Fallibilism

Fallibilism is the view that human beings are always capable of error, so no idea can be given a guarantee against being wrong. No matter how confident you feel or how much you double-check, you could have missed something; certainty of the infallibilist kind is permanently out of reach. CF inherits this from Critical Rationalism (Popper), which treats fallibility not as a mere technical possibility but as an everyday fact: mistakes are common.

Crucially, fallibilism is not skepticism or an excuse for paralysis. The response to having no guarantees is error correction, not general doubt. We make progress by finding and fixing mistakes rather than by trying to prove ideas or accumulate positive support — which is why fallibilism pairs naturally with CR’s rejection of justificationism and induction. All conclusions are held tentatively: we can be confident and act decisively while expecting that future criticism or evidence may force revision.

CF’s distinctive move is to make fallibilism critical. Plain fallibilism says any idea might be wrong; CF adds a method for deciding what to actually use. Instead of grading how likely an idea is to be true — there is no certainty, only degrees some hope to assign — CF evaluates ideas as refuted or non-refuted via decisive criticism. This sets Critical Fallibilism apart even from Popper’s CR, which still ranked ideas by how well they survived testing. For CF, fallibility plus binary error correction, not weighted confidence, is the engine of learning.