Saturday, April 14, 2007

What is the watershed moment for fallibilism?

My buddy Ted Poston put that questioin to me today, so here's my surmise.

I wish I knew, but I’m certain that a big part of it was Chisholm’s focus on degrees of reasonableness.

He studied with C.I. Lewis but I haven’t actually read much of his original stuff. It surely happened between Russell and Chisholm though. Unless it’s Moore. I guess it could be Moore because he’d have admitted that *of course* it’s possible that he was being deceived, but that’s a bunch of philosophy crap! In some ways that marks a clear departure from the kind of epistemology Descartes practiced. I wouldn’t really count Hempel or Carnap because that was considered philosophy of science and it’s pretty recently that standard epistemologists have listened.

That’s my take.