About Project Diktuon
Pulling the Fish Together
To Err Is Human…

…to forgive is divine. (Alexander Pope)

- How many fallibilists does it take to change a light bulb?

- One, but I may be wrong.

We all want to be right. That’s the right thing to do. And the most natural thing to do is to think we are right. After all, if someone thought he was wrong, he would change his mind! However, the pitfall lies in trusting one is right. (The following argument is meant to mere mortals instead of hard core philosophers. Thus it’s somewhat simplified and uses lax language.)

In classical theory of knowledge, knowledge is defined as “True justified belief.” Belief, because if no-one believes it, no-one knows it either. Justified, because if there are no grounds for believing it no-one will believe it. True typically means that reality is as the belief describes the reality. Traditionally, philosophers have argued over when exactly a belief is “justified”. However, there is another, even graver problem: In general, we cannot know if a belief is true in the first place.

As Bertrand Russel remarked – assuming that he ever existed – we cannot know if the universe, with all its memories, came into being 5 minutes ago. This remark alone should demonstrate what problems there are in identifying truth. In essence, we could not be sure we recognized it if it walked to us and introduced itself.

Let me give a simple historical example. For a couple of centuries, scientists “knew” that the Newtonian mechanics described the world accurately. This was a very justified belief. However, with the advent of quantum mechanics and theory of relativity it was discovered to be untrue. Scientists gave up this belief. Yet, at a time it had been “knowledge”.

This problem of reality not fitting to the theory of knowledge is easily explained by noticing the error in the theory. What the classical theory of knowledge calls “knowledge” is not what the rest of the human kind means by that word. In practice, people tend to adhere to what is known as the fallibilist theory of knowledge: Knowledge is a belief justified enough to be believed to be true.

This definition gives an intuitive difference between the concepts of truth and knowledge: knowledge is what we believe to be true, truth is what is true irrespective of if anyone believes it. This also explains how the so-called “relativist truth” is actually a confusion of terms: The truth – state of reality – itself is not relativist, but only our knowledge, our belief about it that state.

If we understand that we are essentially fallibilists, we understand that we may be mistaken, even when we are convinced that we are right. This is actually quite comforting, as we don’t have to be right, but can reserve ourselves an irrevocable right to be wrong. That way we can afford to change our views if a more convincing argument comes up. On the other hand, we can allow others to disagree, as we understand that they have reasons that convince them to believe what they believe and either or both of you may be wrong.

As a more objective note, this view allows us to understand that any ideas of reality, any Christian teachings, are merely our attempts to describe the reality, and there is always a chance that we have described the reality inaccurately. And we can allow that inaccuracy to ourselves and others, when we remember that what counts is not our conception of reality, but the truth, what the reality is.

So, to err is human, but we can allow that to ourselves and others, and let God practise his forgiveness through us.

[Facebook] [LinkedIn] [StumbleUpon] [Email] More »