The Gettier problem, in the field of
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
, is a landmark
philosophical
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
problem concerning the understanding of
descriptive knowledge
In epistemology, descriptive knowledge (also known as propositional knowledge, knowing-that, declarative knowledge, or constative knowledge) is knowledge that can be expressed in a declarative sentence or an indicative proposition. "Knowing-that" c ...
. Attributed to American philosopher
Edmund Gettier
Edmund Lee Gettier III (; October 31, 1927 – March 23, 2021) was an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is best known for his short 1963 article "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", which has generated an exten ...
, Gettier-type counterexamples (called "Gettier-cases") challenge the long-held
justified true belief
Definitions of knowledge try to determine the essential features of knowledge. Closely related terms are conception of knowledge, theory of knowledge, and analysis of knowledge. Some general features of knowledge are widely accepted among philoso ...
(JTB) account of knowledge. The JTB account holds that knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief; if all three conditions (justification, truth, and belief) are met of a given claim, then we have knowledge of that claim. In his 1963 three-page paper titled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?",
Gettier attempts to illustrate by means of two counterexamples that there are cases where individuals can have a justified, true belief regarding a claim but still fail to know it because the reasons for the belief, while justified, turn out to be false. Thus, Gettier claims to have shown that the JTB account is inadequate because it does not account for all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.
The term "Gettier problem", "Gettier case", or even the adjective "Gettiered", is sometimes used to describe any case in the field of epistemology that purports to repudiate the JTB account of knowledge.
Responses to Gettier's paper have been numerous. Some reject Gettier's examples as inadequate justification, while others seek to adjust the JTB account of knowledge and blunt the force of these counterexamples. Gettier problems have even found their way into sociological experiments in which researchers have studied intuitive responses to Gettier cases from people of varying demographics.
History
The question of what constitutes "knowledge" is as old as philosophy itself. Early instances are found in
Plato's dialogues
Plato ( ; grc-gre, wikt:Πλάτων, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greeks, Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thou ...
, notably ''
Meno
''Meno'' (; grc-gre, Μένων, ''Ménōn'') is a Socratic dialogue by Plato. Meno begins the dialogue by asking Socrates whether virtue is taught, acquired by practice, or comes by nature. In order to determine whether virtue is teachable ...
'' (97a–98b) and ''
Theaetetus''. Gettier himself was not actually the first to raise the problem named after him; its existence was acknowledged by both
Alexius Meinong
Alexius Meinong Ritter von Handschuchsheim (17 July 1853 – 27 November 1920) was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology. He also made contributions to philosophy of mind and theory of value.
Life
Alexius Meinong' ...
and
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
, the latter of which discussed the problem in his book ''Human knowledge: Its scope and limits''. In fact, the problem has been known since the
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
, and both Indian philosopher
Dharmottara Dharmottara (Tibetan: ''chos mchog'') was an 8th-century Buddhist author of several important works on pramana (valid cognition, epistemology), including commentaries on the writings of Dharmakirti. Only one of his works survives in the original San ...
and
scholastic logician
Peter of Mantua
Peter may refer to:
People
* List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name
* Peter (given name)
** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church
* Peter (surname), a sur ...
presented examples of it.
Dharmottara, in his commentary c. 770 CE on
Dharmakirti
Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 6th or 7th century; Tibetan: ཆོས་ཀྱི་གྲགས་པ་; Wylie: ''chos kyi grags pa''), was an influential Indian Buddhist philosopher who worked at Nālandā.Tom Tillemans (2011)Dharmakirti Stanford ...
's ''Ascertainment of Knowledge'', gives the following two examples:
Various theories of knowledge, including some of the proposals that emerged in Western philosophy after Gettier in 1963, were debated by Indo-Tibetan epistemologists before and after Dharmottara.
[ In particular, ]Gaṅgeśa
Gaṅgeśa ( sa, गंगेश उपाध्याय, ''Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya'') (first half of the 14th century) was an Indian philosopher, logician and mathematician from the kingdom of Mithila. He established the Navya-Nyāya ("New Lo ...
in the 14th century advanced a detailed causal theory of knowledge.[
Russell's case, called the stopped clock case, goes as follows: Alice sees a clock that reads two o'clock and believes that the time is two o'clock. It is, in fact, two o'clock. There's a problem, however: unknown to Alice, the clock she's looking at stopped twelve hours ago. Alice thus has an accidentally true, justified belief. Russell provides an answer of his own to the problem. Edmund Gettier's formulation of the problem was important as it coincided with the rise of the sort of ]philosophical naturalism
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.
