Against Gettier cases

[@ReynaSingh]

Great video. Keep it up

[@rebeccar25]

Long live the Kane.

[@KaneB]

Thanks lol

[@jmike2039]

🔴

[@rebeccar25]

@@jmike2039 “unfortunately, I disagree with you.”

[@BennettAustin7]

First off great video. Completely agree with your argument that beliefs probably shouldn’t function like formal propositions, hadn’t thought about that before. As for the ending, I think I have two reasons for studying knowledge. First, it is simply fun. I just think of it as a game. Sure it may not have any application but it’s interesting to see if the problem can be resolved (similar to pure mathematics). Secondly, I would say that a water tight definition of knowledge would be useful simply when deciding who to “trust”. For example, should we believe this theory from one scientist or this other theory from another scientist?

[@Wehwehweh]

Isn't the problem simply that the concept of "belief" just a lot more complex than we think it is? What I mean is: what we believe is (reduced to it's simplest form) our best summary of the regularities of our experience about what has happened (what is true), and what has not (the -- potentially-- false). The synthesis of the large amount of information would be left to the imperfect processing of our brains -- that is assuming that phenomena is perfectly translated into information-- and then assigned values. Belief just seems like a way to obscure the gap between reality and representation.

[@nicholastessier8504]

I had always felt something was off about Gettier cases but I never thought too hard about why. This is great for filling in that gap! I agree immensely with the notion that people don't have beliefs subject to/originating from logical inferences. I clearly see this in my students when I tutor symbolic logic and they tend to take a while to grasp the concept of e.g. why modus ponens is valid but affirming the consequent is not, the true meaning of various combinations of negated quantifiers, existential conditionals, etc. Nevertheless, they have a rich body of beliefs. Surely this shows beliefs operate in a very different way than logical propositions.

[@writerightmathnation9481]

Around 8:59, you argue that beliefs don’t, or at least need not, necessarily obey classical inference rules such as modus ponens or universal generalization, etc. However, in the setting you described (that Gettier case), Smith is presumably reasoning from a set of assumptions, and in such a situation, classical logic does actually still provide a coherent interpretation of the situation. The situation at hand is an example of a finite model of a theory. In classical logic and the attendant model theory, such a model can be specified by a finite number of sentences (the diagram of the model, as defined in the work of Abraham Robinson on completeness and model completeness). This means that even if Smith does reason using classical inference rules, the conclusions drawn are allowed to only refer to the objects (people, jobs, coins, pockets, applicants, bosses, …) in that finite model. In particular, roughly, the “abstract man” reasoned about by Smith is a relativized universal quantification (universal in the sense of “abstract”, and relativized in the sense of only applying to the men who are “in” the model). Alternatively, the finite model here can be viewed as providing a limited context for discussion because its constituents constitute the domain of discourse. …

[@Reddles37]

My reaction to Gettier cases was always just that the beliefs aren't really justified even if the person thinks they are. But I agree 100% with your thoughts, especially the bit about belief only applying to specific propositions. We have plenty of examples of people holding contradictory beliefs, which would really cause problems it you tried to say they also believe all the logical consequences... By the way, I think you could turn the stopped clock into a "true" Gettier case if you said that while you were out of the house there was a power outage lasting exactly 12 hours. Then the clock would still be running and showing the correct time, but in principle its actually 12 hours behind and only correct by coincidence.

[@italogiardina8183]

Thanks!

[@KaneB]

Thanks very much!

[@JM-us3fr]

My issue with Gettier cases is that the supposed JTB is phrased to be intentionally vague in some respects, and intentionally specific in another respect. In the scenario of getting a job, having 10 coins is the specific aspect, while "the man who will get the job" is phrased intentionally vaguely. Actual beliefs are really a perspective on reality, which I like to view as a finite sequence of increasingly specific propositions. So for this example, we have something like "There is a job offer"

[@StatelessLiberty]

Great video. Tbh my issue with “justified true belief” is in the other direction: I think there are cases where we have knowledge without justification. If I show someone a red square and ask what colour it is and they reply “red” I’d say they know that the square is red. But what possible justification could they give? Someone might say “I knew he was going to betray me” and this “knowing” is based purely on recognising untrustworthy body language that nobody could give a theoretical account of. Or imagine squirrels were genetically hard wired to run away from foxes. When a squirrel sees a fox for the first time it “knows” to run away.

[@therivalyn195]

I used to dislike the JTB definition. It never struck me as accurate as to how the word is actually used. I now accept it as a definition that philosophers and others use in certain cases and it is good for those reasons. I now think of my self as a definition anti-realist. Use of the words come first and after the event we try to work out more precisely how and when we are doing so only to find out such cultural concepts are loose, flexible, dynamic with no fact of the matter beyond our goals and that is actually a good thing. Thanks for all your videos!

