Abstract

That our knowledge or general experience are fallible seems to be an inescapable part of the human condition, as expressed both in pieces of folk wisdom (be it Murphy’s “anything that can go wrong, will” or the ever popular “shit happens”), and in their academic counterparts (such as Cicero’s “every man is liable to err; it is the part only of a fool to persevere in error”). This latter formulation, however, reveals that the situation is more complicated than it first appears. It raises the question not only of whether we actually err, but whether we must err, and in which sense this “must” is to be understood, or, to put it differently, what such a necessity entails, and what the structure of human fallibility is.

The aim of this workshop is to explore  this structure from three interrelated perspectives. In the historical perspective, one can analyze or contrast the views of the fallibilism’s most prominent figures, such as Popper and Peirce. The epistemological perspective, on the other hand, allows one to address the less obvious points of comparison, such as Descartes’s methodological commitment to doubting everything in order to arrive at the infallible, and Hegel’s counterclaim that the greatest error in epistemology is the fear of erring itself.

Our primary focus, however, is on the expressive point of view. This stems from the observation that the very phrasing of fallibilism appears to be self-refuting because it advocates something that should be avoided – namely, mistakes. We suggest that this expressive opacity is both fallibilism’s main weakness and its strength, which only leads us to the peculiarity of its structure. As its manifestation, then, a variety of approaches might be considered, including Hegel’s philosophy of mistrust, Nietzsche’s perspectivism (based on the premise that our language lies), Wittgenstein’s late epistemology of doubt, or the historical epistemology of Bachelard and Canguilhem, which emphasizes the primacy and productivity of error.

Time: 18.–20. 9. 2025

Venue: Charles University, Prague

Invited Speakers (so far):

Andrea Kern (Universität Leipzig)

Danielle Macbeth (Haverford College)

Paul Redding (University of Sidney)

Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (Universität Leipzig)

Shahid Rahman (Université de Lille)

Organizers: Vojtěch Kolman (vojtech.kolman@ff.cuni.cz), Ondřej Švec (ondrej.svec@ff.cuni.cz), Sequoya Yiaueki (sequoya.yiaueki@univ-lille.fr)

Funding: The workshop is supported by grant No. 23–05448S of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, “Fallibilism and Its Immanent Structure”.