According to philosopher Steven Lockwood, naturalism can be separated into an ontological sense and a me ...
promoted by W. V. O. Quine W. may refer to:
* SoHo (Australian TV channel) (previously W.), an Australian pay television channel
* ''W.'' (film), a 2008 American biographical drama film based on the life of George W. Bush
* "W.", the fifth track from Codeine's 1992 EP ''Bar ...
and others, and was used as a justification for a shift towards externalist
Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integration of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of d ...
theories of justification. John L. Pollock
John L. Pollock (1940–2009) was an American philosopher known for influential work in epistemology, philosophical logic, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.
Life and career
Born John Leslie Pollock in Atchison, Kansas, on Janu ...
and Joseph Cruz have stated that the Gettier problem has "fundamentally altered the character of contemporary epistemology" and has become "a central problem of epistemology since it poses a clear barrier to analyzing knowledge".
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic.
From 1963 to 1982, ...
rejects the historical analysis:
Despite this, Plantinga ''does'' accept that some philosophers before Gettier have advanced a JTB account of knowledge, specifically C. I. Lewis
Clarence Irving Lewis (April 12, 1883 – February 3, 1964), usually cited as C. I. Lewis, was an American academic philosopher. He is considered the progenitor of modern modal logic and the founder of conceptual pragmatism. First a noted logic ...
and A. J. Ayer
Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer (; 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989), usually cited as A. J. Ayer, was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books '' Language, Truth, and Logic'' (1936) ...
.
Knowledge as justified true belief (JTB)
The JTB account of knowledge is the claim that knowledge can be conceptually analyzed as justified true belief, which is to say that the ''meaning'' of sentences such as "Smith knows that it rained today" can be given with the following set of conditions, which are necessary and sufficient
In logic and mathematics, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between two statements. For example, in the conditional statement: "If then ", is necessary for , because the truth of ...
for knowledge to obtain:
The JTB account was first credited to Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
, though Plato argued against this very account of knowledge in the '' Theaetetus'' (210a). This account of knowledge is what Gettier subjected to criticism.
Gettier's two original counterexamples
Gettier's paper used counterexamples (see also thought experiment
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
History
The ancient Greek ''deiknymi'' (), or thought experiment, "was the most anci ...
) to argue that there are cases of beliefs that are both true and justified—therefore satisfying all three conditions for knowledge on the JTB account—but that do not appear to be genuine cases of knowledge. Therefore, Gettier argued, his counterexamples show that the JTB account of knowledge is false, and thus that a different conceptual analysis is needed to correctly track what we mean by "knowledge".
Gettier's case is based on two counterexamples to the JTB analysis, both involving a fictional character named Smith. Each relies on two claims. Firstly, that justification is preserved by entailment
Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one ...
, and secondly that this applies coherently to Smith's putative "belief". That is, that if Smith is justified in believing P, and Smith realizes that the truth of P entails the truth of Q, then Smith would ''also'' be justified in believing Q. Gettier calls these counterexamples "Case I" and "Case II":
Case I
Case II
False premises and generalized Gettier-style problems
In both of Gettier's actual examples (see also counterfactual conditional
Counterfactual conditionals (also ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactua ...
), the justified true belief came about, if Smith's purported claims are disputable, as the result of entailment (but see also material conditional
The material conditional (also known as material implication) is an operation commonly used in logic. When the conditional symbol \rightarrow is interpreted as material implication, a formula P \rightarrow Q is true unless P is true and Q is ...
