresses the idea that our beliefs might be false. This might also occur in the realm of scientific inquiry, where what we have come to believe is the result of collectively controlled and critical research practices across different generations. Being aware that our scientific beliefs are fallible, we cannot assert with any certainty that what we believe as the result of scientific practice is true, especially when we are dealing with unobservable entities. Any meta-claim of this kind is also fallible.

However, the fact that our beliefs might potentially be false, and be recognized as such, does not necessarily mean that they actually are false. This potentiality will be actualized only in the event that the belief is false. A diamond does not have the potential to be a false diamond, but a piece of cubic zirconia has the potential to be a false diamond because it is a false diamond, although we might have come to believe that it is real and acted accordingly—ab esse ad posse valet illatio. In a parallel way, if we regard our beliefs as fallible, this fallibility will affect only those beliefs that are false, although we might not know right now which among our current beliefs are false. Hence, fallibilism is not the idea that we cannot attain knowledge by any means, as the radical skeptic holds. Rather, it is the claim that we do not know with certainty which beliefs are false or inaccurate and, consequently, which beliefs we will need to change. This is why we cannot determine with any certainty that what we believe is true, even when it is the result of well-conducted inquiry. We use the term “fallibilism” to mark this ignorance. It signals that some of our beliefs might need to be discarded from our web of beliefs. This is part of the “logic,” as it were, of the concept of fallibilism.

This result is the consequence of fallibilism’s genealogy. Fallibilism has an etiology in which error is first. As we tread the path from the commonsense notion of error—coming to realize that what we believed to be true is not in fact true—to the philosophical notion of fallibilism, it is necessary to distinguish various stages. In cases of error, in which we openly admit to having made a mistake, philosophers will retrospectively analyze this into the claim that fallible beliefs were present among our previous beliefs, which we now consider to be either partially or totally wrong. This backward-looking assignment of fallibilism to our previous beliefs is a way of saying that, if we were back in the former cognitive situation, we would not know which beliefs we will, in the future, declare to be false. We would not know then what we know now, namely, that some of our previous beliefs were false; this is fallibilism’s “veil of ignorance.” Lastly, philosophers assert that our present beliefs are fallible because, given our record of past missteps, some of our current beliefs might later come to be considered false despite the fact that we do not know right now which ones they will be. They are also fallible.

However, it is not at all clear why we should talk only about the fallibility of our beliefs which has been the main concern of epistemologists and philosophers of science. But there is nothing in the notion of belief that makes it...