[@davidantinucci8027]

Not sold on fuzzy-by-nature take (B4D_cogitor)

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

Great discussion! Both main critical points (that people's beliefs are not logical propositions and that looking for a definition of "knowledge" is pretty pointless) are well-taken and well-argued. As added background, I'd make a historical point: Both issues you are raising go back to the origins of Analytic Philosophy as a movement. There is a sort of implied Platonism that underlies the whole idea of doing philosophy the Analytic way. The assumption is that the object of analysis (in our case it's the concept of knowledge, but also, mental states and attitudes, linguistic meanings, you name it) is an imperfect approximation of a Platonic ideal ("Platonic" in the loose popular sense; it's actually closer to Aristotle's understanding of forms than to Plato's), and that ideal is mathematical or logical. In the final account, everything is just an imperfect embodiment of logical calculus. Now, when I put it in so many words, it sounds pretty ridiculous. Most Analytic philosophers today would raise an eyebrow, and even in the olden days, not everyone would explicitly admit this is the case, even to themselves (though there was that title of Carnap's early book: "The logical structure of the world"). But this weird metaphysics was baked into the methods and traditions of Analytic Philosophy. That's why, for example, the notion of "propositional attitudes" is often understood so literally, as if people's beliefs, expectations, fears, etc. are indeed formal logical propositions, obeying formal rules of inference, in thin disguise. The problem now is that realising there are all these problems with the debate in Analytic epistemology rarely contributes anything to changing the terms of the debate itself. You don't get published, let alone get a job in academia, if you say the whole discussion is pointless, and even if you manage to pull that through somehow, everybody else just ignores you. Of all philosophical assumptions, those that masquarade as neutral framing for the debate, those that people implicitly endorse without even formulating them, even if they would never accept them had they stopped for a moment to think about it-that sort of assumptions is the toughest to get rid of.

[@pauljackson9413]

Wow. This is pretty much exactly how I’ve been thinking about Gettier cases. I actually just wrote a paper for a class and analyzed the Smith and Jones interview case in nearly the same way (except I wrote it in terms of ‘felicitous’ vs ‘infelicitous’ beliefs)

[@pauljackson9413]

Maybe it is a bit weird to put the point in terms of felicity, but my idea is that if Smith were in fact to utter his beliefs, he would utter them infelicitously on the true interpretation of his conclusion.

[@injinii4336]

It seems really easy to adjust the definition of knowledge in light of these cases. Specifically: 'a justified true belief where the justification links reality to the belief'

[@InventiveHarvest]

Very good video. Well thought out. I would much rather have justified beliefs than true beliefs. Imagine someone taking a bad bet and winning. Sure, they won that time, but they will probably lose it all on the next bet In my opinion a good example of a gettier case is economics. I believe that econ comes to the right conclusions (free markets work better than over-regulated ones) even though there are big problems in the path it uses to get there (assumption of non-satiation, problems with statistics, etc).

[@mobili2]

I would expand your considerations on 7:00: in epistemological matters philosophers for times tend to assume a classical logic framework and kinda seem to neglect the importante intentions have in our beliefs. While I believe we could to some degree formalize beliefs, I'm skeptical about reducing matters of belief to logic sentences that completely explain some state of affairs

[@aarantheartist]

Fantastic video Kane. Agree with you entirely, especially the “why analyse knowledge?” Section of the video. I’m not really sure why philosophers are so interested in producing these definitions that reveal how English speakers use words with absolute precision. I was looking into this some time ago, and this style of philosophising is traceable in spirit to certain ordinary language philosophers, who thought that all philosophy could do was describe how we use words, and that doing anything else was “howling for the moon”. I just can’t think who wrote those words. I agree with you that this kind of philosophising just isn’t particularly interesting in itself, and it doesn’t have any consequences for any other area of philosophy (despite what some advocates seem to suggest).

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

A minor nitpick: I wouldn't say Ordinary Language Philosophy is to blame here. The issue predates the OLP movement. If anything, most, though not all, Ordinary Language Philosophers would rather be in solidarity with at least some aspects of your own critique. It is their predecessors, such as the logical positivists, who believed in analysing words. OLP insisted on at least grounding that analysis in how people actually use language, not in pure logical intuition.

[@uninspired3583]

I think that the conversation about knowledge has a lot to do with religious justification. What does it mean to know God? Can miracle claims be taken as knowledge? Can we claim knowledge about places like heaven, or Valhalla? Can we trust science with knowledge claims when science is incomplete? Can we claim knowledge about dualism, materialism, idealism? The way we define knowledge often impacts a lot of these areas that tend to matter a great deal to us personally

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

@@uninspired3583 Well, in the particular academic discourse at stake here, religion is not very prominent, I'm afraid.

[@uninspired3583]

@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 true, and for good reason

[@aarantheartist]

@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 Interesting point. Perhaps it even goes back as far as Russell. Russell had this strategy of solving philosophical problems by “analysing” the concepts. He seems to have meant that “analysing” amounts to a sort of “clarifying” of concepts; replacing ordinary muddy concepts with precise equivalents. Carnap holds that all philosophical problems are to be solved by making concepts more precise. But this is all in an effort to solve old philosophical problems or to avoid what positivists saw as absurd views. The analysis of knowledge debate appears to proceed without any broader concern and has somehow become itself a philosophical problem, so I’m not sure that all of this can be shouldered on the positivists. I think many contemporary philosophers are interested in clarifying concepts just for the sake of it, and that’s the parallel with some parts of OLP I was hinting at. Contemporary stuff is a strange hybrid of OLP and positivism. I don’t get it myself!

[@quippits3201]

I'm interested as to what the counterintuitive consequences of saying that true justification cannot be mistaken, other than maybe the fact that that would make true justification exceedingly rare.

[@Danicker]

Totally agree with the closing remarks. I always found my myself confused with epistemology and I wasn't very interested in arguing for or against the justified true belief model because it just seems to have no bearing on other branches of philosophy or other things that matter in the world. At best, a theory of knowledge presents a definition of what knowledge is, but without using that definition it doesn't really have any substance. For similar reasons, there cannot be one "correct" epistemology because there is no one "correct" meaning of the word knowledge, as used ing English

[@mjuky]

Great point! Anybody that has taught logic can attest to the fact that just because a student believes that "A is the case", doesn't mean that the student believes that "A is the case or any arbitrary proposition B is the case". These things have to be taught before they are believed. I wonder whether we could just drop the requirement of justification altogether. Ultimately, we are only interested in the "release" property of knowledge. I mean: If s knows that A, then A is the case. It doesn't really seem to matter how s arrives at the belief or what's going on in s' mind.