) from justified false beliefs that "Jones will get the job" (in case I), and that "Jones owns a Ford" (in case II). This led some early responses to Gettier to conclude that the definition of knowledge
Definitions of knowledge try to determine the essential features of knowledge. Closely related terms are conception of knowledge, theory of knowledge, and analysis of knowledge. Some general features of knowledge are widely accepted among philoso ...
could be easily adjusted, so that knowledge was justified true belief that does not depend on false premise
A false premise is an incorrect proposition that forms the basis of an argument or syllogism. Since the premise (proposition, or assumption) is not correct, the conclusion drawn may be in error. However, the logical validity of an argument is ...
s. The interesting issue that arises is then of how to know which premises are in reality false or true when deriving a conclusion, because as in the Gettier cases, one sees that premises can be very reasonable to believe and be likely true, but unknown to the believer there are confounding factors and extra information that may have been missed while concluding something. The question that arises is therefore to what extent would one have to be able to go about attempting to "prove" all premises in the argument before solidifying a conclusion.
The generalized problem
In a 1966 scenario known as "The sheep in the field", Roderick Chisholm
Roderick Milton Chisholm (; November 27, 1916 – January 19, 1999) was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception.
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ...
asks us to imagine that someone, X, is standing outside a field looking at something that looks like a sheep (although in fact, it is a dog disguised as a sheep). X believes there is a sheep in the field, and in fact, X is right because there is a sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. Hence, X has a justified true belief that there is a sheep in the field.
Another scenario by Brian Skyrms
Brian Skyrms (born 1938) is an American philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He has worked on problem ...
is "The Pyromaniac", in which a struck match lights not for the reasons the pyromaniac imagines but because of some unknown "Q radiation".
A different perspective on the issue is given by Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
Education and career
Goldman ea ...
in the "fake barns" scenario (crediting Carl Ginet Carl Ginet (born 1932) is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. His work is primarily in action theory, moral responsibility, free will, and epistemology.
Ginet received his BA from Occidental College in 1954, and h ...
with the example). In this one, a man is driving in the countryside, and sees what looks exactly like a barn. Accordingly, he thinks that he is seeing a barn. In fact, that is what he is doing. But what he does not know is that the neighborhood generally consists of many fake barns — barn facades designed to look exactly like real barns when viewed from the road. Since, if he had been looking at one of them, he would have been unable to tell the difference, his "knowledge" that he was looking at a barn would seem to be poorly founded.
Objections to the "no false premises" approach
The "no false premises" (or "no false lemmas") solution which was proposed early in the discussion has been criticized, as more general Gettier-style problems were then constructed or contrived in which the justified true belief is said to not seem to be the result of a chain of reasoning from a justified false belief. For example:
It is argued that it seems as though Luke does not "know" that Mark is in the room, even though it is claimed he has a justified true belief that Mark is in the room, but it is not nearly so clear that the ''perceptual belief'' that "Mark is in the room" was inferred from any premises at all, let alone any false ones, nor led to significant conclusions on its own; Luke did not seem to be reasoning about anything; "Mark is in the room" seems to have been part of what he ''seemed to see''.
Constructing Gettier problems
The main idea behind Gettier's examples is that the justification for the belief is flawed or incorrect, but the belief turns out to be true by sheer luck. Linda Zagzebski
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (born 1946) is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She wr ...
shows that any analysis of knowledge in terms of true belief and some other element of justification that is independent from truth, will be liable to Gettier cases. She offers a formula for generating Gettier cases:
(1) start with a case of justified false belief;
(2) amend the example, making the element of justification strong enough for knowledge, but the belief false by sheer chance;
(3) amend the example again, adding another element of chance such that the belief is true, but which leaves the element of justification unchanged;
This will generate an example of a belief that is sufficiently justified (on some analysis of knowledge) to be knowledge, which is true, and which is intuitively not an example of knowledge. In other words, Gettier cases can be generated for any analysis of knowledge that involves a justification criterion and a truth criterion, which are highly correlated but have some degree of independence.
Responses to Gettier
The Gettier problem is formally a problem in first-order logic
First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
, but the introduction by Gettier of terms such as ''believes'' and ''knows'' moves the discussion into the field of epistemology. Here, the sound (true) arguments ascribed to Smith then need also to be valid (believed) and convincing (justified) if they are to issue in the real-world discussion about ''justified true belief''.
Responses to Gettier problems have fallen into three categories:
* Affirmations of the JTB account: This response affirms the JTB account of knowledge, but rejects Gettier cases. Typically, the proponent of this response rejects Gettier cases because, they say, Gettier cases involve insufficient levels of justification. Knowledge actually requires higher levels of justification than Gettier cases involve.
