Definitions

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  • noun An advocate or supporter of fallibilism

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

fallible +‎ -ist

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Examples

  • He must be, and is, an anti-foundationalist and a fallibilist.

    Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

  • This conservative, fallibilist position, which Hume calls mitigated scepticism, is the proper epistemic attitude for anyone “sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding”

    David Hume Morris, William Edward 2009

  • But the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry.

    Pragmatism Hookway, Christopher 2008

  • (LW: 15.24) Both Peirce and James combined their pragmatism with a distinctive epistemological outlook, one which rejected the Cartesian focus upon the importance of defeating skepticism while endorsing the fallibilist view that any of our beliefs and methods could, in principle, turn out to be flawed.

    Pragmatism Hookway, Christopher 2008

  • Campbell, Donald T., and Paller, Bonnie T. (1989), "Extending Evolutionary Epistemology to" Justifying "Scientific Beliefs (A sociological rapprochement with a fallibilist perceptual foundationalism?)."

    Evolutionary Epistemology Bradie, Michael 2008

  • If so, very few propositions would be known (assuming a fallibilist notion of evidence); the specter of skepticism would hover ominously.

    Reliabilism Goldman, Alvin 2008

  • The pragmatist maxim was first developed in the context of a fallibilist, broadly empiricist approach to the study of inquiry, and it is this approach to inquiry that is central to pragmatism in the wider sense.

    Pragmatism Hookway, Christopher 2008

  • Most contemporary accounts of knowledge are fallibilist, which means they do not require that a person believe in a way that cannot be mistaken in order to have knowledge.

    Foreknowledge and Free Will Zagzebski, Linda 2008

  • So, while the sentences Lewis cites are self-contradictory, they do not capture the fallibilist idea after all.

    Epistemic Contextualism Rysiew, Patrick 2007

  • On this view, CKAs express, as Lewis assumes, precisely the fallibilist idea.

    Epistemic Contextualism Rysiew, Patrick 2007

Comments

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  • If you wanted to label the position, you could say that Montaigne is a fallibilist. He believes we must always bear in mind our own endless capacity for error. ( from the NYT Review)

    April 30, 2011