Fallibility and Skepticism

CHAPTER NINE

FALLIBILITY AND SKEPTICISM

Alison: I’m intrigued by this line of thought. Russell, is your position on truth really incapable of explaining human fallibility, as Hans alleges?

Russell: Quite to the contrary, Alison. Fallibility is crucially important to acknowledge, and as the American philosopher Charles Peirce well understood, it is wholly parasitic on truth.

Hans: But the mark of the fallibilist is to be skeptical of truth-claims.

Russell: Questioning the truthfulness of any particular claim is one thing; rejecting the very notion of truth is quite another. The former is that species of intellectual honesty Peirce recommends as “Contrite Fallibilism”34 – the idea that many, but not all, of our beliefs could be false, whereas the latter is a variety of global skepticism that is notoriously self-inconsistent.

Alison: How is skepticism self-inconsistent? Doesn’t the skeptic simply question the veracity of our every belief?

Russell: One can question each belief in turn, perhaps, but not every belief, globally and at once. Skepticism threatens to self-destruct unless we take at least a few of its most general claims to be immune to doubt. Failing that, the aspiring global skeptic is caught in a logical trap: he or she must take it to be true that all truth claims are suspect. But that is a truth claim, and so suspect by its own criterion. The general result seems to be that without some truths against which to measure falsehoods, or veridical perception against which to measure illusions, the very ideas of fallibility or perceptual illusion make no sense.35 Radical skepticism’s wholesale retreat from truth is disingenuous, and certainly not the mark of toleration or fallibility.36

Alison: I have read some of the ancient Greek and Roman skeptics, and your criticism seems to miss the spirit, at least of the Pyrrhonian tradition. For many of the ancient skeptics, as with other philosophical movements of the time, the thrust of skepticism was not so much epistemological as moral. Not doubting as such, but suspension of judgment was thought to be a path to a better, happier, more just life. The emphasis was not on the epistemological claim itself, but rather on the moral consequences of adopting it as a working assumption.

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Russell: Are you sure you’re not moonlighting as a professional philosopher? You are quite right about the ancient skeptics. Their goal was to improve life through the suspension of judgment. But did they not draw the conclusion that suspending judgment would make for better lives – I’m afraid we’d have to call this a judgment – after decades or centuries of arguing about the possibility of, or criteria for, knowledge?

Alison: Yes, I suppose you’re right that Pyrrhonian skepticism was really also about epistemology. Perhaps it would be better to say that they simply denied the hard distinction between morality and knowledge that we take for granted.

Russell: That seems fair to say. But I must reiterate: to jettison entirely the notion of truth is hardly to embrace toleration or a healthy variety of skepticism. Its effect is in fact the opposite.

Hans: You seem unwilling or unable to hear me, Russell, in this one, important respect: von Glasersfeld does not so much reject truth as simply set it aside, substituting for it the pragmatic notions of viability or usefulness. Though what you say might apply to certain approaches to knowledge, your attack in this instance targets a straw person.

Alison: So the radical constructivist position, on von Glasersfeld’s view, isn’t true, it is simply “viable,” or “viable for von Glasersfeld?” Is that what you mean to say, Hans?

Hans: I have already said as much.

Alison: So, could we say further that it is true that viability replaces truth for von Glasersfeld?

Hans: I see that you’ve acquired a fondness for Russell’s logical trickery!

Alison: No tricks intended, Hans, and I’m not taking sides, here. I agree only with whatever seems to make the most sense. In this instance, I simply don’t see how you can say that viability replaces truth without at the same time uttering a truth about viability.

Russell: That is exactly right, Alison. The attempt to do away with truth by substituting for it some other notion, like “viability,” simply displaces the notion a level or two. So, instead of “x is true” we say “it is true that x is viable.”

Alison: You do make a compelling case, Russell, for the logic of the term. It now seems to me that to reject, or even to suspend, all truth claims is not really