* Fourth condition responses: This response accepts the problem raised by Gettier cases, and affirms that JTB is ''necessary'' (but not ''sufficient'') for knowledge. A proper account of knowledge, according to this type of view, will contain some fourth condition (JTB + ?). With the fourth condition in place, Gettier counterexamples (and other similar counterexamples) will not work, and we will have an adequate set of criteria that are both necessary and sufficient for knowledge.
* Justification replacement response: This response also accepts the problem raised by Gettier cases. However, instead of invoking a fourth condition, it seeks to replace Justification itself for some other third condition (?TB) (or remove it entirely) that will make counterexamples obsolete.
One response, therefore, is that in none of the above cases was the belief justified because it is impossible to justify anything that is not true. Conversely, the fact that a proposition turns out to be untrue is proof that it was not sufficiently justified in the first place. Under this interpretation, the JTB definition of knowledge survives. This shifts the problem to a definition of justification, rather than knowledge. Another view is that justification and non-justification are not in binary opposition
A binary opposition (also binary system) is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one ...
. Instead, justification is a matter of degree, with an idea being more or less justified. This account of justification is supported by mainstream philosophers such as Paul Boghossian [, Chapter 7, p 95-101.]
and Stephen Hicks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhK6XOT3uAA]. In common sense usage, an idea can not only be more justified or less justified but it can also be partially justified (Smith's boss told him X) and partially unjustified (Smith's boss is a liar). Gettier's cases involve propositions that were true, believed, but which had weak justification. In case 1, the premise that the testimony of Smith's boss is "strong evidence" is rejected. The case itself depends on the boss being either wrong or deceitful (Jones did not get the job) and therefore unreliable. In case 2, Smith again has accepted a questionable idea (Jones owns a Ford) with unspecified justification. Without justification, both cases do not undermine the JTB account of knowledge.
Other epistemologists accept Gettier's conclusion. Their responses to the Gettier problem, therefore, consist of trying to find alternative analyses of knowledge. They have struggled to discover and agree upon as a beginning any single notion of truth, or belief, or justifying which is wholly and obviously accepted. Truth, belief, and justifying have not yet been satisfactorily defined, so that JTB (justified true belief) may be defined satisfactorily is still problematical, on account or otherwise of Gettier's examples. Gettier, for many years a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
later also was interested in the epistemic logic Epistemic modal logic is a subfield of modal logic that is concerned with reasoning about knowledge. While epistemology has a long philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, epistemic logic is a much more recent development with applica ...
of Hintikka
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish philosopher and logician.
Life and career
Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa).
In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Hels ...
, a Finnish philosopher at Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...
, who published ''Knowledge and Belief'' in 1962
The fourth condition (JTB+G) approaches
The most common direction for this sort of response to take is what might be called a "JTB+G" analysis: that is, an analysis based on finding some ''fourth'' condition—a "no-Gettier-problem" condition—which, when added to the conditions of justification, truth, and belief, will yield a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions.
Goldman's causal theory
One such response is that of Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
Education and career
Goldman ea ...
(1967), who suggested the addition of a ''causal'' condition: a subject's belief is justified, for Goldman, only if the truth of a belief has ''caused'' the subject to have that belief (in the appropriate way); and for a justified true belief to count as knowledge, the subject must ''also'' be able to "correctly reconstruct" (mentally) that causal chain. Goldman's analysis would rule out Gettier cases in that Smith's beliefs are not caused by the truths of those beliefs; it is merely ''accidental'' that Smith's beliefs in the Gettier cases happen to be true, or that the prediction made by Smith: "The winner of the job will have 10 coins", on the basis of his putative belief, (see also Bundle theory, bundling) came true in this one case. This theory is challenged by the difficulty of giving a principled explanation of how an appropriate causal relationship differs from an inappropriate one (without the circular response of saying that the appropriate sort of causal relationship is the knowledge-producing one); or retreating to a position in which justified true belief is weakly defined as the consensus of learned opinion. The latter would be useful, but not as useful nor desirable as the unchanging definitions of scientific concepts such as momentum. Thus, adopting a causal response to the Gettier problem usually requires one to adopt (as Goldman gladly does) some form of reliabilism Reliabilism, a category of theories in the philosophical discipline of epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosop ...
about justification. See ''Goldman''s Theory of justification
Justification (also called epistemic justification) is the property of belief that qualifies it as knowledge rather than mere opinion. Epistemology is the study of reasons that someone holds a rationally admissible belief (although the term is a ...