[@mjuky]

The deflationist idea could be fleshed out like this. There is valid knowledge and also invalid knowledge, just like there are valid and invalid arguments. If you were to ask me how I know that something is the case I will provide you with an argument. The argument could be valid or invalid, but the validity of the argument is irrelevant for the truth value of the conclusion. The intuition that all knowledge must be justified seems analogous to the intuition that all valid arguments must have true conclusions. But this just isn't the case.

[@SwamyMaximus]

Is there a way to listen to your episodes outside of KZbin (audio only)? Do you have a podcast?

[@KaneB]

I've been thinking of setting that up, but haven't got around to it yet

[@gabri41200]

In the stopped clock example, i would say it is justified true belief, and it is knowledge. To me, all that matters is the intention. If you didn't simply guessed the hour, to me, all that matters is that you had the intention to check an instrument to seek justification.

[@STAR0SS]

I tend to think that only truly justified, true beliefs are knowledge (TJTB), e.g. in the clock case you don't know that it's 8am, you just wrongly inferred it was and got lucky, not TJTB, no problems. This doesn't imply I don't know anything, but only that I can't tell for sure which things I know and which I don't ; I believe a bunch of stuff, I might not know some of them because they are false, and I might not know some of them because my justification was bunk. Seems quite intuitive to me (e.g. in maths exams you don't get points even though you get the correct answer with a wrong justification). But maybe I'm missing something.

[@yourfutureself3392]

How would a gettier case be constructed for the following analysis of knowledge: a justified true belief that isn't inferred from false beliefs.

[@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

It's working well for me, I'm struggling to construct a Gettier case for this. :)

[@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

What was the formula in the video though, if the 'truth' criteria can be separated from the other criteria, because they don't entail the truth and it's possible to have them met without the truth condition met, there will necessarily be ways to construct Gettier cases. I'm not giving up :)

[@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

I think I've got one! It's the sheep scenario but I'll infer from true past experiences instead of from false beliefs about a cardboard cutout being a sheep. I look out my window every day and see my neighbor has 6 sheep in his yard. I don't bother looking out my window today and assume there are 6 sheep there as usual. But they've been sold this morning by my neighbor. Coincidentally, 6 sheep wander into his yard.

[@yourfutureself3392]

@@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke the belief would be something like "there are six sheep in my neighbour's yard." You, through induction, you deduce that since there are always 6 sheep in your neighbour's yard, that now there are 6 sheep in your yard. Your belief is true, justified and inferred from true beliefs. It is therefore knowledge given my definition, but intuitively isn't knowledge. The funny thing is, if you had reasoned like this, your belief would not have been knowledge given my definition. P1: today my neighbour owns 6 sheep P2: everyday my neighbour has owned 6 sheep, there have been 6 sheep in his yard. C: today, there are 6 sheep in his yard. (Through a kind of inductive inference) This way, P1 is false and my definition and our intuitions would match. I think you probably presented a successfull gettier case. What do you think about this definition of knowledge: A belief b is knowledge iff b is true, b is justified, b is inferred only from true beliefs and there isn't a true fact that, if you were to believe, then you would not believe b. In the case of the sheep, the true fact that make you disbelieve b is "My neighbour sold his sheep".

[@bambiknow]

Part of the clock example being a Justified True belief is the assumption that the clock is working, but this part is not true. Trust that clocks deliver correct time, I think is in general justified, but it forms an implicit assumption that is a necesarry part of the belief that it's 8:00. It's true that it's 8:00, but it is not true that the clock is working and can be depended upon to give us correct information about the time. Our belief is informed by something false, to arrive at the belief that it's 8:00.

[@Achrononmaster]

@12:00 "justified true belief" - is a fabrication. Tarksi showed that the notion of "truth" is not formal. So any philosophical talk about "true belief" is necessarily partially poetic. There is no formal language capturing the notion of truth i.o.w. You can define something else formally and label it "truth" but that's purely lexical.

[@daman7387]

Is there some mixing and matching here with objective and epistemic probability? Necessary condition for knowledge X may render the objective probability 1 that S knows that p, but S may not be certain that p. In that sort of case, you would have an infallibilist view in some sense, but you could still know the external world exists, despite not being certain (having an epistemic probability of 1).

[@cunjoz]

I'd say that for many people, in some cases knowledge counts as a strongly held belief or a belief they feel strong emotions for. normal people use the same words meaning different things by them.

[@patrickwrites]

As you give examples, it's not clear these problems are being understood. I think we hear these questions like riddles where we are trying to make sense of the set of sentences, so if someone asks "isn't this a good answer?" (That it is jtb) we jump up and say yes. On first glance the stopped clock is jtb, but I find it really hard to understand why so many philosophers take it seriously. And by hard I mean I don't. Do they really think that's what's meant by justification? Is that how they talk about justification throughout their life? Should I marry this man? Well if I don't think about it very much it all looks peachy, so sure!

