Fallibilism

In philosophy, “Fallibilism” refers to an approach to knowledge and learning that’s based on the premise that no conception of things (no model, framework, belief, etc) can ever be conclusively proven or 100% supported, but that we can understand things to be “true” and actionable, nonetheless.

The laws of physics, then, while fundamental to the majority of scientific research done today, and proven over and over again via that research, should still be questioned and revised, according to Fallibilism (and that is, in fact, what we see happening, as while we continue to prove that these laws are real, we also continue to discover aspects of the universe that seemingly defy them).

Modern scientific principles have something of this concept baked in, then, though it’s been argued (by a Hungarian philosopher named Imre Lakatos) that the “Critical Rationalism” of scientific methodology requires, to some degree, that we assume the unwavering rightness of Critical Rationalism: that we look out into the world and try to understand it by changing our minds and understandings when new evidence emerges, but that we don’t question the premise underlying our rationale for doing this.

This view is sometimes called “Critical Fallibilism,” though the folks making this sort of argument have vacillated and wavered in their support for different versions of it over the past century or so, which has left us with several similar terms and a large degree of variation in how this concept is interpreted.

Fallibilism can be leveraged beyond demonstrable science, too, and in fact is most often applied to (what we might think of as) less concretely demonstrable fields, like philosophy, spiritual belief, and things like ideology and politics.

If we accept that what we know to be true might be false, but also accept that what we know to be true is the best version we have at this moment, we are able to act with confidence and rationality while also leaving room for progress in the future: our views and understandings can change at any moment, and the Fallibilistic model says, in essence, this isn’t just okay, it’s good and correct and to be expected.

Fallibilism is often compared and contrasted with skepticism, the latter of which proposes that basically everything is false and should be treated as such, the former of which says we should assume basically everything is false, but that we should find value and a basis for living and operating in what we seem to know right now, regardless.

Maybe one of the most useful facets of Fallibilism is found in mathematics: a field in which things are ostensibly objective in a way they don’t tend to be in other realms of inquiry.

The term “verisimilitude” means, in this context, that some things are more right—more demonstrably correct—than other things, despite all things being incomplete, incorrect, and prone to being disproven at some point in the future.

Thus, it’s possible to assume that even the most seemingly concrete, true thing is actually just more-true than other things, because at some point (when we discover new mathematics or a novel way of looking at the universe) it could still be shown to be just a hint of the actual truth—though according to this theory, whatever replaces it will likewise be just the best we can do at that moment, until we figure out something even better.