Sweeter than Knowledge: The Primacy of Error and the Delicate Structure of Our Fallibility

By making fallibilism's own expression part of fallibilism's own problem, this open access book explores the ways in which the negative aspects of our experience—such as error or doubt—can be "as sweet as" or even "sweeter than" knowledge, as Dante suggests in the Divine Comedy. It does so, primarily by addressing the need to view ourselves from a universal standpoint outside, which is also always a particular position from within, and by translating this contradictory condition into a strong fallibilist framework. In this framework, not only do we make mistakes, as is usually acknowledged, but we must also make mistakes in order to know. This immanent epistemology leads to a peculiar hermeneutics that, rooted in historicity, combines the vehicles of both formal and dialectical logic. Taking this approach also in concrete, practical terms, the book constructs a broad exegetical arc from Hegel's phenomenology (with its appeal to mistrust), through Nietzsche's perspectivism and Peirce's scientific method to Wittgenstein’s relational analysis of truth. United in their rejection of Descartes’ absolute notion of truth and certainty, these approaches all conceive of knowledge as "more than" it supposedly is. This is what "sweeter than knowledge" can mean as well: experience in all its forms and flavors, from science to religion to art. This volume will appeal to academic philosophers and students interested in pragmatism, the philosophy of language and logic, and German idealism.