Best of 2013: Why It’s Good To Be Wrong - Issue 8: Home
▻http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/best-of-2013-why-its-good-to-be-wrong
That human beings can be mistaken in anything they think or do is a proposition known as fallibilism. Stated abstractly like that, it is seldom contradicted. Yet few people have ever seriously believed it, either.That our senses often fail us is a truism; and our self-critical culture has long ago made us familiar with the fact that we can make mistakes of reasoning too. But the type of fallibility that I want to discuss here would be all-pervasive even if our senses were as sharp as the Hubble Telescope and our minds were as logical as a computer. It arises from the way in which our ideas about reality connect with reality itself—how, in other words, we can create knowledge, and how we can fail to.The trouble is that error is a subject where issues such as logical paradox, (...)