Fallibilism, fundamentalism, folderol

Umberto Eco defends the outlook and practices of science:

The problem is that in many critiques of the ideology of progress (or the so-called spirit of the Enlightenment) the spirit of science is often identified with that of certain idealistic philosophies of the 19th century, according to which history is always moving on towards better things, or toward the triumphant realisation of itself, of the spirit or of some other driving force that is forever marching on towards optimal ends.
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Modern science does not hold that what is new is always right. On the contrary, it is based on the principle of "fallibilism"... according to which science progresses by continually correcting itself, falsifying its hypotheses by trial and error, admitting its own mistakes - and by considering that an experiment that doesn't work out is not a failure but is worth as much as a successful one because it proves that a certain line of research was mistaken and it is necessary either to change direction or even to start over from scratch.

It's one of the favourite moves of postmodernists and other such partisans of intellectual confusion to charge the rationalist defenders of science, or even just of knowledge which is based on evidence and reasoned argument, with claiming some kind of certainty. To make the charge sound really bad, they will attach to the word 'certainty' other words like 'absolute', 'metaphysical', 'transcendental' and 'God-like' - with 'arrogant' usually thrown in there somewhere as well. OK, so there is a naive kind of dogmatic faith in science, less common today than it used to be, against which this charge has some bite. But so far as genuine science and all rational and empirically-based forms of enquiry are concerned, it's as Umberto Eco says: they operate on the principle that their own results may always be challenged and that they're subject to revision or refutation in the light of new evidence, fresh logical or theoretical insights, and so forth.

Such forms of enquiry are anything but absolute. On the other hand, the discourse-relative approaches with which partisans of the postmodern would replace these forms of enquiry institute new, if lightly disguised, absolutisms of their own. Every view of things, every belief, is ipso facto now validated, merely as being one; that is, merely as being a view or a belief amongst other views and beliefs, with its own framing assumptions, meanings, insertion within real-life processes, and regardless of how false or noxious it might (according to available evidence) appear to be. The claims made by the aforesaid partisans themselves, whether about the belief systems of others or about anything, become immune from effective criticism, because they - the partisans or their claims - don't have to answer to any normal consideration, like that of matching what's out there in the real world, or that of following through on the consequences of what they say in one place for what they say in another. These considerations are not any longer requirements of knowledge so much as they are optional modes of discourse. You may take them or leave them. It allows the 'language-game' partisan to say more or less what she wants - not quite at random, but according to the discursive need of the instant - as many of them indeed do. It's very tiresome.