Fallibilism and the Certainty Norm of Assertion

Among the main reactions to scepticism, fallibilism is certainly the most popular nowadays. However, fallibilism faces a very strong and well-known objection. It has to grant that concessive knowledge attributions-assertions of the form "I know that p but it might be that not p"-can be true. Yet, these assertions plainly sound incoherent. Fallibilists have proposed to explain this incoherence pragmatically. The main proponents of this approach appeal to Gricean implicatures (Rysiew in Nous 35(4):477514, 2001; Dougherty and Rysiew in Philos Phenomenol Res 78(1):123132, 2009; Dougherty and Rysiew in Synthese 181(3):395403, 2011). Very recently, some philosophers have observed that fallibilists can also explain this apparent incoherence pragmatically if they embrace a (context-sensitive) certainty norm for assertion (Petersen in Synthese 196(11):4691-4710, 2019; Beddor in Philos Impr 20(8), 2020; Vollet in Dialectica 74:3, 2020). In this paper, I argue for the superiority of this latter explanation over its older rivals.