“Statements are true or false, not fallible or infallible; what is fallible or infallible is the statement-generating systems. People are fallible statement-generating systems.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
From the archives: 25th December, 1994
I had written:
“The contrary of a logically false statement is a logically true statement, so we can be sure that if we ever find a logically false statement, then the negation of it is logically true. So if you are saying that the statement ‘one may be wrong in anything one says’ is self-contradictory, you are also saying that its negation is true. The contrary of ‘one may be wrong in anything one says’ is ‘one cannot be wrong in anything one says’ So you are saying that the statement ‘one cannot be wrong…’ is logically true.”
Rick replied:
“You are confusing contrary statements with contradictory statements. The negation of a statement is its contradictory statement, not its contrary. The contrary statement to ‘one may be wrong in anything one says’ is, as you state, ‘one cannot be wrong in anything one says.’ But its contradictory statement is this: ‘one cannot be wrong in some things one says.’”
Whether I confused the technical terms or not, my meaning was clear. But you are confusing the truth or falsehood of statements with the fallibility or infallibility of the process through which statements are made.
“To put it into clearer terms, the statement may be rephrased as ‘All statements are fallible.’ The contrary statement to this is ‘No statements are fallible.’ The contradictory statement is ‘Some statements are not fallible.’ That is its negation, and that statement is true.”
This is a blatant equivocation, Rick. To describe a statement as “fallible” is meaningless. Either you mean that the statement is false, or you mean that the person who made the statement was fallible. A statement is either true or false, not fallible or infallible. My statement, that “one may be wrong in anything one says” was an assertion that human beings are fallible, that as statement-generating systems they may make mistakes, and that we have no way of knowing for sure that we have not made a mistake.
An example of an obviously fallible system is a computer programmed to print out a statement at random. Fallible systems may, of course, make true statements sometimes, or even all the time: what makes them fallible is that given the process by which they generate their statements, there is no reason to infer that statements from these entities are definitely true. Fallibility relates to the process by which statements are derived; truth relates to the statement itself. When I refer to myself and other humans as “fallible” I am describing a property of physical entities subject to the laws of physics—human beings.
So, when you refer to the statement “all statements are fallible”, which meaning do you have in mind? Let’s see. Do you mean:
“The process through which all human statements are derived is fallible.” The contrary statement to this is “The process through which all human statements are derived is infallible.” The contradictory statement is “The process through which some human statements are made is infallible.”
or:
“All statements are false.” The contrary statement to this is “No statements are false.”. The contradictory statement is “Some statements are not false”.
Your “proof” that I am contradicting myself depends on changing the meaning of the word “fallible”, from the first meaning, which I had in mind, to the second, between the beginning and the end of your paragraph.
“If a person says, ‘A triangle has 3 angles,’ it is impossible for that person to be wrong! By definition, if it does not have 3 angles then it cannot be a triangle.”
But my point is that given the fact that we are physical systems, how (for instance) do we know that we have said that at all? From our infallible memory? Or what? How do we know it is a definition? From our infallible reasoning abilities? Or what? We only “know” any of these things in a sense that is perfectly compatible, logically, with their being false. Therefore we cannot infer, merely from knowing a thing, even a thing we “know” to be pure logic, that it is certainly true. In particular, we cannot infer that we are infallible just by considering statements—even true statements—about triangles.
“It only takes 1 exception to disprove a universal!”
So let’s see: I was saying that human beings are fallible—a universal statement about the nature of human knowledge. Does the fact that we may make true statements constitute proof of infallibility? No. Being fallible does not mean “always wrong”. One can’t disprove one’s fallibility by coming up with a true statement. Or any number of true statements. To disprove fallibility, you would need to address the issue of the process through which the statements were derived, and I contend that human beings are physical entities, subject to the laws of physics, and that therefore, since we can’t be sure which way the atoms will jiggle, say, we have no reason to believe, by virtue of that process, that there is ever a time when statements coming from this physical system are definitely true or false merely by virtue of having come from that system. You would need to show that that human process is not always subject to the laws of physics.
“If that’s not enough, here are some more examples to prove that some things a person says cannot be wrong (i.e. it is not true that a person can be wrong in anything one says): If a person says, ‘I exist,’ it is impossible for that person to be wrong.”
In a loose sense, yes, fine, but the level on which we are arguing is not this loose one. How do you know the person said it? Plenty of people are “certain” about all sorts of things that are not true. People make errors of reasoning, have hallucinations, dreams, slips of the tongue, and so on. However much they check and re-check, some errors may slip through (consider the Pentium chip).
“You cannot logically deny a self-evident truth.”
You are confusing abstract logic and epistemology.
“If a person says, ‘Homosexual activity is evil,’ it is impossible for that person to be wrong, because God teaches it through the Church and the Bible and God cannot be mistaken.”
Okay. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Bible is strictly, absolutely true. Even if what the Bible says can’t be wrong, people can be wrong about what the Bible says. When I studied theology for three years, there was an occasion on which this idea was clearly illustrated: the church offering these classes had several different groups running, each of which was covering the same ground as the others each week. One week, I could not go to my usual Tuesday class, so I joined another equivalent group on the Wednesday. Imagine my surprise when the group leader made a statement about the meaning of a certain statement in the Bible that directly contradicted a statement made by my own Tuesday leader the previous week! When I tactfully questioned them about it, they each said that the other was wrong, that the meaning was absolutely clear, and that the other was mistaken.
The point is, no matter how true the Bible may be, we, as fallible human beings, may interpret it incorrectly, and we have no way of knowing (for certain) when we are making a mistake in this regard. What I am saying here is not an anti-Bible statement: it is a statement about the fallibility of human beings.
I had said:
“Being wrong about this would amount to the possibility that one is infallible. In other words, I am saying: ‘I believe I am fallible, but I could be wrong. It is possible that I am infallible.’ ‘May be’ is not the same as ‘is’.”
Rick replied:
“Well then, let’s use ‘may be’ and see what happens if we apply the original statement to itself. If it indeed may be possible that the statement that one may be wrong in anything one says is itself wrong, then it is possible that one may say things that cannot be wrong.”
Well, if you mean that one may say things that are true, no one will disagree. But if you are suggesting that we know for certain that there are times when we will not be subject to the laws of physics, and thus that there will be times when we are infallible, I do not agree.
“Doesn’t saying that a person can say thing without the possibility of being wrong, contradict the whole point of that original idea?”
Depends whether you are referring to your “proof” that my assertion that human beings are fallible is false, which if your proof were not mistaken, would contradict the whole idea, or whether you are saying that human beings can sometimes make true statements, in which case, that says nothing whatever about the fallibility of the statement-generating system and thus does not contradict the whole idea.
“That’s why I say that it is self-contradictory.”
We seem to be having trouble agreeing upon a matter of pure logic don’t we? Which just goes to show: human beings are fallible statement-generating systems; otherwise, we’d agree, wouldn’t we?
See also:
- Rationality in Popperian epistemology
- “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”
- “What if they bring home objectionable literature?!”
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1994, ‘People are fallible statement-generating systems’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/people-are-fallible-statement-generating-systems