[@penssuck6453]

Great stuff. I have come to similar conclusions recently myself. I generally agree with your comments on Gettier's two cases, but there's enough difference in the details (between our assessments) to make it prohibitive to discuss here. What I don't think you're seeing is that you should be disagreeing with Zagzebski, as she draws her conclusions in accord with what Gettier has to teach us about JTB, but if you think Gettier gets it wrong, then you can't agree with Zagzebski, because she gets it wrong too. Finally, there is always a problem with analyses of second-order language terms or class-terms. I mean, if you know all my moral acts throughout my life, it's only going to cause confusion when you try to determine if I'm a "good man" or "bad man" -- I mean, if you know my moral history, what do the labels "good" or "bad" do for us other than cause confusion? I think "knowledge" is similarly problematic. If a particular belief is true, is believed, and is justified, what does labelling it "knowledge" add epistemically? Without the classification "knowledge," in some cases, we will simply say that your justification was had under subtlely different conditions than normal. So, when you look at the working clock, you have justification because in normal conditions the clock works, and the clock is a reliable source of the correct time. But when you look at the broken clock, you don't have justification because it's not under normal conditions. We can make such distinctions unproblematically. But when you commit to a classification called "knowledge" and say that both circumstances (looking at the working clock and looking at the broken clock) give you justification, then you run into problems -- but these are problems we create for no reason, as there is nothing gained epistemically in having this class which we call "knowledge."

[@sabate7127]

Thanks for the video. I'm really puzzled by some of your arguments and claims: 1. The case stipulates that Smith comes to the belief that (a) 'The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket via' entailment. Your claim that that's not how we usually arrive at beliefs seems irrelevant to me (I think your claim is false, but the larger issue is that it's irrelevant). So the claim has to either be that agents do not arrive at belief that way ever or that they shouldn't form beliefs that way, that it's faulty or epistemically wrong (or something along those lines). Both options are clearly false. There's nothing wrong with the entailment, it's truth-conducive and Smith's evidence supports (a) and we often do arrive at beliefs that way. Thus, the belief is justified, it's true, but intuitively Smith doesn't know (a). A similar issue arises for the second case. Also: Smith having a particular man in mind doesn't make the content of his belief false, that's why he comes to the true belief in the first place. 2. Your response to the clock case is very odd. Many clocks don't show seconds, take an alarm clock. Even if they show the seconds and the pointer is moving, the minute pointer may not be, or the hour pointer. All kind of weird stuff may be going on. Moreover, we can form justified beliefs about what time it is by just glancing. 3. There are a bunch of other Gettier cases that you may have addressed, the "Fake Barn Case", "The Sheep Case", "The Pyromaniac". I mentioned these because you can't do away with them using the same arguments. 4. You actually have a lot more than 2 options when it comes to the lessons you can take from these counter-examples to the JTB view. One of those options that you may want to consider is the knowledge-first view, where knowledge is a primitive concept, non-analysable, which as far as I'm aware is one of the most popular views nowadays. 5. If there are indeed Gettier cases and genuine counter-examples to the JTB view, then it suffices one counter-example for the view to be false. 6. I was particularly baffled by you hinting at that there not being a single concept of knowledge, because it comes in degrees or it's context-sensitive(?). As far as I know most epistemologists agree the knowledge comes in degrees and it's threshold is context-sensitive. 7. "Why is it philosophically interesting to inquire about knowledge?" Because that's what philosophy, among other things, does, it analyses concepts. The practical interest has to do with improving our understanding as to how knowledge ought to be attributed in scientific contexts, philosophical contexts, mundane contexts, under which conditions. What are the proper epistemic processes to arrive at knowledge, this is going to partially hinge on the analysis of the concept. Not even to mention how knowledge typically appears as the main aim of inquiring, asserting...

[@KaneB]

(1) "Your claim that that's not how we usually arrive at beliefs seems irrelevant to me" -- That's not my claim. My claim is that Smith *cannot* form the belief in question. That is, my claim is that since Smith believes that Jones will get the job, he cannot then form the belief that "a man" will get the job (where the content of this would be made true by just any man). (2) Is it really that odd? I mean, I don't really have a dog in this particular fight, since I grant that the clock case is among the more plausible ones. But some theories of justification can be fairly demanding. I don't think it's crazy to say that merely glancing at a clock isn't sufficient, and that in general, you need to put at least a little effort into confirming that the clock is working. (3) Yeah, and? I didn't address them all because that would have made the video about 5 hours long, and I don't see how it would have added anything important. But to briefly respond to the ones you mention: -- It's always seemed to me that the person in Fake Barn County does indeed know that he's looking at barn; I guess I just don't share the usual intuition on this one. -- The sheep in the field case can, I think, clearly be dealt with in the same way as Gettier's original examples. You do not believe that there is "a sheep", in the abstract, in the field. You believe that the thing you are looking at is a sheep... which is false, hence not a justified true belief. -- The pyromaniac case is a good one; I'd say that's a candidate for a genuine Gettier case. (4) Okay, I guess that does weaken the argument. I suppose I could reframe it as a conditional claim: If you want to go for a theory that analyzes knowledge... (5) No, that absolutely does not suffice in my view. There is nothing unreasonable about accepting a theory that has counterintuitive consequences, especially if all its rivals also have counterintuitive consequences. Re (6) and (7), what I'm hinting at there is a standard critique of conceptual analysis: First, it seems plausible to me that there just are no concepts, in the sense that would be required for conceptual analysis to work. Second, since we invent new concepts, even if we did have a successful analysis of the concept , it's not obvious why this would matter to us: we could just stipulate some new concept, call it knowledge2. Let's say that we deny that knowledge is JTB. Well, I can just stipulate that knowledge2 is JTB. Why is it knowledge that we care about, rather than knowledge2 (or knowledge3, knowledge4)? Knowledge is what ordinary English speakers have in mind, but I don't see why I would care about that (ordinary people suck).

