Two Forms of (Political) Fallibilism

In a recent post, Jeff frames the troubling inflexibility in contemporary American politics in terms of our fallibility as political actors, and the need to recognize it, concluding: “Compromise between two fallible competing opinions is a virtue. Compromise of a perceived truth is a vice.” This leads me back to the thought left open at the close of my last post. There, in the context of my skepticism about the deployment of the trope of “growing pains” in political affairs, I called into question the “epistemic certainty” that such a narrative entails. Fairly often, we hear that such certainty is impossible: this position can be called one form of “political fallibilism.” In this first sense, “political fallibilism” means something like the conscious cultivation of not being too certain about things political, about one’s views of what is, but also about what must be done. That is, one knows that no matter how right one is, one is at least a little bit wrong. And one knows that, however much one knows about what is happening, there is even more that one does not know, and probably still more that one doesn’t know what one does not know.

We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility.  Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling raging, and political leaders competing over who can use the words “imperfect” and “necessary” more often and in closer connection, we’ve seen the “domestic” side of this form of repudiating over-confidence with the uncertainty of political events. Whether at home or abroad, this form of political fallibilism is all about the recoginition of one’s limits. Not just the limits of one’s capacity to act under a certain constellation (such as not having limitless resources, not being able to “dictate” to other nations, or serving as chief executive during a period of divided government). But also, and more importantly, the limits of one’s ability to know the truth about matters that one must act upon. Who are the Libyan rebels? What might a post-Assad Syria look like? How many jobs will be created in the next 6, 9, 12, 18 months under this or that blend of interest rate lowering and/or stimulus spending?.

So far, I suppose, I do no more than provide some contextualization to Jeff’s thoughts, if I have succeeded in doing this much. However, without undercutting this form of political fallibilism, I want to point to a second, and I believe deeper form. To uncover it, we should remember the core convictions of (philosophical) fallibilism, as developed (among others) by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. While easy to oversimplify, the heart of this epistemological position is not hard to briefly express. Let’s put it thus: it is neither true that there exists some knowledge claim that can be asserted with absolute certainty, nor is it true that every knowledge claim can be reasonably doubted. A fallibilist, in this sense, is someone who believes in the existence—and the importance—of what Plato’s Socrates calls “true opinion,” but also recognizes that both the subject who believes and the object of that belief are caught up in a developmental process: that all truth is historical. This does not commit one to the view that nothing is true, nor must one think that all beliefs are equally fallible. But it does mean seeing the fallibility as endemic to the possibility of knowledge, and not to the psychology of the knower, or the physical conditions of things to be known. One is not saying here, “I might be wrong about this, but…” Rather, one is saying, “I might very well be absolutely right about this, but even if I am, that about which I am right might very well not be what it is right at the moment. I might be right about it relatively soon.”

A classic example of this “structural fallibilism” is the perception of what Aristotle calls “common sensibles,” most infamously, perhaps, color.  The structural and the humble fallibilists both agree that there is no certain knowledge of color as such; while the humble fallibilist attributes this to the subjective conditions of the knowledge—that the senses err, that other minds perceive color differently than we do—the structural fallibilist says that what is actually “out there” to be perceived as color is context-dependent.  So to say, it’s not our “fault” that we will never perfectly perceive what’s “there,” it’s that, in a very real sense, there’s no “there” there.

And here we see, I think, a difference between the two forms. In the quote with which I began, Jeff—rightly, to my mind—underscored the deleterious role of “true belief” in undermining the possibility of the first form of political fallibilism: one cannot be ready to make political compromises (i.e., recognize the limits of one’s ability to act, responsibly) if one refuses from the outset to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge. At the same time, the second form of political fallibilism actually embraces “right opinion,” and calibrates one’s belief in that opinion not against the limited possibility for one to be right, but against the limited possibility for events to allow for being right. In both cases, one acknowledges fallibility.  The difference is that, while in the first instance, this is based on the certainty that one cannot infallibly assert their view, insofar as any view of things can be mistaken, in the second, one is rather certain that the object of their view is itself uncertain.  This is what makes fallibilism in the second sense an anti-skeptical position.

This second form of fallibilism has an analogue in the political arena. In place of the “humility” of the first form—which is still focused on the psychological and physical conditions of the knower who would act in public, the structural form puts before us the possibility of holding contradictory beliefs, while understanding them as bound within separate spheres. Humility-fallibilism leaves you saying something like: “It is my earnest conviction that, but…” Structural fallibilism provides the space to say: “Given that it is my earnest conviction that the United States can never stand by idly as dictators murder their own people in the streets, and that it is my earnest conviction that the United States cannot use military means to ensure that all people, everywhere, can live free of such indiscriminate violence, it is clear that one or the other of these two convictions will be violated when the decision is made to intervene militarily when a dictator decides to use indiscriminate force against unarmed citizens. All the same, I am going to act, confident that I can never know if events will vindicate my decision, but also that I have acted on the best of my knowledge.” Under this scenario, the fallibilist can embrace the uncertainty of political developments as an end, and not merely as a means, of the cultivation of open societies.