.
Lehrer–Paxson's defeasibility condition
Keith Lehrer
Keith Lehrer (born January 10, 1936) is Emeritus Regent's Professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona and a research professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where he spends half of each academic year.
Education and career
L ...
and Thomas Paxson (1969) proposed another response, by adding a '' defeasibility condition'' to the JTB analysis. On their account, knowledge is ''undefeated justified true belief'' — which is to say that a justified true belief counts as knowledge if and only if it is also the case that there is no further truth that, had the subject known it, would have defeated her present justification for the belief. (Thus, for example, Smith's justification for believing that the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket is his justified belief that Jones will get the job, combined with his justified belief that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. But if Smith had known the truth that Jones will ''not'' get the job, that would have defeated the justification for his belief.)
Pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
was developed as a philosophical doctrine by C.S.Peirce and William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...
(1842–1910). In Peirce's view, the truth is nominally defined as a sign's correspondence to its object and pragmatically defined as the ideal final opinion to which sufficient investigation ''would'' lead sooner or later. James' epistemological
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
model of truth was that which ''works'' in the way of belief, and a belief was true if in the long run it ''worked'' for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world.
Peirce argued that metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
could be cleaned up by a pragmatic approach.
Consider what effects that might ''conceivably'' have practical bearings you ''conceive'' the objects of your ''conception'' to have. Then, your ''conception'' of those effects is the whole of your ''conception'' of the object.
From a pragmatic viewpoint of the kind often ascribed to James, defining on a particular occasion whether a particular belief can rightly be said to be both true and justified is seen as no more than an exercise in pedant
A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism, accuracy and precision, or one who makes an ostentatious and arrogant show of learning.
Etymology
The English language word ''pedant'' comes from the French ''pédant'' (used i ...
ry, but being able to discern whether that belief led to fruitful outcomes is a fruitful enterprise
Enterprise (or the archaic spelling Enterprize) may refer to:
Business and economics
Brands and enterprises
* Enterprise GP Holdings, an energy holding company
* Enterprise plc, a UK civil engineering and maintenance company
* Enterprise ...
. Peirce emphasized fallibilism
Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: ''fallibilis'', "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that Proposition, propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or Justification (epistemology), justifie ...
, considered the assertion of absolute certainty a barrier to inquiry, and in 1901 defined truth as follows: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth." In other words, any unqualified assertion is likely to be at least a little wrong or, if right, still right for not entirely the right reasons. Therefore one is more veracious by being Socratic, including recognition of one's own ignorance and knowing one may be proved wrong. This is the case, even though in practical matters one sometimes must act, if one is to act at all, with a decision and complete confidence.
Revisions of JTB approaches
The difficulties involved in producing a viable fourth condition have led to claims that attempting to repair the JTB account is a deficient strategy. For example, one might argue that what the Gettier problem shows is not the need for a fourth independent condition in addition to the original three, but rather that the attempt to build up an account of knowledge by conjoining a set of independent conditions was misguided from the outset. Those who have adopted this approach generally argue that epistemological terms like justification, evidence
Evidence for a proposition is what supports this proposition. It is usually understood as an indication that the supported proposition is true. What role evidence plays and how it is conceived varies from field to field.
In epistemology, evidenc ...
, certainty
Certainty (also known as epistemic certainty or objective certainty) is the epistemic property of beliefs which a person has no rational grounds for doubting. One standard way of defining epistemic certainty is that a belief is certain if and ...
, etc. should be analyzed in terms of a primitive notion of ''knowledge,'' rather than vice versa. Knowledge is understood as ''factive,'' that is, as embodying a sort of epistemological "tie" between a truth and a belief. The JTB account is then criticized for trying to get and encapsulate the factivity of knowledge "on the cheap", as it were, or via a circular argument, by replacing an irreducible notion of factivity with the conjunction of some of the properties that accompany it (in particular, truth and justification). Of course, the introduction of irreducible primitives into a philosophical theory is always problematical (some would say a sign of desperation), and such anti-reductionist accounts are unlikely to please those who have other reasons to hold fast to the method behind JTB+G accounts.
