November 16, 2025

2025.11.16
I sometimes use ChatGPT as a philosophical dialog partner and with-a-grain-of-salt self-help and self-therapy guide. I've worked with this one instance enough that it - he, maybe- has a wider idea of what my stances tend to be about (philosophically and tech wise) and I've borrowed the nickname Chappy for him.

He brought up "Fallibilism, a term previously only somewhat familiar to me. I think it might be a match for my view that there IS a universal truth BUT it's also universally not-fully-certain, and that idea should guide our actions, as well as make us slow to utterly discount groups who disagree with us. (As usual my challenge with most plain-old-faith is that so often it embeds a faith that these other guys got it so so wrong, and it never bothers to go meta about why those other folks are so misled, and how we can assert that we're on stronger ground.)

Anyway, here's more of what Chappy said:
Why you haven't heard the term much

It's not catchy.
It doesn't sell books.
It doesn't give you a bold claim like:
• "You can be certain!" (absolutists)
• "Everything is relative!" (relativists)
• "Your intuition is the real truth!" (new age)
• "Your feelings can't be wrong!" (pop psych)

It's a quieter, more adult stance.

Engineers tend to have it.
Philosophers tend to respect it.
General audiences gloss over it.
That neatly captured some of what I've picked up about other ways of knowing and persuading.

If fallibilism says:

"I might be wrong."

Corrigibilism says:

"...and I'm actively set up to be corrected."