[HN Gopher] In Memoriam: Edmund L. Gettier III
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In Memoriam: Edmund L. Gettier III
Author : nkurz
Score : 18 points
Date : 2021-09-12 02:54 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.umass.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.umass.edu)
| allturtles wrote:
| I don't get it. I read case I, and I don't see how Jones is
| 'justified' in believing (e), since his belief is based on a
| false premise derived from hearsay. But maybe I'm missing some
| technicality in the meaning of 'justified.'
|
| In any case, "justified true belief" seems like a flimsy basis
| for epistemology, since we have no independent oracle to ask
| whether our beliefs are true. So this definition doesn't seem to
| do anything to help us separate knowledge from non-knowledge.
| fmoralesc wrote:
| One assumption there is that testimony can provide you with
| justification. We are told by the article that Edmund Gettier
| has died earlier this year, and we seem to be justified in
| believing that. In that case, let's assume, justification and
| truth matches. But this isn't the case always. You may see that
| the color of the wall is red, for example, and may feel prima
| facie justified in believing that the wall is red. But it may
| be the case that, unknown to you, there is a red light
| projected over the wall, which is actually cream color. In an
| absolute sense, you are wrong, but your belief is still
| justified. 'Justified' and 'true' are used for different
| purposes.
| allturtles wrote:
| Okay, I buy that, you can have a justified belief that isn't
| true, if justification is itself subjective/probabilistic
| rather than deductive.
|
| Then this paper argues that you can have a justified belief
| that is true, but still isn't knowledge. Why? Because the
| justification is faulty. Well sure, since we've admitted in
| the first place that justifications can be faulty. So why
| would you ever assume that they invariably lead to knowledge?
| Had the concept of believing right thing for the wrong
| reasons not been invented in the 1960s?
|
| I just can't get myself into a mindset where this is a
| revelatory finding, but maybe I'm too steeped in a bayesian
| worldview.
| natt941 wrote:
| Just to be clear, it isn't that people though justification
| (which, yes, can be probabilistic/non-deductive) invariable
| leads to knowledge, and these aren't supposed to be cases
| of believing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
|
| Suppose you grant that justification is probabilistic.
| What's the extra condition that makes justified belief
| count as knowledge? Pre-Gettier, one might have been
| inclined to say that it's that your justified belief is
| actually right--what you believe is true. Gettier's point
| is that this can't be the full explanation of the
| difference between merely justified belief and knowledge.
|
| Similarly, suppose you grant that one can have true belief
| that falls short of knowledge because one lacks "right
| reasons". Well, "right reasons" is a tricky notion, but
| suppose this means something like good evidence, or more
| generally, the sorts of reasons that we take to show your
| reasoning in a responsible way. Again, Gettier's point is
| that good evidence or responsible belief (assuming this
| isn't limited to deduction from things that you're certain
| about) isn't sufficient to make true belief into knowledge.
|
| (Fwiw, Gettier wasn't the first person to point this out,
| but he did it in an especially vivid way which got a lot of
| people thinking hard about what else you needed to say if
| you were going to explain the difference between mere
| justified true belief and knowledge.)
| allturtles wrote:
| > Suppose you grant that justification is probabilistic.
| What's the extra condition that makes justified belief
| count as knowledge? Pre-Gettier, one might have been
| inclined to say that it's that your justified belief is
| actually right--what you believe is true.
|
| I would say that what makes it count as knowledge is the
| quality of the justification. If Jones had seen a written
| job offer to Smith rather than just hearsay that he would
| get the job, his belief that Smith would get the job
| would probably count as 'knowledge.'
|
| Requiring that what you believe be actually true to count
| as knowledge is begging the question, since that requires
| either already having 'knowledge' that it's true, or
| having direct access to objective reality that no one
| has.
| fmoralesc wrote:
| The problem is that if your definition of knowledge
| requires only three conditions (belief, truth and
| justification), then it has counterexamples, namely, the
| Gettier cases. So we need to either revise our concept of
| justification (for example, make it so that a knowledge-apt
| belief is justified only if it is for the right reasons --
| but then, how to account for justified but false beliefs?),
| look for ways to supplement the analysis with additional
| conditions (for example, that the conditions are satisfied
| in a robust ways counterfactually), or reject the idea that
| knowledge can be analyzed altogether.
|
| To make it more concrete how this sort of thing can get
| complicated quickly, consider your own explanation of the
| case. As I take it, you think that the issue is that "the
| justification is faulty". But how is it faulty, besides not
| being true (remember, we have reasons to want justification
| to not imply truth)? And also, there are Gettier-like cases
| where we cannot say that justification is faulty or where
| we can't find false premises (for example, cases where it
| seems like the problem is that the individuals in questions
| are not in an appropriate environment, see [here](https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem#False_premises...)).
