The word 'fallibility' has two different meanings. One is that we can't be absolutely sure of anything. The other is that mistakes are common. These meanings are both the same kind of thing, but the first is much narrower than the second. I embrace the truth of both meanings.

Sometimes fallibilists argue that math cannot have certainty because performing a proof is a physical process, and during physical processes things can go wrong (e.g. i could be drugged to unconsciousness and then awake with tampered memories such that I thought I'd completely the proof correctly when I hadn't). This argument is correct, but it is only an argument for the first, lesser meaning of fallibility. Although it gives an example demonstrating the possibility of a mistake, it does not show that mistakes are common.

A similar kind of argument is made by fallibilists with inductivists. We may point out that, as a matter of logic, inductive conclusions do not deductively follow from their premises, and therefore they are fallible. Again, this is an argument for fallibility in the first sense -- error is possible -- but it does not say whether error is common or not.

One result of this situation is that some people are converted to fallibilism but only in the first sense. When they encounter people who embrace fallibilism in the deeper sense, they become confused because these people discuss fallibilism but in a different way than they understand it. There can be further confusion because both groups identify themselves by the same label, "fallibilists", and may then wonder why they are disagreeing so much.

The more thorough meaning of fallibilism is required for most important fallibilist arguments. This is known to many anti-fallibilists who claim fallibilism is stupid and useless because not a lot of interesting truths follow from it (they have in mind the more limited meaning of fallibilism). And emphasizing that error is possible could be deemed misleading if it is in fact very very rare and perhaps even negligible.

Here are some examples of how the stronger meaning of fallibilism leads to important conclusions the weaker meaning does not:

Should parents take seriously the possibility that, in the face of a disagreement, their child might be in the right? If mistakes are common, including mistakes by parents, then yes they should. This is a clear implication from the strong meaning of fallibilism. But on the other hand if the parent having made a mistake is only a very remote possibility, one in a million, then one could considering taking a different attitude.

Should lovers who think they won't end up with broken hearts take seriously the possibility that their knowledge of how to avoid being hurt may contain a mistake? That depends if mistakes are commonplace or extremely rare. If the rate of making mistakes like that is one per hundred million couples then it's not worth worrying about. If it's one per two couples then it'd be crazy not to think about it a lot.

When a person seems to misunderstand my argument, should I believe he is doing it deliberately (perhaps because he sees that it refutes his position)? If mistakes in understanding arguments are extremely rare, then it would follow that it's usually deliberate. But if mistakes are common, then I shouldn't take it to be deliberate.

In general, when I disagree with someone, is he mistaken, am I mistaken, or is he a bad person? If mistakes are common, either of us could be mistaken. If mistakes are extraordinary rare, then I may have to conclude he is a bad person who wants to adopt mistaken ideas due to bias or some other factor. This is especially true if I have multiple disagreements with him. If mistakes are very rare, can he really be innocently mistaken on all those issues?

The Portable Edmund Burke edited by Isaac Kramnick states on page xxviii of the introduction that:

Beginning in 1929 and 1930, Burke's reputation was subjected to the most serious assault on it since the radical crew of Wollstonecraft, Priestly, Paine, William Godwin, and others had finished with it one hundred and thirty-five years earlier.

This is false. Godwin did not assault Burke's reputation. Here is a well known quote by Godwin about Burke:

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/godwin/pj8/pj8_10.html

Whilst this sheet is in the press for the third impression, I receive the intelligence of the death of Burke, who was principally in the author's mind, while he penned the preceding sentences. In all that is most exalted in talents, I regard him as the inferior of no man that ever adorned the face of earth; and, in the long record of human genius, I can find for him very few equals. In sublety of discrimination, in magnitude of conception, in sagacity and profoundness of judgement, he was never surpassed.

This was followed with a bit of criticism; Godwin considered Burke to be one of the best men ever, but flawed. There is no way to take it as an assault on Burke's reputation. Godwin also praised Burke on several other occasions.

Consider the following approach to land ownership:

One has a right to land if he performs the appropriate duties for that land, and only as long as he continues to perform them.

This is a strange idea, today. What duties come with a house? We have a very different system, and it's not easy to even imagine most other systems. (One system we are familiar enough with to imagine is communism. But even that is hard. People vary wildly in how the imagine it, and all but one of the contradictory views must be mistaken. Some see it like We The Living, Anthem or 1984, and some imagine it as paradise, and others imagine everything in between.)

