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Universal Fallibility

All persons are fallible and cannot claim complete certainty.

Definitions

Fallibility: An entity is fallible if it is possible that it holds at least one false belief.

Belief: A psychological state. It may be confident and false.

Knowledge: Explanatory conjectures that have survived sustained error correction.

Universal Fallibility (Theorem)

Premises:

  1. All persons are finite.
  2. No finite entity can access all facts.
  3. If an entity lacks access to all facts, there may exist an unknown fact that contradicts one of its beliefs. Therefore, it cannot guarantee that all of its beliefs are true.

Therefore, all persons are fallible.

Note: The set of all facts is unbounded: for any given belief, it is not possible to determine in advance which facts are relevant to its truth.

No Certainty (Corollary)

Certainty is the state of holding a belief beyond the possibility of error. Since all persons are fallible, no person can ever achieve this state.

No Certifier of Infallibility (Reinforcement)

In addition to the minimal proof for fallibility, it can also be shown that no finite entity can certify any belief as infallible.

Premises:

  1. Suppose a finite entity relies on a method M that claims to certify a belief as infallible.
  2. To trust M, the entity requires justification that M is perfectly reliable. This justification must itself come from some method M1.
  3. In turn, M1 requires justification from some method M2, and so on.
  4. This yields the Münchhausen trilemma:
    • Arbitrary stopping point (dogma): no proof of infallibility.
    • Self-justification (circularity): method validates itself.
    • Endless chain (infinite regress): impossible for a finite agent to complete.

Therefore, no finite entity can non-circularly certify any belief as infallible.

Not only are all persons fallible (from the theorem), but attempts to prove infallibility collapse into dogma, circularity, or regress. Infallibility is unavailable to finite knowers.

Constructive Perception and Cognitive Science (Reinforcement)

Perception is not a passive mirror of reality. It is an active, constructive process: the brain generates predictions and updates them with error signals. This predictive, probabilistic architecture explains phenomena such as illusions, multistable perception, and reconstructive memory. Each shows that experience can diverge from reality even under normal conditions.

If the process that generates beliefs is itself fallible, then fallibility is not merely a limitation of scope but a structural feature of finite cognition.


2023-11-30 Aaron Brinton
2025-10-11 feedback integration
2026-01-06 structural updates