Fred Dretske's conclusive reasons and Robert Nozick's truth-tracking
Fred Dretske
Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske (; December 9, 1932 – July 24, 2013) was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
Biography
Born to Frederick and Hattie Dretske, Dretske first planned to be ...
developed an account of knowledge which he called "conclusive reasons", revived by Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, as what he called the ''subjunctive'' or truth-tracking account. Nozick's formulation posits that proposition p is an instance of knowledge when:
#p is true
#S believes that p
#if p were true, S would believe that p
#if p weren't true, S wouldn't believe that p
Nozick's definition is intended to preserve Goldman's intuition that Gettier cases should be ruled out by disacknowledging "accidentally" true justified beliefs, but without risking the potentially onerous consequences of building a causal requirement into the analysis. This tactic though, invites the riposte that Nozick's account merely hides the problem and does not solve it, for it leaves open the question of ''why'' Smith would not have had his belief if it had been false. The most promising answer seems to be that it is because Smith's belief was ''caused'' by the truth of what he believes; but that puts us back in the causalist camp.
Criticisms and counter examples (notably the ''Grandma case'') prompted a revision, which resulted in the alteration of (3) and (4) to limit themselves to the same method (i.e. vision):
#p is true
#S believes that p
#if p were true, S ''(using M)'' would believe that p
#if p weren't true, S ''(using method M)'' wouldn't believe that p
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emerit ...
has pointed out that this view remains problematic and uses a counterexample called the ''Fake Barn Country example'', which describes a certain locality containing a number of fake barns or facades of barns. In the midst of these fake barns is one real barn, which is painted red. There is one more piece of crucial information for this example: the fake barns cannot be painted red.
Jones is driving along the highway, looks up and happens to see the real barn, and so forms the belief
*I see a barn
Though Jones has gotten lucky, he could have just as easily been deceived and not have known it. Therefore it doesn't fulfill premise 4, for if Jones saw a fake barn he wouldn't have any idea it was a fake barn. So this is not knowledge.
An alternate example is if Jones looks up and forms the belief
*I see a red barn.
According to Nozick's view this fulfills all four premises. Therefore this is knowledge, since Jones couldn't have been wrong, since the fake barns cannot be painted red. This is a troubling account however, since it seems the first statement ''I see a barn'' can be inferred from ''I see a red barn''; however by Nozick's view the first belief is ''not'' knowledge and the second is knowledge.
Robert Fogelin's perspectival account
In the first chapter of his book ''Pyrronian Reflexions on Truth and Justification'', Robert Fogelin
Robert John Fogelin (June 24, 1932– October 24, 2016) was an American philosopher, and advocate and leading scholar of modern Pyrrhonism. He was a professor of philosophy and Sherman Fairchild Professor in the humanities (emeritus) at Dartmout ...
gives a diagnosis that leads to a dialogical solution to Gettier's problem. The problem always arises when the given justification has nothing to do with what really makes the proposition true. Now, he notes that in such cases there is always a mismatch between the information disponible to the person who makes the knowledge-claim of some proposition p and the information disponible to the evaluator of this knowledge-claim (even if the evaluator is the same person in a later time). A Gettierian counterexample arises when the justification given by the person who makes the knowledge-claim cannot be accepted by the knowledge evaluator because it does not fit with his wider informational setting. For instance, in the case of the fake barn the evaluator knows that a superficial inspection from someone who does not know the peculiar circumstances involved isn't a justification acceptable as making the proposition p (that it is a real barn) true.
Richard Kirkham's skepticism
Richard Kirkham
Richard Ladd Kirkham (born June 18, 1955) is an American philosopher. Among his published works are ''Theories of Truth'' (his most-cited work, published by MIT Press in 1992), "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" ''Mind'' (1984. Vol. 93 ...
has proposed that it is best to start with a definition of knowledge so strong that giving a counterexample to it is logically impossible. Whether it can be weakened without becoming subject to a counterexample should then be checked. He concludes that there will always be a counterexample to any definition of knowledge in which the believer's evidence does not logically necessitate the belief. Since in most cases the believer's evidence does not necessitate a belief, Kirkham embraces skepticism about knowledge. He notes that a belief can still be rational even if it is not an item of knowledge. (see also: fallibilism
Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: ''fallibilis'', "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that Proposition, propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or Justification (epistemology), justifie ...
