The Paradox of Infallibility
Issue: Issue 15 • Author/s: Daniel Rönnedal
Topics: Epistemology, Philosophical logic, Philosophy of language
This paper discusses a new paradox, the paradox of infallibility. Let us define infallibility in the following way: (Def I) t is infallible if and only if (iff) everything t believes is true, where t is any term. (Def I) entails the following proposition: (I) It is necessary that for every individual x, x is infallible iff every proposition x believes is true. However, (I) seems to be inconsistent with the following proposition (P): It is possible that there is some individual who believes exactly one proposition, namely that she…