Notes for 2/23/2026

 2/23/2026
[Philosophy Club every Monday, 4-5 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")]
[Bioethics Club: Mondays from 5:30pm-6:30pm in Leigh Hall 408]

What is something you would say you are skeptical about?
 Descartes’ “Archimedean point” was the principle,
“I am thinking, therefore I exist.”


Descartes sought to leverage this into a general infallibilist system for scientific knowledge.




But it failed.

Descartes’ failure was part of what motivated a turn away from infallibilism toward fallibilism.

Fallibilism is the view that we can often claim knowledge even where there is a possibility that we are wrong.
(We do not have to have perfect justification in order to claim knowledge.)


Another driver of fallibilism is attention to ordinary language.

We often claim knowledge despite the possibility of error.

“I know what day it is today.”
“I know I am not adopted.”
“I know my cat is not a sophisticated robot.”

I know that 1=1


Infallibilism appears to set the bar for knowledge impractically high.

It also generates a significant problem of skepticism.

General argument for skepticism:
1.    For any way that things appear to be, there are multiple possible accounts of why things appear that way.
2.    It is impossible to know with certainty which of those accounts is correct.
3.    Therefore, it is impossible to know (on infallibilism) that things are the way they appear to be.


But this threatens the distinction most people accept between knowledge and mere opinion.

The challenge for fallibilism is to explain what level of justification is “good enough” to claim knowledge.

This kind of skeptical argument motivates a problem that we can find in almost any philosophical tradition in history that can be called ‘the appearance-reality gap.’