Against the Doctrine of Infallibility

Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4):pqaa082 (2021)
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Abstract

According to the doctrine of infallibility, one is permitted to believe p if one knows that necessarily, one would be right if one believed that p. This plausible principle—made famous in Descartes’ cogito—is false. There are some self-fulfilling, higher-order propositions one can’t be wrong about but shouldn’t believe anyway: believing them would immediately make one's overall doxastic state worse.

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10.1093/pq/pqaa082

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Christopher Willard-Kyle
University of Glasgow

Citations of this work

P, but you don’t know that P.Christopher Willard-Kyle - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14667-14690.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Knowledge in a social world.Alvin I. Goldman - 1991 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge in an uncertain world.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Matthew McGrath.
A virtue epistemology.Ernest Sosa - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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