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Knowledge and fallibility (Or: Postmodernism is right)

The philosophers are right. There is something awe-inspiring about knowledge. Rather than simply accepting whatever comes through our senses or whatever we first think or whatever we’re told, we can step back and consider what is worthy of belief. We can even wonder what constitutes “worthiness” and then we become philosophers and end up driving a cab. Knowing is a break with the world, a recognition that the world isn’t always as it first seems.

But our culture, under the grip of philosophers, came to believe that knowledge is a corrective for fallibility. Having recognized that our unreflective grasp of the world is unreliable, we’ve treated knowledge as a way to gain the certainty that we had previously assumed we possessed. Thus, the story of knowledge begins with mathematics, and it ends — an ending in which we still live — with Descartes’ reduction of the realm of knowledge to a single, self-reflective proposition.

When we think of knowledge as a corrective for fallibility, we are comfortable with a knowledge aristocracy in which there are authorities different from you and I. They are the great encyclopedias, the great newspapers, the great journals. We are mere footloose commoners who look things up in the works the aristocrats have announced.

But there is no corrective for fallibility. We live in the breach between the world and how we take it. We are that breach. It closes only when they shovel the dirt over us. Until then, there are only degrees and modes of fallibility.

That doesn’t mean the authorities have no authority. It does mean that there is nothing with total authority. We’re stuck with always having the argument about what to believe because knowledge is a way to manage fallibility, not to escape it.

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