In our system of property rights, if you own a piece of land then it's yours, forever, to do whatever you want with. You can leave it sitting there, empty, or anything else. You have no duties. Except not exactly: you must pay property taxes. And you must abide by zoning laws and building codes. Properties can be declared "blighted". Properties can be confiscated if the Government wants to build a highway through them, or sometimes even if a stranger comes to your property and commits a crime there. And if you build a business you must abide by anti-discrimination laws, get a business license, and get permits to sell various things. If you wish to practice medicine on your property or sell alcohol, for example, that's heavily regulated.

So land owners do have duties, in a way. He must help pay for the upkeep of his cities. He must keep his property from being blighted. And he must follow various laws. If he does not do these things, he can potentially forfeit the right to his property. Still, we don't really think of these things as duties.

We also have an idea that the way to gain ownership of natural resources is to put them to good use. This doesn't come up a lot in America anymore only because so much stuff has already been claimed. Using a resource appropriate is a similar idea to duty. To say you can own an oil well but only if you use it by drilling it and selling the oil, and to say you can own an oil well only if you do your duty to drill it and sell the oil, is very similar.

Feudalism focussed on duties more. A lord gained certain privileges (ownership of land; right to tax his serfs; etc), but to maintain them he had certain duties (to protect his serfs in wars; to offer them justice in their disputes; to feed the poor; to help support the local church; etc). This system is not altogether without merit; both the lords and the serfs gain some benefit from the arrangement.

Emphasis on duty as I've described is a conservative attitude. That is not to say all conservatives would favor it or that it's their only option. But what I can say is that it's illiberal. Duties contradict the liberal ideals of maximizing freedom, tolerating diverse lifestyles (including ones that do not perform various duties), and an emphasis on people's rights.

I believe that the laissez faire style of capitalism, which eliminates duties, (thus going beyond the somewhat minimal duties we have today) is the best.

I do not believe the vast majority of libertarians, liberals, capitalists, or anyone else, could give a compelling argument against duty. You are welcome to try in the comments.

Once upon a time there was a libertarian who wanted to end taxes within his lifetime. It was his mission in life. He goes around telling people taxes are bad and involuntary, and the taxman is taking money backed up by guns, and that's wrong. Suppose he succeeded as far as getting the political debate in America to be significantly about taxes. Would that be good? Who knows. Maybe not. Should he assume it's good on principle? No. In fact my guess is that taxes would not be efficient to reform anywhere near that much, today; once taxes were reduced a bit there'd be plenty of lower hanging fruit, and reducing taxes the last, say, ten percent would be extremely hard and shouldn't be a high priority.

I am doubtful that he's much of a thinker. It's easy to take a naive/simple liberal policy, notice we don't fully implement it in our society, and say we should. What's harder is looking at what concrete steps would improve things, and how to make them happen. He has no idea how much knowledge it would take to do without taxes, and he isn't trying to contribute to creating it; a real reformer ought to work on creating the knowledge needed for reforms to happen.

Should he go ahead anyway? I don't think it can do any harm, and I think he'll have fun and perhaps meet interesting people and learn something. And if he fails, he may learn about a few of the practical difficulties, and perhaps he will react to that by thinking about how to overcome them and end up creating some useful knowledge. He will only get attention if he is persuasive to others. If he's wrong and it's bad, well so are they, so his part in the harm is miniscule. And anyway we have a system for deciding what issues to focus on, and as long as he follows the system who can fault him? The system is to persuade people, and it's the best system we know. To say he shouldn't pursue his ideas within that system is to say you know what's good and bad better than the system -- it's saying you know more than our political institutions, and ought to override them -- which is deeply arrogant and foolhardy.

Suppose I hire someone to make a website for me. He says it will take two weeks. During those two weeks he says everything is fine. At the end he says sorry, he was very busy, and actually he has barely worked on it, and I'd better hire someone else.

He has materially harmed me. He wasted my time. Now my website launch is delayed. So I sue him for damages for the wasted time (never mind that he said he'd make me a website and didn't, so owes me a website, which is a separate issue). Our contract was short and did not mention this outcome or any circumstances under which he would owe me money. Should the law be on my side, or not?

