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From: flink@mimsy.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Uncertainty in life
Message-ID: <6794@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-May-87 00:00:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: mimsy.6794
Posted: Wed May 27 00:00:14 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 28-May-87 05:46:46 EDT
References: <6762@mimsy.UUCP> <1782@sphinx.uchicago.edu> <1146@cavell.UUCP>
Reply-To: flink@mimsy.UUCP (Paul V Torek)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 31
Keywords: certain
Summary: 3 cheers for fallibilism

In article <1146@cavell.UUCP> jiml@cavell.UUCP (Jim Laycock) writes:
>There are lots of claims and theories that I accept and believe, and
>I'll argue 'til I'm blue in the face why a particular position is a
>reasonable one to hold, or why it would be utterly foolish to hold a
>contrary view, but I shy away from any talk about 'truth' in such
>discussions.  So many people have claimed to have the truth.  They can't
>all be right.

I may be missing some technical sense of `truth' which you are using, but
isn't believing a proposition pretty much the same as believing that the
proposition is true?  I'm not necessarily endorsing a redundancy theory of
truth, just the good old-fashioned condition that 
	"p is true" iff p.
So, if you really believe p, I don't see any reason to shy away from saying
that p is true.

Perhaps we don't disagree.  I think that it is rational sometimes to believe
propositions, _with_(psychological)_certainty_, even though they are possibly
false.  In other words, I'm a fallibilist.  And one reason I'm a fallibilist 
is that I think that in accepting empirical propositions one always, from an
epistemic viewpoint, risks falsehood; yet one cannot go about life without 
believing any empirical propositions.  

Is this newsgroup an appropriate place to discuss fallibilism?  Any takers?
--
P.S.  I've conspired with news sites everywhere to suppress opposition
from anti-certainty philosophers:
	This program posts news to many thousands of machines throughout...
	Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]
:-)
Paul Torek						flink@mimsy.umd.edu