Anderson's fallibility with respect to Fallibilism

It looks like Anderson is making use of some of our exchanges in his courses now. That's partially encouraging, but I suspect that the strawman fallacy abounds. I say this because Gangadeanians in general seem to have a hard time understanding my views as opposed to mere caricatures. This is largely due to the fact that they haven't done their due diligence. They never cared to try and understand because in my experience they tend to be quick to the defense which seems to cloud their abilities to assess things with a clear head.

Anderson in a recent post speaks of fallibilism about knowledge. One should note at the outset that the fallibilism that I am committed to is something like moderate or weak fallibilism--which is just the thesis that knowledge doesn't require maximal justification or epistemic certainty. That's just an existential thesis that might be stated formally in the following way:

Weak Fallibilism: there is at least one subject S and one proposition P such that S knows that P, without having maximal justification for P. 

'Existential' above denotes the quantifier 'at least some' which is to be contrasted with (is sometimes called the 'subalternation' of) to the quantifier 'all'. In other words, I think that we can know things without having maximal justification.

Now to be fair, I supplement this thesis with another. I also think that we don't have maximal justification about most, if not all of our beliefs and by extension, for much or all of what we know. But I'm far less committed to this position. In many of my exchanges with Gangadeanians, I'm happy to not presuppose. The other thing to note is that this second thesis is much weaker than Gangadeanians often attribute to me again due to their lack of due-diligence. To say that we don't have certainty is a claim about actuality. It's not the stronger claim (nor does it entail) that certainty is impossible. To see the contrast, I might say that I don't think that people actually live beyond 140 years, but that doesn't imply that it's impossible for people to live longer.

As it pertains to the Gangadeanian worldview, what I claim is that even if certainty is in principle possible, they haven't shown us a consistent way of ascertaining it. At the "most basic level," they just use intuitions and conveniently switch the label on us. One upshot: suppose that Gangadean were to somehow successfully show that we must have certainty without appealing to intuitions under a different label and without begging the question. Still, that's not the same as showing us how it is that we can attain certainty. Those are just two different things. Now I don't think he's even tried to show us that we need certainty as opposed to simply asserting so much. It's an axiom of his system really (though he wouldn't be caught dead using such a term).

So to be clear, certainty may be possible, but that's not to say very much. If it's a remote enough of a possibility, then who really cares about it? Certainty might even be necessary for certain purposes (though I don't believe this for a minute), but again that's not to have shown much.

The nagging questions are how it is that we can be certain when we have attained certainty? How do we know when something is self-attesting as opposed to merely seeming to us to be self-attesting?Further, is the question that moves beyond possibility to actuality (i.e., can we have certainty vs. do we actually have it?). Further, why does the fact that a proposition is self-attesting count as having achieved certainty of it? You might be tempted to think something like, "that's just what 'self-attesting' means." But how are you so certain that the phrase 'self-attesting' even has an extension? How are you certain that it denotes anything? The Gangadeanian might in turn be tempted to respond with, "well you're using the terms 'self-attesting' and asking how we can be certain that something is self-attesting and so you must be presupposing that it has extension." But that's just confusing the terms of the debate. Here's my response: I'm merely using the word because you've introduced it. For all I've said, it could just as easily be replaced by a variable like 'X' that may or may not have any referent. It's your job to show us that it does!

Yes, I doubt we have certainty of much of anything, which again isn't the same thing as suggesting that certainty is impossible.

Why am I skeptical that we actually have certainty over what we know? Well it's a really high bar. If we equate certainty with maximal justification (as the Gangadeanians do) then this amounts to it not being possible to have more justification for the proposition in question--your epistemic position, as it were, as it regards that proposition couldn't possibly be improved. For the theists among us, you might say that your epistemic position with respect to the proposition for which you have certainty, is no worse than that of God's position. And that just seems crazy to me. It seems to me that we can always improve our epistemic position with respect to what we know even in the things we feel quite certain about (note there's a big difference between mere psychological certainty and epistemic certainty and it's the latter that we're interested in, but I suspect Gangadeanians sometimes conflate to two).

To this the Gangadeanians will no doubt argue in the following manner. We must have certainty, to question anything, including whether we have certainty. Without clarity at the basic level, thinking is not possible and neither is questioning (which presupposes thoughts). The problem is, this is an unproven assumption. As I've pointed out many times in the past, there's just no reason given to accept the claim that we must have certainty for thought or questioning to be possible. It just seems like an intuition that supports their entire worldview.

Anyway, I noticed that Anderson in his post about fallibilism had some of the following "study questions". I'll speak briefly about them since they point to just how mistaken is his understanding of my position as well as fallibilism in general. 

What does it mean for a law to be self-attesting?  Does the fallibilist believe anything is self-attesting?  How could one prove that nothing is self-attesting?

One thing to note here is that it's strange that the fallibilist would be at all interested in trying to prove that nothing is self-attesting. The fallibilist would say that we can know things without proof. Moreover, many fallibilists are externalists about knowledge. So why would they feel any need to prove that nothing is self-attesting in the first place (do we need more than knowledge of things)? This smells like a slip on Anderson's part where he's smuggling in infallibilism + internalism in evaluating fallibilism which is question-begging. 

Can a fallibilist be certain that a statement he made is actually the statement he made?  Must a fallibilist he concerned for intellectual consistency? 

Here, too again is the same sort of slip as above. Why would the fallibilist need or desire certainty about the statements they are making?! A fallibilist would say that they can know what statements they are making and it doesn't require certainty. So what more do you want? Again, he's assuming infallibilist norms in order to in effect, argue against fallibilism which is obviously begging the question. 

Is fallibilism a neutral position from which to criticize others or does it have presuppositions that need to be identified and proven to be true?

And yet again, same mistake! The fallibilist isn't necessarily a neutral position, but neither does it aim to prove things like the infallibilist of Gangadean's vintage. So why would the fallibilist feel the need to prove it's own assumptions if certainty isn't needed for knowledge? The fallibilist allows that they have assumptions like everyone else does, and even goes so far as to say that these assumptions can count as knowledge without proof. So how is this question supposed to suggest an inconsistency with fallibilism? 

A couple of elementary lesson in argumentation do result from this exploration. 

1) You shouldn't use premises that presuppose that your opponent's view is wrong in order to show that their position is wrong. 

2) If you want to point out an inconsistency in your opponents position, you should stick to premises that they accept. You shouldn't characterize their view as having an assumption that you accept, but they that reject.