[@batkinson130]

The “Jones has 10 coins” case is interesting to me, especially since it is such a common example of a Gettier case, because even if you were to grant that beliefs follow the rules of formal logic, this case doesn’t work in formal logic. Essentially, in order for Smith to have justification for his belief, we have to assume that what he is doing is taking “P(j) and Q(j)” and inferring “for all x, P(x) implies Q(x),” which is just a straightforward fallacy. Even if Smith had the ability to form this belief by abstracting from the case of Jones, he would be wrong in doing so!

[@jimmyfaulkner1855]

Hey Kane B, are there any certain philosophical ideas/theories that were once taken seriously by philosophers but now no longer are held amongst the vast majority of philosophers. For example, one philosophical theory I can personally think of is logical positivism. Logical positivism was a movement whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of meaning). This theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. It was developed in the 1920s and was very popular in the Anglo-American world. Even though it was very popular and taken very seriously, eventually, by the early 1960s, it had completely collapsed in of itself. This was due to numerous potent criticisms developed by such thinkers like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, and especially, W.V.O. Quine. This is why the movement is now long gone. In 1976, A. J. Ayer, the best defender of logical positivism for decades, quipped that “the most important” defect of logical positivism “was that nearly all of it was false.” John Passmore found logical positivism to be “dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes.” That is my personal favourite example. What are some other philosophical ideas, theories, or schools of thought, that throughout the history of philosophy were once popular (or at least taken seriously) but is now widely rejected and seen as false by philosophers? These can include any examples from any branch of philosophy, such as: metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, political philosophy, and so on. From any branch of philosophy you personally prefer. Cheers.

[@KaneB]

Idealism used to be very popular; it's now one of the least popular positions, with only about 6% of philosophers endorsing it in the recent PhilSurvey.

[@jimmyfaulkner1855]

@@KaneB Good suggestion 👍🏻 I think I have thought of two others: logical behaviourism and logical positivism

[@tjcofer7517]

Does this critique apply to externalist accounts of justification? I don't like that account because it seems to mean we could never know what of our beliefs are actually knowledge, but if we say beliefs in "P" are only justified if they are caused by the fact that "P" or something like that is it still possible to construct a Gettier case?

[@fountainovaphilosopher8112]

I grant your disbelief in closure, although i think the part of the thought experiment entails that Smith just also happens to attain that belief. Really then, the problem with this Gettier case in particular is it feels like a rather artificial construction. A far more natural one would be the following. Suppose Smith is taking a walk, and encounters John taking a dog for a walk. Smith then forms the belief that John owns a dog, and it is justified in that. John does, in fact, own a dog, but the dog he is walking isn't his, it is his neighbour's. If one doesn't grant this to be a valid Gettier case (but is okay with the 'true' and 'justified' parts), one would have to posit that "actually, Smith doesn't form the belief that "John owns a dog", but forms the belief that "John owns the dog and is walking him currently" or "John owns the very dog i see with him right now" or similar", but here that already feels like a stretch. To clarify, I also grant the "Inescapability of counterintuitive consequences" part, and realize this may not just be of particular interest to you, i guess i am merely supporting the consequent of your stance. On the "why analyze knowledge" part a general question could be asked: why bother defining or analyzing linguistically compact concepts post their conception? A lot of philosophy does in fact concern itself with such concepts (knowledge, morality etc), possibly because of an even deeper question, namely "how do we understand these concepts without defining them?". This tends to be a relevant question in the philo community, i believe, i at least find it interesting by itself when put that way, and this is the best possible answer i can conjure for the existence of (admittedly failed) conceptual analysis. Though likely not a satisfactory one, it could feel like shifting the question one step away. Then it is just counting blades of grass

[@KaneB]

>> but here that already feels like a stretch That doesn't feel like a stretch to me at all -- that is exactly what I am inclined to say about that case. What Smith actually believes is more actually captured by saying, "Jones owns *that* dog", and I don't think Smith can infer from this the belief "Jones owns *a* dog", where this proposition is made true by Jones owning just any dog whatsoever.

[@ironbutterflyrusted]

Belief....hard to ask questions about it and then justify the "true-belief-knowledge" responses. I don't think we can talk our way to a truth of a truth from belief because our talk has clearly admitted as much. And our history is just vast lists of the many things we once, with good reason, believed to be true...improvement, some may say. For me, belief in knowing is the default position for mumbling, earthbound misfits. Otherwise we would have no real interest in what other people have to say, display and do, we would just doubt the significance and denounce progress.... 😁yeah, we would do that. Keep thinking Mr B

[@Sam-_-]

Man why couldn’t you have uploaded this two months ago 😭

[@martinbennett2228]

The issue with Gettier cases always seems to be the justification. The criterion of truth is implicit even though there are issues with defining 'truth' and a number who assert that there are no objective truths. In the case you mention and others I have seen the justification is at fault (the belief and the truth are unquestioned). A simple modification is to state that knowledge is truly justified true belief. Obviously we can argue about how a justification is known to be true, but similar objections apply to 'true' and 'belief'; realists (such as myself) accept notions of true reality and true justification, but belief is intrinsically subjective and cannot be independently corroborated.

[@Achrononmaster]

Despite my comments below which were playing along with Gettier, what most of these "philosophers" have confused is the very nature of "knowledge" which is subjective, not logical. The logical stuff is what Gettier is all about, and in almost every case you can get coherence by claiming it is the formal language statements that the "believer" in them "knows" to be consequences of other statements. So it's just formal logic. It obliquely refers to a subject, but avoids subjectivity. If you want your philosophising to be about subjective knowledge you have to be prepared to think about metaphysics, because formal logic does not cut it. There is nothing of the subjective phenomena in formal logic. So philosophers should stop being babies - stop trying to logically formalise what cannot be formalised.