)
Attempts to dissolve the problem
One might respond to Gettier by finding a way to avoid his conclusion(s) in the first place. However, it can hardly be argued that knowledge is justified true belief if there are cases that are justified true belief without being knowledge; thus, those who want to avoid Gettier's conclusions have to find some way to defuse Gettier's counterexamples. In order to do so, within the parameters of the particular counter-example or exemplar An exemplar is a person, a place, an object, or some other entity that serves as a predominant example of a given concept (e.g. "The heroine became an ''exemplar'' in courage to the children"). It may also refer to:
* Exemplar, a well-known scienc ...
, they must then either accept that
# Gettier's cases are not really cases of justified true belief, or
# Gettier's cases really are cases of knowledge after all,
or, demonstrate a case in which it is possible to circumvent surrender to the exemplar by eliminating any necessity for it to be considered that JTB apply in just those areas that Gettier has rendered obscure, without thereby lessening the force of JTB to apply in those cases where it actually is crucial.
Then, though Gettier's cases ''stipulate'' that Smith has a certain belief and that his belief is true, it seems that in order to propose (1), one must argue that Gettier, (or, that is, the writer responsible for the particular form of words on this present occasion known as case (1), and who makes assertion's about Smith's "putative" beliefs), goes wrong because he has the wrong notion of ''justification.'' Such an argument often depends on an externalist
Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integration of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of d ...
account on which "justification" is understood in such a way that whether or not a belief is "justified" depends not just on the internal state of the believer, but also on how that internal state is related to the outside world. Externalist accounts typically are constructed such that Smith's putative beliefs in Case I and Case II are not really justified (even though it seems to Smith that they are), because his beliefs are not lined up with the world in the right way, or that it is possible to show that it is invalid to assert that "Smith" has any significant "particular" belief at all, in terms of JTB or otherwise. Such accounts, of course, face the same burden as causalist responses to Gettier: they have to explain what sort of relationship between the world and the believer counts as a justificatory relationship.
Those who accept (2) are by far in the minority in analytic philosophy; generally, those who are willing to accept it are those who have independent reasons to say that more things count as knowledge than the intuitions that led to the JTB account would acknowledge. Chief among these is epistemic minimalists, Crispin Sartwell
Crispin Gallagher Sartwell (born 1958) is an American academic, philosopher, and journalist who is a faculty member of the philosophy department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He has taught philosophy, communication, and political ...
, who hold that all true belief, including both Gettier's cases and lucky guesses, counts as knowledge.
Experimental research
Some early work in the field of experimental philosophy
Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry Edmonds, David and Warburton, NigelPhilosophy’s great experiment, ''Prospect'', March 1, 2009 that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe ...
suggested that traditional intuitions about Gettier cases might vary cross-culturally. However, subsequent studies have consistently failed to replicate these results, instead finding that participants from different cultures do share the traditional intuition. More recent studies have been providing evidence for the opposite hypothesis, that people from a variety of different cultures have similar intuitions in these cases.
See also
* Knowledge-first epistemology
''Knowledge and its Limits'', a 2000 book by philosopher Timothy Williamson, argues that the concept of knowledge cannot be analyzed into a set of other concepts; instead, it is ''sui generis''. Thus, though knowledge requires justification, truth ...
References
Further reading
*
* Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida, and Peter D. Klein (eds.), ''Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem'', Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 2017.
*
* Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
Education and career
Goldman ea ...
: "A Causal Theory of Knowing" in The Journal of Philosophy v. 64 (1967), pp. 357–372.
* Stephen Hetherington, ''Knowledge and the Gettier Problem'', Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge), 2016.
* Richard Kirkham
Richard Ladd Kirkham (born June 18, 1955) is an American philosopher. Among his published works are ''Theories of Truth'' (his most-cited work, published by MIT Press in 1992), "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" ''Mind'' (1984. Vol. 93 ...
, "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" Mind, 93, 1984.
*
*
External links
Text of the article
*
*
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gettier Problem
Philosophical problems
Concepts in epistemology
Epistemology
Justification (epistemology)
Knowledge
Thought experiments
Thought experiments in philosophy