On Knowledge vs. Confidence

[anvi]

After a long time thinking through problems in epistemology, I guess I've settled (for now) on a kind of fallibalism.  We can garner various levels of what you're calling "confidence" in a belief or a "piece" of knowledge depending on our justificatory criterion and the strength of our evidence or degrees of confirmatory cognitions.  But there is nothing that guarantees that such a belief, though it may be reliably justified for the time being, might not be upset, confuted, supplemented or dispelled entirely by future experience or findings.  It may then be more or less justifiable to hold certain beliefs, or think one is in possession of knowledge about some specific things for the moment, but its possible we may find sometime soon or in the distant future that we were wrong.  We are in almost every conceivable respect limited beings, and so whatever we believe we know will also be limited and provisional. 

[anvi]

Yes, all good points Beet.  The other thing I like about falliblism is that it doesn't necessarily call into question beliefs in which we currently have a great deal of confidence.  We can, that is, make meaningful distinctions between beliefs we consider to have no justification at all, poor justification, adequate justification and strong justification, on various grounds.  Our basis for maintaining a certain set of beliefs will be as strong as the standards we use to verify them and the quality of the kinds of evidence we have in their support.  So, a falliblist can say that there are good grounds for me to believe that something is true under the prevailing circumstances and state of knowledge.  There are just no grounds upon which I can claim anything like "absolute certainty," since, because we cannot know what we will learn in the future, our presently held beliefs may be discovered to be false later on, both in our own lives and in succeeding generations.  Falliblism safeguards our intuitions about strongly supported beliefs, but also acknowledges inescapable human limits, and it's that which strikes me as the great virtue of the idea.