[@DaKoopaKing]

I never could comprehend what justification was supposed to be if it wasn't something meant to covary with truth. I have knowledge that I'm typing right now because it's true that I'm typing and the cognitive process that I used to arrive at this belief did in fact produce a true belief, so the cognitive process is justified. If my cognitive processes were to stop tracking the truth then they would no longer be justified. Idk what justification is supposed to pick out if not this covariation between my beliefs and belief-forming mechanisms.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

Sounds like you are a justification-externalist. You think that your cognitive processes might stop being justificatory (by ceasing to track the truth) _without you even noticing any difference,_ right?

[@DaKoopaKing]

In general I deny that justification is a sui generis property or relation, so I'm amenable to any view that also denies this. I don't think there's anything major hanging on the internalist vs externalist debate.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

@@DaKoopaKing By "not sui generis", do you simply mean it can be explained in terms of something else? In this case, I can't think of any property that _is_ sui generis.

[@DaKoopaKing]

@@СергейМакеев-ж2н Yeah, as in justification is a social kind with lots of variability, not a natural or nonnatural kind.

[@KaneB]

Justification can track the truth without it *perfectly* tracking the truth. I don't think many philosophers would deny that justification should track the truth in the sense that having justification must be a reliable indicator of truth, or must increase the probability that your belief is true, etc. But this is compatible with there being some cases where a person has justification for P, but it's nevertheless false that P.

[@davidantinucci8027]

Lehrer's "undefied" jtb seems to do the trick, allowing that some related jtb is missing in the believer's mind (for ex. think of yet undiscovered empirical evidence) that would avoid the gettier objection. It also addresses the issue of the overrated relevance/requirement of finding a crystallized truth-guaranteeing formulation of jtb+x.

[@Ansatz66]

The concept of knowledge is vague mostly because the concept of justification is vague. We all have a fairly fixed and concrete notion of what "truth" means and what "belief" means, though these concepts are not beyond philosophical discussion, but clearly "justification" has no fixed particular meaning, and different things can be justified in different ways in different contexts. Depending who we are talking to and what we are talking about, the same thing may be justified in one context and unjustified in another because sometimes we expect a more rigorous standard of justification. For example, is Alice justified in buying an apple? In one conversation where we are talking about choices between various foods, we might say that she is justified because an apple is delicious and more healthy than other treats while not being disproportionately expensive. In a different conversation when we are talking about giving to charity, we might say that Alice is unjustified in spending money on any frivolous luxuries and buying the apple is unjustified because she should give more to charity. I am a skeptic because I am not fond of beliefs. They are inherently dangerous, especially when they cannot be guaranteed to be true. People can become confused and disoriented by their false beliefs, and each false belief that we have tends to lay a foundation for accumulating more false beliefs in the future. Look at how people's minds can be ruined by believing that the earth is flat so that they see themselves as surrounded by conspiracies to hide the truth. Beliefs are too dangerous to hold just because they seem likely to be true, and beliefs offer little benefit in return for the risk, so I prefer the most rigorous standards of justification. Justification ought to be very near to infallible, because holding false beliefs can ruin people's lives and holding true beliefs has no tangible reward.

[@evolsteveve]

There are always assumptions. Just because I saw Penn Jillette put 10 coins in his pocket doesn't at all mean he has 10 coins in his pocket. All I know is that is looked like it.

[@Ansatz66]

The way we happen to use the word "knowledge" does not have any cosmic significance beyond our particular usage, but that should not make it any less important to _us._ We are the ones using this word, so we have reason to care about knowing what it means. If we did not care about people understanding our meaning when we speak, then why would we even speak? Some other society with a different usage of the word is irrelevant to the significance of the word in our version of English, and philosophy is all about precision in thinking and argumentation. If we are using a word with only a vague and dubious notion of what that word means, then we are not doing philosophy properly.

[@KaneB]

>> but that should not make it any less important to us It makes it less important to me because ordinary people are boring losers and I don't really care about figuring out exactly what concepts they have in mind when they use words.

[@das.gegenmittel]

Would you like to read a paper about how to explain it?

[@APaleDot]

I don't think tying justification to truth is really as catastrophic as philosophers make it out to be. They make it seems like we could never have any knowledge ever again, like even looking at a clock wouldn't even tell you what time it was, because "hey, maybe the clock is broken". But if you tie justification to truth, all that means is that whether something is justified depends on the actual facts of the world. Like if you look at a clock, and the clock is working properly, then that does in fact justify your belief in the current time. However, maybe you don't know that the clock is working so you don't really know if it justifies your belief, but does that matter? Why do you have to know that your knowledge is knowledge? That seems to create an infinite regress which could never be satisfied, and which is the actual cause of the problems these philosophers are claiming comes from tying justification to truth. Why can't we just be happy to have knowledge? Why must we know that that knowledge is knowledge?

[@real_pattern]

imagine how annoyed wittgenstein would've been with gettier cases..

[@antirealist]

Lots of ad hoc here... should we not be long past taking "god of the gaps" arguments seriously at this point?

[@clemlgt]

I don't know what I'd do without a Kane B in my life

[@abdulrahmanalhamali1707]

I think we still have Gettier to thank for the privileged position we're at right now. The traditional account of knowledge was significantly modified thanks to it, and we started questioning how beliefs/justification work.