One perspective is that contracts come first, and people are free to live their lives however they want as long as they don't violate a law or a contract. What he did sucks, but such things happen, and I should just find someone else and forget about him. He has a right to spend his time as he chooses unless there is a clear and incontestable reason to the contrary. What he did may have been a mistake, it may have been bad of him, but in America people have freedom; that means they can live badly and make mistakes as long as they don't violate our minimally-intrusive laws.

Another perspective is that people have reasonable expectations in life and it's wrong to violate them. Our society works a certain way, and if you want to change that or go against it then you are the one asking for special treatment and you are the one with the burden to make sure your change does not hurt anyone. In this way of thinking, the contractor has violated his duty to me, and violated my reasonable expectation that the project would be completed. Of course projects sometimes miss deadlines, but he didn't even come close to meeting the deadline. Freedom is good, but it doesn't include the freedom to not to make a good faith effort to meet one's obligations.

I believe that neither of these perspectives is clearly better than the other, as written. People who insist on one, and do not respect the other, are ideologues. Both perspectives make some apparently reasonable points.

I'd now like to offer a third perspective which I think is superior:

The law must be clear so that everyone knows what they must do to follow it. It would be unjust if a reasonable person, who made a good faith effort to follow the law, ended up a criminal. Mistakes happen, as does bad luck, so it may happen sometimes, but it should be a very rare event, and the legal system should have strong safeguards to avoid it. For this reason, we must allow that some bad things will happen with no punishment. The law needs to not only stay out of any grey areas but allow a significant margin for error and only convict people who go well beyond any grey areas into deep black. For this reason, it would be bad for a man to become a criminal by disappointing another man.

People are different and have diverse lifestyles. When the law favors some lifestyles that stifles diversity. Perhaps my conception of what is material harm is mistaken. Perhaps he made a good faith effort as best he knows how to, and he has a different way of making efforts to do things than I do. It would be bad if everyone was under pressure to have the same style of thinking, and same opinions about a wide variety of things, or else they risk becoming a criminal.

It's bad for the law to be intrusive into peoples' private laws, or for it to encourage people to invade each other's privacy. How do I know he did me wrong? Maybe he made a very strong effort to complete the project, but his mother ended up in hospital, then his computer was stolen, and then his car broke down. Or maybe something else happen, somewhat milder, but sufficient to keep him busy. Should I find out the details of his life for the last two weeks and judge his methods of prioritizing and time management? Should bad time management even be a crime?

Did he know the project was urgent? Did he have any reason to expect I would be harmed if it was late? Did I tell him? If so, how clearly? Doesn't everyone say they want their projects done fast? How would he know I wasn't exaggerating? Should he be a criminal depending on exactly how clearly I stated the urgency of the project? Should it be possible to become a criminal over miscommunication? How much of an effort should he have had to make to be certain he understood how urgent the project was or wasn't? It's just a two week project, couldn't he reasonably expect the project to be a little relaxed? Did he ever communicate to me his relaxed attitude in any way? If he did, would that make him not guilty? I don't think these questions should be answered. If the law cares for all these details then it's too hard to follow it, and it's too intrusive into the minute details of our behavior. The law should never tell people the details of how to live their life; it should be tolerant of diverse lifestyles.

I am claiming my business is harmed. But my business is my responsibility, not his. He never agreed to take on the risks inherent in starting a new website business. If I wanted him to take on some of the business risk associated with my site launching late, I should have asked him to, put it on the contract, and paid extra. Imagine if Electronic Arts sued some of its employees for millions of dollars because they were responsible for a product being delayed two weeks, but the advertising for the product had already run. Perhaps the delay the employees caused really did harm the company for millions of dollars, but they are just employees, that isn't their problem, they didn't ever agree to take on that much risk. In a free and rational society, it's important that people don't take on obligations by accident. Obligations and risks need to go to to the people who consent to have them.

The theme here is to encourage the growth of knowledge by allowing for people to make mistakes and live varied lifestyles. Having a large scope of legal behaviors, greatly exceeding what most people consider good behavior, allows for the possibility that somewhere in those possible deviations is an improvement, and does not punish people who try to find it. This is the perspective of the open society where errors are, as much as possible, nonviolently corrected by thought and persuasion, not suppressed by the police.

