E Fallibilism
Philosophers of many stripes and scientists—who disagree about much else— agree at least on this: we cannot attain absolutely certain knowledge about the world, a position so profound that it has a name.
It is called fallibilism, and if you agree with it, you are a fallibilist. Deep down all scientists are fallibilists, even if we don't use the term. We don't believe that achieving complete, unambiguously correct knowledge (capital “T” Truth) is possible, and we accept that our most definite and cherished facts may be wrong. For better or worse, scientists are in a perpetual state of doubt at some level (see sections 1.F-1.H), though it's true that we don't always act that way. Doubt, however, is not a bad thing; in fact, gaining our freedom to doubt and to express doubts publicly was a major achievement in intellectual history. Until the Enlightenment, belief and acceptance of principles laid down by ancient authority were the dominant intellectual virtues. Doubt was not welcome in the ages when dogma ruled.Although it is an unavoidable consequence of our human mental, temporal, and spatial limitations, accepting the ultimately insecure basis of our knowledge can create a sense of queasiness. Other systems, especially religions, provide faith-based certainty that relieves the anxieties that accompany uncertainty. Science offers no such comforts. On the bright side, if we put our minds to it, getting accustomed to fallibilism shouldn't be much more difficult than getting accustomed to the fact that there is no Santa Claus. Nonetheless, if you are like many people, you can commit to the principle of fallibilism intellectually but maybe not quite whole-heartedly. We'll encounter the problem several times throughout this book, and I'll suggest solutions. Fallibilism affects the question of how science knows what it knows. One answer is that science relies on objectivity, which we turn to next.
1.