[@cunjoz]

if only philosophers knew a thing or two about how language and definitions work. if we define knowledge as jtb than any such case of a belief that is both true and justified will be knowledge. those that aren't won't count as knowledge. there are some other words to describe other epistemological states of mind that are both weaksr and stronger than jtb. and whether or not we apply the lexeme knowledge to jtb or something else, jtb's will exist regardless, it's just that we'll have another term for that or maybe we won't so we will just keep saying jtb just like we say jFb or un-jtb and don't have separate terms for those

[@kukuruzzo]

Doesn't 'justification' counts as knowledge too? So knowledge is knowledge

[@italogiardina8183]

Justification of true belief for philosophy is like the decisive moment for photographer's that desire a perfect representation of a social construct. The photographer faces the problem of elite interpretation but philosophy the problem compounds exponentially given world systems. Here justification appears relativistic as historic elites embedded in a civilization produce truth contingent on forms of justification. The atom collider construction produces elaborate justification for sub atomic mass and force, but so to in non modernist/ science civilizations albeit constrained to the elites construction of justification. So collectivism or individualism seems to suggest it's minority collectivism qua status that drives justification of true belief that filters from elites as drivers of justification based on epistemological constructivism derived from external controls which are specific to the construction of true belief. Possiblity science gives absolutely justification but problems persist as specialists' form beliefs about the sub atomic structure of reality. So relativism of cultural elites as world systems construction of multiple justifications of contextual true belief upheld in a social civilizational world epistemology.

[@squatch545]

It all comes down to the definitions of 'justified' and 'knowledge'. Does knowledge have to be true? Even in science, our 'knowledge' of facts is always been revised. What does it mean to 'know' something, really. By the same token, 'justification' seems to be rather subjective. I may think I'm justified in having a certain belief about the world, e.g. that the moon landing was faked. But someone else looking at the same facts and logical relations between them, may think no such justification about the moon landing being faked is warranted. So, I tend to bristle at slippery concepts like 'justified' and 'knowledge'.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

I believe that knowledge is just "justified belief", without the "true" requirement. And I also believe that justification is sort of "subjective", in the sense that it has to do with _my own internal standards_ in some way.

[@squatch545]

@@СергейМакеев-ж2н Yeah, good point.

[@rath60]

Isn't easier to say that the justification is limited to a specific statement and not the statements that we can derive for them. In the case of the coins "Smith" is justified in believing that "Johns" has ten coins in his pocket and he is justified in believing that "Johns" is a man and will get the job. Bu he is not justified in believing that any man who gets the job will have ten coins his pocket. In the case of the clock the observer does not know the clock is working so they simply are m ot justified in believing that it is the hour it says on the clock. At most getiar case point out that knowledge is hard to be had. But, we already know this.

[@das.gegenmittel]

The solution or explanation for the Gettier cases is like an atomic bomb for philosophy - believe me. Connected to it are problems that no one associates with it. Tick... tick... tick...

[@theducknes2453]

I got some assumptions in my change purse. Some intuitions in my pocket. WHOOPS! slipped and they all fell out over your kitchen floor. What? They aren't even thick enough to make a puddle or varnish? Hm? Because I give no cold hard backing to anything I say? Keep being a ghostly apparition on the side of the field while the realist football players keep scoring touch downs.

[@lokeshparihar7672]

16:50

[@Achrononmaster]

@3:00 omg, do I really want to listen to the end? Maybe come up with something as an example that motivates needing to keep listening dude? And not that sounds like academic philosophical wankery. The Smith & Jones parable is not it. Smith clearly has fine knowledge that someone labelled Jones _he thinks will get the job_ has 10 coins in it's pocket. Unless he just took LSD or the like: in which case, Smith has fine knowledge that he is probably hallucinating that someone he thinks will get the job has 10 coins in It's wallet.

[@KaneB]

I'm just explaining the cases Gettier used in his article. Since I have objections to those specific cases, no I can't really use a different example...

[@Caylynmillard]

I wish you would reference the rules you use to criticize these arguments. The explicit rules’ citing makes you beg the question less. Regards.

[@Caylynmillard]

Say, if you said “gettiers cases beg the question”, that would help me understand why his cases are not refutations of Plato’s recipe for knowledge. Make fallacies explicit please.

[@cunjoz]

Gettier: let's suppose that knowledge is jtb also Gettier: this case of jtb doesn't count as knowledge. imagine having your life's work rest on equivocations and baseless assertions and people actually take you seriously. he should've been a con-man or a cult leader.

[@filipfilipov9056]

👍🤘

[@yyzzyysszznn]

Surely Smith believing Jones will get the job entails that he believes "a man will get the job"? I dont really get how you could explain it away through him actually just believing that Jones is the one who will get the job, unless youre denying closure? Jones is a man, so a man will get the job is a belief that Smith would have, especially if you imagine theres also a woman there who, to Smith, will obviously never get the job

[@KaneB]

I mean, I just spent several minutes explaining why I don't think he believes that -- why, in general, beliefs don't work that way -- so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@KaneB]

Anyway, yeah, I do deny closure. That is, I deny: If S believes that P, and S believes that P entails Q, then S can come to believe that Q.

[@yyzzyysszznn]

​@@KaneB Thats what i was responding to but you didnt really explain how he doesnt believe that "a man" will get the job, you just got caught up on saying "the man" will get the job, arguing that he actually just means Jones-how does this argue against Jones' belief that "a man will get the job"??

[@yyzzyysszznn]

​@@KaneB So is your argument contingent on denying closure? Thats the only way I can see it.

[@yyzzyysszznn]

​@Boulanger If we stipulate "he then thinks about it and believes that a man will get the job because of the belief that smith will", then its a clear jtb??

