Fallibilism:
Fallibilism is the epistemological thesis that no belief (theory, view, thesis, and so on) can ever be rationally supported or justified in a conclusive way. Always, there remains a possible doubt as to the truth of the belief. Fallibilism applies that assessment even to science’s best-entrenched claims and to people’s best-loved commonsense views. Some epistemologists have taken fallibilism to imply skepticism, according to which none of those claims or views are ever well justified or knowledge. In fact, though, it is fallibilist epistemologists (which is to say, the majority of epistemologists) who tend not to be skeptics about the existence of knowledge or justified belief. Generally, those epistemologists see themselves as thinking about knowledge and justification in a comparatively realistic way — by recognizing the fallibilist realities of human cognitive capacities, even while accommodating those fallibilities within a theory that allows perpetually fallible people to have knowledge and justified beliefs. Still, although that is the aim of most epistemologists, the question arises of whether it is a coherent aim. Are they pursuing a coherent way of thinking about knowledge and justification? Much current philosophical debate is centered upon that question. Epistemologists generally seek to understand knowledge and justification in a way that permits fallibilism to be describing a benign truth about how we can gain knowledge and justified beliefs. One way of encapsulating that project is by asking whether it is possible for a person ever to have fallible knowledge and justification. [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Noted in “Science Does Not Have All the Answers—and This Is Not a Problem,” Guilherme Brambatti Guzzo and Gabriel Dall’Alba, Skeptical Inquirer (January/February 2024, paywall):
Science may be best understood as a continuous process in which inquiries about the world and ourselves hardly, if ever, have final answers. The philosopher Lee McIntyre highlights the open-ended character of science (McIntyre 2019); it operates under epistemic principles such as fallibilism, which demands open-mindedness, skepticism, and the continuous revision of ideas within communities of inquiry. So, when there are answers, they must never be regarded as definitive or beyond all possible doubt.
“Humans can have knowledge of the world, even though such knowledge is imperfect, and reliable comparisons can be made between competing theories or opinions.” That is the essence of fallibilism in the words of Michael Matthews (2014, 70). Fallibilism, in this regard, is a position that is opposed to relativism and absolutism. We may, at the same time, discard the assumption that “anything goes” or that there are no better and worse ways to test ideas, and reject the notion that the current knowledge we have about the world and ourselves is absolutely perfect, incapable of improvement.