| allturtles wrote:
| Thanks for engaging in the conversation. When I say "the
| justification is faulty" I just mean it's not deductively
| air-tight, therefore we can't assume that it leads to
| truth. In this sense, pretty much all justifications are
| 'faulty.'
|
| The thing I'm struggling with here, ultimately, is truth.
| All of these problems rely on some outside, oracular
| knowledge of what is true, (e.g. in the example you
| linked there really is a cow/sheep in the field, or Mark
| is really hiding under the desk). But we have no such
| oracle to refer to, so trying to ground knowledge in
| truth seems like a lost cause in the first place. All we
| can have is more or less certain beliefs.
| 13415 wrote:
| Sure, from a present perspective on epistemology this may
| make sense, since we now know all the troubles and faulty
| attempts to decide proper justifications from incorrect
| ones after Gettier's paper. However, back then the idea
| to define knowledge using JTB was on the table. The
| knowledge as justified true belief view is about a
| definition of knowledge, not a learning method or how to
| gain knowledge. Many authors would even have rejected the
| idea of graded belief entirely and said you either
| believe something or don't (many still do).
|
| Since you accept the notion of truth (otherwise you
| couldn't be a Bayesian), you'd have to explain why you
| reject the realist conception of knowledge inherent to
| the JTB view. Gettier's paper is one attack on it,
| arguing for graded belief representations is another type
| of attack on it. In this context it is worth noting that
| graded belief and categorical belief are very hard to
| reconcile because they have different logical properties
| [1]. It's known as Locke's Thesis and quite a vexing
| problem.
|
| That being said, I share your intuitions. The factivity
| of knowledge has created more problems in epistemology
| than the notion of knowledge was supposed to solve. The
| German word _Erkenntnis_ in _Erkenntnistheorie_ has a
| meaning closer to _learning theory_. AFAIK there is no
| good equivalent to this in English.
|
| [1] http://fitelson.org/coherence/hawthorne.pdf
| [deleted]
| fdhfdjkfhdkj wrote:
| Where is Jones in the thought experiment Case I. He attempting
| to conclude ideas without external influence. There is always
| external influence
| prvc wrote:
| You're trying to smuggle the "truth" criterion back into the
| "justification". Any standard of justification that depends on
| truth is impractical (to say the least) to meet, creates
| conceptual confusion, and, if applied to the definition of
| knowledge in this case, makes the "truth" criterion redundant.
| allturtles wrote:
| Not so. I was applying a strict definition of justified,
| where justified means "logically necessary." Others have
| clarified elsewhere in this conversation that this in't the
| intent.
|
| As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I already think the
| truth criterion is redundant, since if you can determine
| whether your knowledge is true, you don't need to worry about
| justifying it or believing it.
| nkurz wrote:
| I've often been intrigued by cases where erroneous logic
| coincidentally leads to a correct conclusion. In philosophy,
| these are known as "Gettier Problems":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
|
| They are named after the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who
| in 1963 published what is probably the most influential 3 page
| paper ever written by a philosopher:
| https://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf
|
| Searching once again to find the name for this phenomenon, I was
| surprised to see that Gettier himself was still alive until
| earlier this year. The submission is a summary of his career by
| one of his colleagues at UMass.
| fmoralesc wrote:
| Gettier cases are not cases where erroneous logic leads to a
| correct conclusion. The reasoning in a Gettier case can be
| perfectly fine; this is why the belief of Gettierized subjects
| remains justified. The issue is, rather, that because of "luck"
| there is a risk for reasoning/belief formation mechanism to go
| wrong, at the same time that it turns out to have produced a
| correct/true belief. The issue derives from there being a gap
| between a proposition being justified and it being true (Linda
| Zagzebski has a great paper that shows that whenever that is
| the case, you will end up with an analogous problem).
| bobthechef wrote:
| Interesting story: Gettier only published his paper on the
| subject because of pressure to publish. Apparently he wasn't
| especially prolific and this led him to publish something,
| anything, to get people off his back.
|
| I recall thinking that the famous paper of his was a little
| forced. As I understood it, it seemed to conflate the question
| of whether JTB is a good definition of knowledge -- I think it
| absolutely is -- and whether some given proposition is actually
| known. In the latter case, you would need to know that
| proposition p is true, that your justification is true, and
| that you believe it. This becomes a bit more murky IMO, but it
| doesn't undermine JTB I would say.
| prvc wrote:
| I hypothesize that every philosophical definition is susceptible
| to a Gettier-type problem.
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