Epistemic Fallibilism

Peter Unger argues for universal skepticism.  If somebody knows something to be so, then it is all right for the person to be absolutely certain that it is so.  It is never all right for anyone to be absolutely certain that anything is so.  Therefore, nobody ever knows that anything is so.  He is diametrically opposed to any forms of a dogmatic attitude in regards to the knower and is determined to show that one cannot be certain about anything. 
This paper argues that one should be skeptical about Unger’s conclusion of universal skepticism.  It is far more compelling to believe that one can in fact know certain things about reality.  An alternative model, “The Scale of Provisional Knowledge”, deals with knowledge in gradation and avoids the charge of absolute certainty.  This defeater is used to diminish the claim of global skepticism, thereby yielding with a more positive, epistemic outlook.

The traditional argument for skepticism relies on a comparison between a normal subject and a subject in a skeptical scenario: because there is no relevant difference between them, neither has knowledge. Externalists respond by arguing that there is in fact a relevant difference—the normal subject is properly situated in her environment. I argue, however, that there is another sort of comparison available—one between a normal subject and a subject with a belief that is accidentally true—that makes possible a new argument for skepticism. Unlike the traditional form of skeptical argument, this new argument applies equally well to both internalist and externalist theories of knowledge.

Peirce's account of the Self shows some of the main critics to the classical, cartesian, substantial conception. Peirce's conception of the Self is social and historical, it rejects any form of intuition and is based on a fallibilist epistemology. Following the stages of the development of the Self, Peirce shows that it emerges as a subject of error, and therefore it can exist only in a social context, in a linguistic community.

Karl Popper lamented the prevalence of dogmatic argument in philosophy and commended the kind of critical argument that is found in the sciences. David Miller criticises the uncritical nature of so-called critical thinking because of its attachment to dogmatic arguments. I expound and clarify Popper’s distinction between critical and dogmatic arguments and the background to it. I criticise some errors in Miller’s discussion. I reaffirm the need for philosophers to eschew dogmatic arguments in favour of critical ones.

Virtually every epistemological theory that is currently a live option is committed to two theses: fallibilism and attributabilism.  A new argument for skepticism is advanced, which is grounded in the incompatibility of these two theses.  It is then argued that the main responses to traditional skepticism—epistemic externalism, contextualism, and Moorean common sense—are ineffective with respect to this new type of skepticism.

Organizational knowledge is at the center of the debate focused on the nature of knowledge, where the perspective of knowledge as possession opposes the perspective of knowledge as practice. These two views are rooted in the radical versions of realist and constructivist epistemology, respectively, according to which knowledge is an object or a practice. Far from being a Byzantine dispute, the adoption of one or the other has relevant and concrete consequences for the design and management of IS/IT, because as such, the two paradigms result incommensurable in both theoretical and methodological aspects. However, from a moderate and middle-ground version the following fruitful implications would stem: 1) the juxtaposition would dissolve, and a dual nature of knowledge as object and practice would emerge; 2) the epistemology of pragmatism would be able to account for all the concepts and methods employed by the two fronts, thus terminating a sterile “paradigm war”; 3) the theory of autopoiesis would become irrelevant and eventually even misleading; 4) standard scientific methodologies and simulation models would be acknowledged as useful and common tools for progressive confrontations among the supporters of both the paradigms; 5) the development of IS/IT studies and the design of knowledge management systems would substantially benefit.

Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully general account of the view. I conclude by looking at the two major difficulties for fallibilism: the Gettier problem and the lottery paradox.

Das Argument der Selbstwidersprüchlichkeit, das vonseiten der Transzendentalpragmatik gegen den Fallibilismus als zentralem Bestandteil des Kritischen Rationalismus vorgebracht wurde, diskutiere ich in dieser Arbeit und versuche anschließend den Fallibilismus gegen diesen Einwand zu verteidigen.

I will reflect on the reconciliation between ‘subjective’ life and ‘objective’ doctrine experienced by Catholic LGBT couples. Even though their particular experience cannot be considered as universal it can nevertheless constitute a case study for theological reflection. I will propose a theological model for the integration of LGBT Catholics into the Christian community. The case of LGBT Catholics also helps us address the theoretical difficulties of religious pluralism. Their experience of faith is an example of “lived pluralism”. In the lexicon of religious pluralism, this experience is a case of intra-system or intra-theistic diversity, but it also touches upon the meta-theological issue of the model of reason that is to be applied to every system. I believe that every possible case of pluralism is worth considering if we want to theorise this concept. This may lead us to consider pluralism as a premise from which to start that is articulated at different levels. This premise has several theoretical consequences that I want to elucidate.

