Gettier cases

[Small L]

Do you guys find Gettier cases convincing?

Quick rundown: Traditionally knowledge = Justified True Belief. Edmund Gettier wrote a paper attacking this view. He gives hypothetical situations of the kind now known as "Gettier cases," where someone has a justified true belief but we intuit that it's not knowledge.


For example (I've heard this one somewhere. It's not in his paper):
I am in a windowless room and look at a clock. The clock says 11:30. That gives me good reason (justification) for believing that the time is 11:30. Also, it is 11:30 (true), and I believe it. So all the conditions are met for Justified True Belief. However, unbeknownst to me, the clock stopped exactly 36 hours ago. Most people look at that situation and say I do not have knowledge.

Relevant links:
A 3-minute youtube video that explains the issue well.
Gettier's very short paper
A more in-depth explanation.

For me, it depends on my mood, but I usually hold that Justified True Belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge, and that it's possible to have knowledge by "luck," as the latter part of the third link talks about. That's definitely a minority view though. Other days I just throw up my hands and say knowledge is an unanalyzable, know it when you see it, kind of thing.

[Beet]

For example (I've heard this one somewhere. It's not in his paper):
I am in a windowless room and look at a clock. The clock says 11:30. That gives me good reason (justification) for believing that the time is 11:30. Also, it is 11:30 (true), and I believe it. So all the conditions are met for Justified True Belief. However, unbeknownst to me, the clock stopped exactly 36 hours ago. Most people look at that situation and say I do not have knowledge.

But can't you say it's not justified since your reason involves the clock being in working order and it isn't?

[Beet]

For example (I've heard this one somewhere. It's not in his paper):
I am in a windowless room and look at a clock. The clock says 11:30. That gives me good reason (justification) for believing that the time is 11:30. Also, it is 11:30 (true), and I believe it. So all the conditions are met for Justified True Belief. However, unbeknownst to me, the clock stopped exactly 36 hours ago. Most people look at that situation and say I do not have knowledge.

But can't you say it's not justified since your reason involves the clock being in working order and it isn't?

You could say that. I think that answer ends up collapsing into infallibilism about justification. At that point, in my opinion, we're not talking about our everyday concept of knowledge anymore.

What do you mean "infalliblism about justification"?

[Beet]

For example (I've heard this one somewhere. It's not in his paper):
I am in a windowless room and look at a clock. The clock says 11:30. That gives me good reason (justification) for believing that the time is 11:30. Also, it is 11:30 (true), and I believe it. So all the conditions are met for Justified True Belief. However, unbeknownst to me, the clock stopped exactly 36 hours ago. Most people look at that situation and say I do not have knowledge.

But can't you say it's not justified since your reason involves the clock being in working order and it isn't?

You could say that. I think that answer ends up collapsing into infallibilism about justification. At that point, in my opinion, we're not talking about our everyday concept of knowledge anymore.

What do you mean "infalliblism about justification"?

Meant "infallibilism," sorry. Basically the claim discussed here that only absolutely certain reasons, with no hypothetical potential of being mistaken, count as justification for knowledge.

Ah. Well the 'everyday concept of knowledge' is a different question.

As I believe fallibilism is correct, I prefer a strictly psychological definition of knowledge that simply equates it with supreme confidence. In this way you can both be a fallibilist and have a definition of knowledge that accords with everyday life at the same time.

However, if one must conduct the mind experiment that posits some objective truth and the necessary correspondence between that truth and one's belief, I suppose you can defend JTB from the clock example by saying that one does not believe that 'the time is 11:30' in isolation. Rather, one believes that the clock told me it is 11:30, and the clock is an accurate authority, and therefore the time is 11:30. But the statement 'the time is 11:30' cannot be separated out from the other two statements. Since one of those statements is not true, it is not knowledge.

The mistake is to think that the mind always isolates singular propositional statements from the surrounding context. In reality, an entire network of supporting beliefs can go into any one belief.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The only things we truly know are 1. a priori knowledge (eg the basic rules of logic and mathematics) and 2. our sensory perceptions (eg, "I know that I'm seeing what looks to me like a clock indicating 11:30"). Objective, material reality is by nature unknowable and can only be speculated about.