The Case for Infallibilism

Infallibilism is the claim that knowledge requires that one satisfies some infallibility condition. I spell out three distinct such conditions: epistemic, evidential and modal infallibility. Epistemic infallibility turns out to be simply a consequence of epistemic closure, and is not infallibilist in any relevant sense. Evidential infallibilism i s unwarranted but it is not an satisfactory characterization of the infallibilist intuition. Modal infallibility, by contrast, captures the core infallibilist intuition, and I argue that i t is required to solve the Gettier problem and account for lottery cases. Finally, I discuss whether modal infallibilism has sceptical consequences and argue that it is an open question whose answer depends on one’s account of alethic possibility.