“Sākṣī and the epistemic grounding of knowledge”, Brhat, March 26, 2026
“Fallibilism requires, at minimum, a witnessing consciousness capable of registering successive cognitions and recognising their incompatibility. This article argues that positing a merely conscious but fallible witness is insufficient, since it relocates rather than resolves the infinite regress problem. The sākṣī of Dvaita vedānta, whose infallibility pertains not to cognitive content but to the act of disclosure itself, provides the stable ground that fallibilism’s own operations presuppose. Without the witness, the ad infinitum structure of fallibilism is rendered unstable since an endlessly revisable cognitive chain lacks the stable point from which error can be recognised. Accordingly, the coherence of fallibilism itself rests on an implicit presupposition of a stable ground of awareness (the sākṣī) whose illumination conditions the intelligibility of all cognitive operations and their continual revision.
Introduction
Fallibilism is an epistemic stance that denies the existence of any intrinsically authoritative sources of knowledge or infallible methods for establishing truth. It holds that all knowledge consists of conjectures that must remain open to rigorous criticism and testing. Explanations that withstand such scrutiny are accepted only provisionally valid until replaced by better explanations. Thus, fallibilism treats both knowledge and indeed the methods used to evaluate it as perpetually revisable, embracing an open-ended, ad infinitum process of improvement[1]. This position is most systematically developed in Karl Popper’s account of knowledge growth through conjecture and refutation, where learning occurs not by verification but by the elimination of error[1]. Yet this process of revision itself presupposes something: a subject capable of registering one cognition as replacing another. The question of what grounds this registering capacity is one fallibilism does not address.[1]
The gap in fallibilism is not in its account of knowledge-episodes or their revision, but in its silence about the subject to whom revisions appear. Popper explicitly argues that the question “how do you know?” is the wrong question — what matters is whether a claim can withstand criticism.[1] This refusal to ask about the knowing subject is methodologically deliberate: Popper later develops this into a full epistemology without a knowing subject, positing a World 3 of objective knowledge that exists independently of any mind.[2] But this displacement of the subject does not dissolve the problem. Criticism must be conducted by someone, and the recognition that a claim has failed to withstand criticism must occur to someone. For a correction to count as a correction, an earlier cognition must be held in relation to a later one, and their incompatibility must be registered by something. A purely computational chain of knowledge-episodes has no standpoint from which this comparison occurs. This requires, at minimum, a witness. This is what Dvaita vedānta calls the sākṣī…….”
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