Freedom is good. If our Government adopted more voluntary methods, without breaking anything, that would be good.

There are other good things too. Political systems can only do a limited amount of stuff at once. They must prioritize.

Lowering involuntary taxes is one way to make the Government more voluntary and the people more free. It further would benefit the economy. But it can't be established just by wanting it. People have to work out how to change the budget to accommodate it. It takes quite a lot of effort, and in return there is a reward.

Simplifying the tax code is a good which would make it easier to feel good about paying one's taxes -- it helps it be more voluntary. It is also an economic good: it would save people time and effort. But it can't be done just by declaration. Knowledge has to be created about what changes to the tax code would not only simplify it but also retain the good aspects and not break anything.

We could focus on fixing social security. Or on how we fund education and what we ask of public schools. Or we could improve the health care system. Or we could reform welfare. Or we could change the military to use money more efficiently. All of those things would have economic and other benefits. And all of them are difficult. It takes a huge amount of effort to make serious changes to them. One has to plan out what to change, consider the effects it will have in detail, and persuade millions of people it's a good idea, including, generally, people from the other party (especially if, as one should, one hopes for a lasting improvement that can be stable to the other party being elected).

Which of these should be the highest priority? I don't know. But I do accept that there are a lot of factors involved. What we should not do is pick some principle, say freedom, and insist that whichever changes would most increase freedom must be the top priority. That would be thoroughly unreasonable.

he and some of his friends visited burke several years before french rev. separately i think.

when the revolution started, he and a few others wrote to burke.

they thought burke would be on their side!

that's how little they understood any philosophy. they didn't even know he wouldn't agree with them.

the french revolution is reputed to have been all about philosophy and abstract ideas.

but how can that be? those men didn't know anything about ideas. they were incapable of understanding burke's philosophy even enough to see which side he'd be on.

paine's book replying to burke on the french revolution confirms my point. it showed that even after burke explained his position in detail that paine *still* couldn't understand even the main points of it. paine was no thinker.

The nature/nurture debate is about two main issues which people mix up.

One issue is: what is the physical mechanism by which some knowledge (like people's personalities) is created and maintained? Is it caused by genes? By education? By a mix of both? Is the knowledge stored in the form of ideas just like the my idea that South Park is a good TV show? Is it still stored in the genes in adults? Or in the brain but in a different way than my TV preferences?

The second issue is: how possible is it to change this knowledge? Is it hard or easy or impossible? Can it be changed just like a TV preference, or more like learning physics, or not at all? Is it a choice, or just something that happens to people which they bear no responsibility for? Or are their parents morally responsible?

Almost everyone on both sides of the debate believes the following:

1) If the nature side is the correct answer to the first issue, that means the answer to the second issue is that it's very hard or impossible to change, not a choice, and parents are not responsible.

2) If the nurture side is correct about the first issue, that means the answer to the second issue is that it's easy to change, people are a blank slate and can choose to be whatever they want at their whim. (Or like that but somewhat milder.)

That's why whenever I tell people that personality is ideas, autism is ideas, sexual orientation is ideas ... nurture is absolutely correct WRT the first issue ... they reply by telling me that they don't have control over those aspects of their life, and don't believe they ever did.

I think if issue two wasn't at stake, people wouldn't really care about issue one. What does it matter where the knowledge is, and the detailed mechanisms of how it gets there? What most people care about is the affect on their lives, and what it means in terms of moral responsibility.

The funny thing is they have it backwards. Nature traits are far easier to change than nurture traits, because genes have less knowledge than memes, and the requirement to change a trait is basically to create more knowledge than whatever is making you the way you are now.

But even if they didn't have it backwards, conflating the issues is senseless. And so is assuming that what traits can be changed, and how, is obvious based on the first issue. In fact how to change knowledge is a hard issue to analyze! Epistemologers know the answer in outline (conjectures and refutations; piecemeal gradual changes; respect for existing knowledge; optimism; rationality; error correction; etc), but working out specific, practical consequences for real life situations is often difficult. Very few contributors to the nature/nurture debate know that outline at all -- they are completely out of their depth, and often don't even know that epistemology is the key field -- yet they still take a large portion of the answer for granted and consider it so obvious it doesn't need serious analysis.