Originally posted by Palynka
I'm still having trouble to understand how such a mistake could come about without assuming that omniscience is bounded somehow (e.g. the knowledge about the strenght required to guarantee the truth of the judgment in question).
If somebody were to say "I know that P, but it's possible I am wrong", how are we supposed to interpret this? You could interpret this as his saying that it is a possible state of affairs both that he knows P and that his belief in P is false. But, that is simply not a logically possible state of affairs because it leads to a contradiction (his knowing P entails that P is true; and his mistakenly believing that P entails that P is false). Odds are, the person is a fallibilist, and you have just totally misinterpreted what he is actually trying to say.
It can come down to modal construal. Maybe the person means that, for example, his evidence for P is not
entailing evidence. In other words, the evidence does not logically entail that P is true (evidence is taken to be propositional). Thus, in just this sense, he means it's "possible" that he is mistaken. Still, a lack of entailing evidence for P does not preclude knowledge of P, so he nevertheless knows P, say on the grounds of very good, though not entailing, evidence.
Basically, I don't disagree with your objection (if I understand it correctly), which boils down to saying that it is impossible for an omniscient being (actually, the being doesn't have to be omniscient for this to hold) to both know that P and to be mistaken in his belief that P.*** I totally agree because that leads to contradiction (P and not-P). But I simply don't find that interesting. What I would be interested in is alternative construals about what it means to be "possibly" mistaken even where you are knowledgeable. I'm sure I am not making myself clear, but I don't know how else to put it.
***Either that or your objection is that you don't see how an omniscient being could know that P and yet believe that not-P. If that's the case, then I agree with that as well. But, again, I do not think that is necessarily what is meant by saying that it is possible that an omniscient being could be mistaken (although maybe yours could be a reasonable interpretation).
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More than that, in this thread I was hoping to get those who hold that it is impossible for God to be mistaken to tell me what they mean by that.