How Not to Be a Fallibilist.

The article critically examines the origins and methodological status of fallibilist intuitions about knowledge, focusing on the "Moorean constraint"—the idea that we have abundant knowledge—which is central to fallibilism. It argues that fallibilist reasoning often relies on a reflective question substitution heuristic, supported by cognitive biases such as availability and representativeness heuristics, which leads to a vicious circularity involving confirmation bias, begging the question, and bootstrapping. This circularity undermines the independent justification of fallibilism's cornerstone and suggests that epistemic methodology should be more impartial and theory-neutral, allowing for a fair comparison between fallibilism and infallibilism. The article further contends that prominent ordinary language fallibilist epistemologists implicitly employ this questionable reasoning pattern, and it proposes an alternative abductive methodology that treats fallibilist intuitions as data to be explained rather than fixed starting points.