This paper answers the question, what is Kant’s ‘Critical Philosophy’? The answer is not provided by a bibliography of Kant’s main works, nor by his transcendental idealism. The answer consists in Kant’s critique of our human capacity to judge and of those rational principles by which we can properly judge matters accurately and cogently. To show this, three key features of Kant’s critique of rational judgment are examined: Five constitutive characteristics of our human capacity to judge (§2), two basic theses of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (§3) and a table of basic systematic questions and their Critical answers (§4). This conspectus is philosophically significant because it clearly identifies Kant’s Critical method and its key considerations, which continue to be widely neglected when considering philosophical method (§5).

In this article my aim is to address the issue of the public justification of political liberalism from the perspective of moral epistemology. I begin showing that a strictly political account of liberal legitimacy is hostage of tensions that are intrinsic to the justificatory framework itself. On the one hand, an adequate conception of justice should grant the required normative force thanks to the appeal to compelling justificatory arguments. On the other hand, a strictly political version of liberalism is characterized by a major focus on the actual circumstances of justice and on the acknowledgment of the fact of pluralism. Rawls main goal in Political Liberalism, for example, is to provide a full justification for a strictly political conception of liberalism starting from the “here and now” of the contemporary political societies. Rawls believes that his version of political liberalism, being neutral with regard to metaphysical and epistemological disputes, can avoid dilemmatic outcomes.
In the second part of the article, I argue, pace Rawls, that political liberalism cannot be robust vis-à-vis different theories of justification, because it is required that as theorists we take a stance regarding the epistemological framework we employ while developing a specific theory of political legitimacy. My proposal is that a moderate approach in moral epistemology expresses the best scheme available to us - as moral agents constrained by the limit of our rationality - for establishing a normatively binding, and yet realistic, procedure of justification for political institutions and practices. An epistemic moderate account can be described around four fundamental benchmarks: (1) a doxastic presupposition that highlights the fundamental deliberative role played by moral agents as they are the last authority for determining which principles are indeed compatible with their wide set of beliefs; (2) a fallibilist account of moral knowledge; (3) a coherentist theory of epistemic justification and (4) a moderate account of objectivity according to which the objectivity of the moral discourse rests on the correctness-apt deliberative procedure we produce as moral agents and that involves some correctness criteria that are publicly justified through the exchange of reasons among reasonable citizens.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that creativity and imagination are key to envisioning alternatives to the problems of postnormal times. At the same time, educational institutions all over the globe are still mired in assumptions from the machine/industrial age, preparing students for reproduction and conformity rather than creativity. This article outlines the philosophical foundations of an educational approach in which creativity is central to scholarship, where learners move from being consumers to creators and from bystanders to participants in the postnormal dance of knowledge.

These slides (made for presentation at a panel on Skepticism and Philosophy at The Amaz!ng Meeting (conference organized by the James Randi foundation) explain the very different meanings of "skepticism" in ordinary discourse and in philosophy, and distinguish philosophical skepticism from fallibilism.  They conclude with some observations aobut "critical thinking" which, Haack argues, is much subtler than is often recognized, and certainly not something to be taught in a semester of fallacy-spotting.

Ernest Sosa’s virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes’s project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa’s epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual stability Descartes wanted. I then argue that this leaves Sosa’s epistemology vulnerable to an important kind of skepticism.

This chapter delves into debates about time and democratic deliberation. Deliberative democrats have developed sequential models but tend to think of time mainly as a background variable. Critics have drawn attention to the inadequacy of deliberation in accelerated society but, in so doing, have conflated arguments about the pace of democratic deliberation with arguments about its durational time. Democratic deliberation may be slow and inconclusive, but one aspect does not necessarily entail the other. It is against this backdrop that I shed lights on a diachronic reading of fallibilism in order to advance a more favourable reading of inconclusiveness.

