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The Myth of Stochastic Infallibilism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2019

Adam Michael Bricker Open the ORCID record for Adam Michael Bricker [Opens in a new window]
Adam Michael Bricker*
Affiliation:
University of Oulu and University of Turku, Finland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

There is a widespread attitude in epistemology that, if you know on the basis of perception, then you couldn't have been wrong as a matter of chance. Despite the apparent intuitive plausibility of this attitude, which I'll refer to here as “stochastic infallibilism”, it fundamentally misunderstands the way that human perceptual systems actually work. Perhaps the most important lesson of signal detection theory (SDT) is that our percepts are inherently subject to random error, and here I'll highlight some key empirical research that underscores this point. In doing so, it becomes clear that we are in fact quite willing to attribute knowledge to S that p even when S's perceptual belief that p could have been randomly false. In short, perceptual processes can randomly fail, and perceptual knowledge is stochastically fallible. The narrow implication here is that any epistemological account that entails stochastic infallibilism, like safety, is simply untenable. More broadly, this myth of stochastic infallibilism provides a valuable illustration of the importance of integrating empirical findings into epistemological thinking.

Keywords

Infallibilismperceptual knowledgesignal detection theoryneural noisesafety
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 523 - 538
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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