[@plasmaballin]

This argument doesn't make any sense to me. Why would any fallibilist account of knowledge automatically require it to be possible for a justified belief to be true "just by luck"? As an obvious counterexample, you could just say, "A belief is knowledge if it true and justified, and the truth isn't just by luck." This is obviously too vague to actually be a good account of knowledge, but if you can flesh out what it means for a justified belief to be true just by luck, then you have a definition of knowledge that gets around the argument in the video. And if it's not possible to flesh it out, then it makes no sense to use the apparently meaningless concept of a belief being true just by luck to argue that all fallibilist accounts of knowledge face Gettier cases.

[@THEFIZZIEST]

Kane slay

[@badsocks756]

Uh oh

[@luszczi]

Uh, what? Since you agree with the inescapability of Gettier cases, attacking specific Gettier cases won't help you. Give me a justified true belief, allow for that justification to be fallible and I will give you a justified belief that could be false (because it's justified in a reasonable, but flawed way), but happens to be true. You admitted to that, yes? Now it seems like you have to choose two, and only two, of the following: 1) The classical definition of knowledge. 2) Fallible justification. 3) The intuition that epistemic luck isn't knowledge. You retain 1), so what'll be? Foundationalism or allowing knowledge by chance? Did I fail to grasp something or did you fail to think this through? You give all that standard analysis and then you're like... "meh, the JTB definition is fine, I guess".

[@onty-op5587]

I don't see why anyone would accept fallible justification. Knowledge of contingent truths isn't knowledge, only knowledge of unchanging eternal truths is knowledge. We've known this since Plato.

[@luszczi]

@@onty-op5587 If you have no knowledge, why comment?

[@KaneB]

I actually don't retain (1), as I explicitly stated in the video. I just don't think that Gettier cases provide a particularly convincing case against (1). There are broadly speaking two reasons for this: (a) Gettier cases are far rarer than usually assumed: most supposed Gettier cases are not genuine Gettier cases (where a "genuine Gettier case" is a case where S has a justified true belief, but intuitively S does not have knowledge), and (b) if there are genuine Gettier cases, you can construct them for any theory of knowledge which allows for justified false beliefs. Perhaps I should have made this more clear, but I'm assuming that what we're doing with Gettier cases is testing proposed analyses of knowledge against our intuitions (I take it that this is the standard view of how the methodology works: it's "the method of cases"). I'm trying to make the case that it's not so implausible to just deny the Gettier intuition. Given that Gettier cases are rarer than usually assumed, and given that any fallibilist theory of justification will face Gettier cases, it's reasonable to simply accept the counterintuitive claim that subjects in genuine Gettier cases actually do have knowledge.

[@luszczi]

@@KaneB If you don't think that Gettier is a successful attack on the JTB definition, then you retain (1), if just for the sake of this argument. It still seems to me that you need to either deny the irremovability of the Gettier problem altogether or just admit that you allow for knowledge by luck (is that what you mean by "denying the Gettier intuition"?). If it's one of those, fine, don't read the rest of this. But if you don't want to choose either of these options, then I still don't get what you're trying to say. Again, the rarity or intuitive pull of specific Gettier cases is irrelevant if you admit that the crux of the Gettier problem is irremovable. And the crux is this: give me an account of knowledge with fallible justification and I'll give you a justified true belief that isn't knowledge according to the intuition that epistemically lucky beliefs cannot constitute knowledge. I like to phrase it like that, because often Gettier cases are rejected not because of their invalidity, but because of the invalidity of the underlying theories of knowledge (like propositional knowledge propagating through logical deduction - ironically Gettier must have chosen this example to be as agreeable as possible). If you have issues with theories of knowledge in general, then it's a whole different thing, then the whole discourse surrounding the Gettier problem is nonsensical to you. But if you want to claim that Gettier's argument against the JTB definition is invalid and not just unsound, then you need to accept some theory of knowledge and justification for the sake of argument. Give me your example of a justified true belief, so I can give you a Gettier case to go with it. So I don't know how attacking specific Gettier cases (i.e. (a)) helps you retain the JTB definition if you accept the core issue of fallibility in justification and epistemic luck, (together with some account of knowledge & fallible justification and the intuition that you can't have knowledge by luck). (b) is just how the core issue works. Unless you admit that Gettier sentences can be constructed in general, but then claim that they are invalid in each case, which is incoherent. If they can be constructed, they are valid, if they cannot, they are not.

[@KaneB]

@@luszczi Yes, I allow for knowledge by luck. What I mean by "denying the Gettier intuition" is that I think it's perfectly reasonable to hold that subjects in Gettier cases do have knowledge, despite the intuition that they don't.

[@writerightmathnation9481]

Around 8:59, you argue that beliefs don’t, or at least need not, necessarily obey classical inference rules such as modus ponens or universal generalization, etc. However, in the setting you described (that Gettier case), Smith is presumably reasoning from a set of assumptions, and in such a situation, classical logic does actually still provide a coherent interpretation of the situation. The situation at hand is an example of a finite model of a theory. In classical logic and the attendant model theory, such a model can be specified by a finite number of sentences (the diagram of the model, as defined in the work of Abraham Robinson on completeness and model completeness). This means that even if Smith does reason using classical inference rules, the conclusions drawn are allowed to only refer to the objects (people, jobs, coins, pockets, applicants, bosses, …) in that finite model. In particular, roughly, the “abstract man” reasoned about by Smith is a relativized universal quantification (universal in the sense of “abstract”, and relativized in the sense of only applying to the men who are “in” the model). Alternatively, the finite model here can be viewed as providing a limited context for discussion because its constituents constitute the domain of discourse. …