Cynismus Hegelovy filosofie je téma, které již dávno, rozhodně od Popperovy Otevřené společnosti, přesahuje úzké hranice odborného žánru. Chvála války jako prostředku utužování státu či obdiv k "světodějným" osobnostem typu Caesara či Napoleona, to vše shrnuté v šokujícím tvrzení: co je skutečné, je rozumné, jsou čteny jako jasné vyzdvihování statu quo, tedy pruského státu, v němž našly dějiny své vyvrcholení a Hegel kýženou mocenskou pozici. Výrok "Tím hůře pro skutečnost", který údajně Hegel pronesl v reakci na kritiku své disertace o planetárních drahách, rozšiřuje tento cynický moment i na jeho teoretickou filosofii. V článku nejprve zmíním, proč je tato představa už věcně chybná, v další části se pak zaměřím na pojmovou stránku problému. Má teze je, že Hegelův cynismus je sice reálný, jeho funkce je ale primárně didaktická, manifestující komplikovanou logickou strukturu naší řeči o tom, co "je".

This inquiry aims at exploring the complex relationships between the basic epistemological concepts found in the “traditional analysis of knowledge”, namely: truth, belief and justification. After having clarified what is left aside by the standard way of framing reflection on knowledge (ch. II - particular attention is paid to the relation between know-that and know-how), focus is directed onto the relationship to truth. Truth is conceived as a norm,
that is as an object of commitment: the commitment to truth is called “the claim to truth” (ch. III - particular attention is paid to the Aquinas theory of truth). Such a notion is then explored in depth, first in relation to the difference between “the state of belief” and “the act of judgment” or “act of assent”: their nature is clarified through the notion of “holding-truth” (ch. IV - particular attention is paid to the Moore’s Paradox). The problem of justification is then explored on the basis of the relation between assent and commitment to holding evidential considerations (ch. V - particular attention is paid to the relation between justification, being justified, having a reason to believe and context relativity). At the end, the difference between the claim to truth and the claim to knowledge is elucidated and both the Gettier Problem and the relations between knowledge and human fallibility are discussed
(ch. VI).

The following article argues for four main points: 1. Kant’s epistemological thesis about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments is neither a fallibilist nor a fundationalist stance on the nature of knowledge. 2. The inevitable epistemological ambiguity between fallibilism and foundationalism follows from a) Kant’s in-between metaphysical thesis that mixes empirical realism and transcendental idealism, b) Kant’s blended empiricism, that demands formal elements of subjectivity in order to authorize possible experience and c) the creation of an ‘in-between’ rhetoric that allows Kant to (c.1) transit between the best features of seemingly opposite philosophies, and (c.2) allows him to preserve his set of problems from being kidnapped by technical approaches or empirical science methodologies 3. Kant’s answer to the question of knowledge and empirical validity only acquires meaning inside the rhetorical structure of a transcendental problem that involves the linking of the problem of knowledge (and empirical validity) to the practical-human problem and its post-metaphysical residues. 4.The impossibility to place Kant in one or another side of the debate between fallibilists and foundationalists (being the same valid for the conflict between realists and idealists) shows an incorrigible limitation to the fallibilist and naturalist critiques of the a priori formal theory of Kant.

In a recent article Dylan Dodd has argued that anyone who holds that all knowledge is evidence must concede that we know next to nothing about the external world. The argument is intended to show that any infallibilist account of knowledge is committed to scepticism, and that anyone who identifies our evidence with the propositions we know is committed to infallibilism. I shall offer some reasons for thinking Dodd’s argument is unsound, and explain where his argument goes wrong.

Generally, an epistemic fallibilist considers it reasonable to claim, “I know that P, but I may be wrong.” An epistemic infallibilist, on the other hand, would consider this claim absurd. I argue initially that infallibilism presents more advantages in its assertion of the claim’s absurdity than fallibilism does in making the claim. One, infallibilism is not faulted with the propensity for violations of epistemic closure that beleaguers some fallibilist accounts, due in part to the latter’s problematic shunting of fallible epistemic standards across inferential chains. Two, infallibilism is more easily modelled doxastically than fallibilism, as the former’s understanding of certainty is more tractable than the latter’s idea of what counts as a viable standard of fallibility. A rectification of these fallibilist issues may then be called upon to motivate gradualist variants of fallibilism. For epistemic gradualism, the problematic modellability and shunting of standards is curtailed via an awareness that the standard for knowledge is just one out of many along a gradient that includes, at one extreme, the infallibilist standard of certainty. Specifically, first, gradualism, along with infallibilism, can be modelled doxastically through elucidating upon an obtaining relation between doubt and knowledge; next, the problem with violating closure, although not generally applicable to infallibilism, can be answered by gradualism with a reasonable denial of closure altogether that makes precise which epistemic standard is relevant for which part of an inferential chain; lastly, these modelling resources can be appropriated, by both gradualism and infallibilism, to successfully address a doxastically pertinent form of closure violation called rational self-doubt.

