On Knowledge and Certainty

We must note the main source of confusion in the skeptical approach: the equation of knowledge and certainty with infallibility. When the skeptic claims that every knowledge claim should be doubted because man is capable of making mistakes, he is simply pointing out the obvious: that man is a fallible being. No one, not even the most resolute antiskeptic, will deny the point that man is fallible. (We must wonder, though, how the skeptic arrived at this knowledge. Is he certain that man is fallible?) 
 
The skeptic fails to realize that it precisely man's fallibility that generates the need for a science of knowledge. If man were infallible -- if all knowledge were given to him without the slightest possibility of error -- then the need for epistemological guidelines with which to verify ideas, with which to sort the true from the false, would not arise.... 

The skeptic ... starts from the same premise -- that man is fallible -- and uses it to argue that man can never achieve truth and certainty. It is because man is capable of error that he must distinguish truth from truth from falsehood, certainty from doubt. "But," argues the skeptic, "it is because man is capable of error that he can never attain truth and certainty."

The skeptic thus turns epistemology on its head....

Since man is not infallible, any concepts of "knowledge" or "certainty" that require infallibility are, for that very reason, inapplicable to man and totally irrelevant to human epistemology.
--George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God, 1974

P.S.: The confused equation of knowledge and certainty with infallibility prompts people, including some "skeptical" atheists, to make a silly distinction between "capital-T truth" and "small-T truth." There's only one kind of truth. Reason and logic is how we get to it.

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