Attempts at Understanding Fallibilism
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Fallibilism is the idea that all of our knowledge contains errors, and that nothing is obviously true but depends on what one understands about reality. This means that we can't be certain about anything, because all knowledge contains errors. Knowledge, therefore, grows by addressing the errors we encounter as we encounter them. We can't solve a problem we haven't encountered yet. We solve problems by guessing solutions and testing them. This also means we should always be careful not to destroy or even slow down the things and ideas that correct errors and thereby create knowledge. Some of which are freedom, privacy, and free markets. We are also never the passive recipients of our knowledge; we are the creators.
This view is mainly influenced by Popper, and errors are my own.
We can't solve a problem we haven't encountered yet.
Some theories have enough reach to solve problems we haven’t encountered or even considered yet. I would just remove this sentence.
Finding problems that a knowledge addresses is a form of new knowledge.
Maybe not. Figured that out as I was typing. The knowledge isn't new.
At the same time, there is a notion that I want to address that flows from fallibilism, and the reason decentralized 'things' tend to be more truth seeking. Even though a given knowledge has solved problems we haven't yet discovered, we still got that solution by solving a problem we encountered, and we can't solve problems we haven't encountered. When we try to solve a problem, we might find out that we've already solved it, but that only happens after we have looked at the problem.