Questo studio, dedicato al razionalismo critico di Hans Albert - la prima monografia sul filosofo tedesco in Italia - intende metterne in luce le possibilità costruttive e i limiti. Sviluppando e radicalizzando il pensiero di Popper, nel confronto con altri suoi “allievi” quali Feyerabend e Bartley, Albert rifiuta ogni forma di processo fondativo – sia in epistemologia, sia negli altri ambiti della prassi umana – e attacca polemicamente le correnti teologiche e filosofiche emergenti e più influenti: la Scuola di Francoforte, la pragmatica trascendentale di Apel, l’ermeneutica di Heidegger e Gadamer, fino agli sviluppi della teologia in Bultmann, Ebeling, Pannenberg e Küng. Su quest’ultimo fronte, in particolare, si concentra questo libro, dal momento che la filosofia albertiana vuole delineare una coerente immagine del mondo, figlia del progresso della civiltà occidentale improntata alla ricerca empirica della verità: l’interlocutore naturale diventa quindi la religione, espressione di una metafisica “sociomorfa” che le scienze empiriche avrebbero contribuito a distruggere. I dibattiti e le polemiche suscitati dal fallibilismo di Albert vengono riferiti con larga ampiezza, e si fa così conoscenza del suo stile, sempre brillante e talvolta sprezzante, ma spesso ricco di argomentazioni acute ed efficaci.

When Kant explicitly considers the status of the claims he advances in his Critique of Pure Reason, he maintains that they should provide apodictic certainty. This contention is strongly connected to his conjunction of the concepts of the a priori, necessity, and certainty. Thus, Kant explicitly argues that a priori justification for claims to knowledge requires infallibility, where this fact has understandably cast doubts on the possibility of finding relevant relationships between his philosophy and pragmatism. However, his infallibilist account of a priori justification for claims to knowledge contrasts with his own characterization of reason and its powers, as well as with his concept of philosophy as an archetype. I begin by introducing Kant’s criteria for justified claims to knowledge, especially as they are presented in the section “On Having Opinions, Knowing, and Believing” of the first Critique. Then, I illustrate Kant’s modest account of reason and philosophy, paying particular attention to the “Discipline of Pure Reason” and the “Architectonic of Pure Reason.” Next I identify what I see as a sustainable account of a priori fallible epistemic justification. To finish, I develop a more modest criterion for the justification of our claims to knowledge starting from Kant’s account of conviction (Überzeugung).

Misrecognition from other individuals and social institutions is by its dynamic or ‘logic’ such that it can lead to distorted relations-to-self, such as self-hatred, and can truncate the development of the central capabilities of persons. Thus it is worth trying to shed light on how misrecognition differs from adequate recognition, and on how misrecognition might differ from other kinds of mistreatment and disregard. This paper suggests that misrecognition (including nonrecognition) is a matter of inadequate responsiveness to the normatively relevant features of someone (their personhood, merits, needs etc.), and that if the kind of mistreatment in question obeys the general dynamic or ‘logic’ of mutual recognition and relations-to-self, then it may be called ‘misrecognition’. Further, this article considers the multiple connections between misrecognition and human fallibility. The capacity to get things wrong or make mistakes (that is, fallibility) is first of all a condition of misrecognition. Furthermore, there are two lessons that we can draw from fallibility. The first one points towards minimal objectivism: if something is to count as a mistake or incorrect response, there must accordingly exist a fact of the matter or a correct response. The other lesson points towards public equality: if our capacity to get things right on our own is limited, then public, shared norms will probably help. Such norms are easier to know and follow than objective normative truths, and they may contain collective cumulative wisdom; and of course the process of creating public norms embodies in itself an important form of mutual recognition between citizens.
Keywords: Misrecognition  Fallibility  Honneth  Christiano  Objectivism  Public equality"

Lewis thought concessive knowledge attributions (e.g., ‘I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that he’s just a cleverly disguised mule’) caused serious trouble for fallibilists. As he saw it, CKAs are overt statements of the fallibilist view and they are contradictory. Dougherty and Rysiew have argued that CKAs are pragmatically defective rather than semantically defective. Stanley thinks that their pragmatic response to Lewis fails, but the fallibilist cause is not lost because Lewis was wrong about the commitments of fallibilism. There are problems with Dougherty and Rysiew’s response to Stanley and there are problems with Stanley’s response to Lewis. I’ll offer a defense of fallibilism of my own and show that fallibilists needn’t worry about CKAs.

A critique of the overly narrow notion of rational criticism, along with positivist-foundationalist remainders, of today's most widely adopted model of reflective research, the "fallibilist" model of critical rationalism and its "primacy of theory" doctrine.

O problema de como interpretar a teoria da probabilidade é, em Popper (1902-1994), incontornável para a adequada compreensão da teoria quântica em suas implicações
com o realismo. A interpretação estatística é correta, no entanto, permite uma oscilação entre concepções objetivistas – puramente estatísticas – e subjetivistas – que recorrem às probabilidades para suprir as insuficiências do nosso conhecimento. O objetivo desse texto é apresentar alguns traços da proposta de Popper acerca da teoria da probabilidade à luz da sua teoria dos Três Mundos. Tenciono fazê-lo em uma articulação que se configura com a interpretação da probabilidade (Mundo 3) em termos de propensões físicas (Mundo 1), compatibilizando com a defesa de Popper do realismo de inobserváveis e de uma nova metafísica da física.

The starting point of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science is epistemological humility: We are ignorant and prone to error. This much may seem trivially true, but Popper (e.g., 1963: Ch. 1)  thought that it had too often been neglected. Such neglect, particularly for philosophers of science, is egregious because it is our ignorance of the world that makes science itself necessary. We need science not only because the world is vast and we are not, but because our senses do not infallibly yield the truth about the parts of the world with which we come into contact.
Science is for Popper a middle way between ignorance and knowledge, an alternative to both epistemological pessimism and optimism. The pessimist is impressed with human fallibility and ignorance, as Popper was. But if we thought that it was not just difficult but impossible to gain access to the truth, there would be no point in doing science. On the other hand, if we were able to get at the truth easily, as the optimist holds, then science would be unnecessary. Common sense would do.
....

The presence of accidentality in a subject's holding a belief is generally thought to be incompatible with that belief's being an instance of knowledge. Epistemologists have tended to focus on the accidentality of the truth of a belief. I argue (a) that it is also possible that there be accidentality in the justification of a belief, and (b) that the consequences of this type of accidentality are potentially much more harmful than accidentality only in the truth of a belief.

Fallibilism is roughly the view that one can have knowledge even though one’s belief could have been mistaken.  Such a view seems to be incompatible with the standard way of thinking about epistemic possibility: it is possible (for me) that p just in case I don’t know that not-p.  It is also difficult to reconcile fallibilism with the thought that knowledge ought to be action-guiding, given that the margin of error built into fallibilistic knowledge can sometimes become practically relevant.  In this paper, I offer a solution to both of these puzzles for fallibilism—one that relies on neither contextualism nor subject-sensitive invariantism.  I conclude by offering a new invariantist account of the way we speak about knowledge and epistemic possibility.

If the task of theoretical reason is to discover truth, or reasons for belief, then theoretical reason is impossible. Attempts to circumvent that by appeal to probabilities are self-defeating. If the task of practical reason is to discover what we ought to do or what actions are desirable or valuable, then practical reason is impossible. Appeals to the subjective ought or to subjective probabilities are self-defeating. Adapting Karl Popper, I argue that the task of theoretical reason is to obtain theories that we can agree to instate given that they appear to have greater explanatory merit than their rivals. I then argue that the task of practical reason is to decide which ought-propositions to act on. As a consequence theoretical reason is seen as a branch of practical reason. This approach makes both theoretical and practical reason practicable and free of the defects of the usual accounts.

I discuss Charles Pigden’s paper ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ and ask whether theories of meaning whose primary purpose is to discredit rival philosophies as meaningless necessarily employ artificially narrow conceptions of meaningfulness.  In the course of my argument I ask whether the colloquial-rhetorical use of words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ has made it difficulty for philosophers to see just how novel and radical their own accusations of talking nonsense are.

Many epistemologists call themselves ‘fallibilists’. But many philosophers of language hold that the meaning of epistemic usages of ‘possible’ ensures a close knowledge-(epistemic) possibility link (KPL): a subject’s utterance of ‘it’s possible that not-p’ is true only if the subject does not know that p. This seems to suggest that whatever the core insight behind fallibilism is, it can’t be that a subject could have knowledge which is, for them, possibly false. I argue that, on the contrary, subjects can have such possibly false knowledge. My ultimate aim, then, is to vindicate a very robust form of fallibilism. Uniquely, however, the account I offer does this while also allowing that concessive knowledge attributions – sentences of the form “I know that p, but it’s possible that not-p” – are not only infelicitous but actually false whenever uttered. The account predicts this result without conceding KPL. I argue that my account has the resources to explain some related cases for which the KPL account yields the wrong predictions. Taken as a whole, the linguistic data not only do not support the proposal that subjects cannot have possibly false knowledge, but indeed positively favor the proposal that they can.

Almost every contemporary theory of knowledge is a version of fallibilism, yet an adequate statement of fallibilism has not yet been provided. Standard definitions cannot account for fallibilistic knowledge of necessary truths. I consider and reject several attempts to resolve this difficulty before arguing that a belief is an instance of fallibilistic knowledge when it could have failed to be knowledge. This is a fully general account of fallibilism that applies to knowledge of necessary truths. Moreover, it reveals, not only the connection between fallibility and error, but the connection between fallibility and accidental truth as well.

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two theses held by John McDowell, namely i) the claim that we are under a standing obligation to revise our beliefs if reflection demands it; and ii) the view that veridical experience is a mode of direct access to the world. Since (i) puts no bounds on what would constitute reasonable doubt, it invites skeptical concerns which overthrow (ii). Conversely, since (ii) says that there are some experiences which we are entitled to trust, it undermines the prescriptive scope of (i). Drawing on C. S. Peirce’s distinction between genuine and contrived doubt, I maintain that critical revisions of beliefs should be triggered only by unwanted disruptions of habits, thereby restoring unity between McDowell’s two theses.

Il rapporto tra fede e ragione è la questione meta-teologica per eccellenza. L’autore si propone dunque d’indagare se il modello oggi prevalente di “ragione umile” – basato su fallibilismo e umiltà epistemica – sia il più adeguato per esprimere le verità teologiche, anche alla luce del dibattito interno al teismo contemporaneo (teologia razionale). Per rispondere a questa domanda è necessario esaminare lo statuto epistemologico della verità umana e della verità di fede, per poter elaborare un metodo comune alle discipline scientifiche, filosofiche e teologiche, capace di trovare un equilibrio tra fideismo e positivismo teologico. Dopo una breve panoramica storica dei rapporti tra fede e ragione nel pensiero occidentale (con particolare attenzione alla dottrina dei praeambula fidei), l’articolo cercherà di mostrare come, nel paradigma della verità relazionale e del fallibilismo sia necessario integrare il problema delle fonti, dell’autorità, del concetto di ispirazione e della nozione di “rivelazione”, giacché contraddistinguono la teologia rispetto alla filosofia. Si mostrerà infine come la dimensione comunitaria e della scelta (appello alla libertà) siano connaturate alla teologia intesa come fede critica, la cui peculiarità è di collocarsi senza nostalgie nel mezzo tra fideismo, razionalismo e un certo relativismo. Dal percorso emergerà infine la proposta di una nuova cristeologia.

When spelled out properly infallibilism is a viable and even attractive view. Because it has long been summary dismissed, however, we need a guide on how to properly spell it out. The guide has to fulfil four tasks. The first two concern the nature of knowledge: to argue that infallible belief is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for knowledge. The other two concern the norm of belief: to argue that knowledge is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for justified certainty. With such a guide in hand infallibilism can be evaluated on its own merits. The most controversial parts are the first and fourth. The idea that knowledge requires infallible belief is thought to be excessively sceptical. The idea that knowledge warrants certainty is thought to be excessively dogmatic. The present paper addresses the first. It argues that knowledge requires infallible belief.

Abstract:
While discussing his notion of objective knowledge Popper introduces the idea of dispensability of knowing subjects, the autonomy of knowledge and the argumentative function of language. The main claim of our paper is that, on our view, objective knowledge produced by argumentative interaction is not achieved by dispensing knowing subjects but by differentiating between the play and the strategic levels of argumentation, where a distinction should be drawn between a particular concrete knowing subject engaged in that interaction, say Karl, and an arbitrary one. Moreover, the theory of meaning deployed at the level of plays, the so-called local meaning, provides already some kind of objective knowledge, since it is player-independent and it does not reduce to the purely logical one of the strategy level. In fact, despite our criticism we think that Popper's discussion of the notion objective knowledge still deserves to be reflected on, particularly so in view of new results concerning the formalization of Brouwer’s Creating Subject and the dialogical interpretation of the notion of epistemic assumption.