Edmund Gettier - Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

Gettier's 1963 article, published in the journal Analysis, is famous for giving counterexamples to the Justified True Belief analysis of knowledge. We discuss not only the counterexamples, but also the context in which Gettier's paper could have its enormous impact
Victor Gijsbers teaches philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This video is part of an ongoing look at various philosophical papers: • Philosophical Papers

[@APaleDot]

The Gettier cases never moved me much because they all seem to rely on the same equivocation for their rhetorical effect. Namely, they start by saying that a belief is justified, and then simply assert that it is not justified. In the clock example, the person looking at the clock believes they are justified, but it turns out the clock is secretly broken. So, actually their justification is false. Well, this doesn't seem like a problem at all to me. Of course the justification has to be true in order to justify the belief. False justifications don't properly justify beliefs. The justification must _actually_ justify the belief in order to count as knowledge. Consider a parallel case where a person merely believes that their belief is true, but it turns out that secretly it is false. Does this present a problem for the JTB analysis of knowledge? Obviously not. They simply believe they have knowledge, when in fact they do not. It's exactly analogous to the Gettier case. Perhaps there are cases which account for this analysis and problematize it further that I am simply unaware of?

[@hyperreality753]

Thought the same thing.

[@VictorGijsbers]

Thanks! Those are good questions. First of all, you are right that there is a difference between being justified and believing that you are justified. You might have been careless, or disregarded evidence, or been engaged in motivated reasoning, without being aware of this. In such a situation you would believe that you are justified, but you wouldn't really be justified. But the concept of justification used by Gettier -- and by those whose theories he criticises -- is not supposed to imply truth. It is useful to think of it as describing a kind of internal perspective, or a kind of blamelessness. If I disregard some of the evidence without noticing, I'm not blameless; I myself have access to the facts that show that I'm not justified in my belief; and so I'm not justified. But if I carefully take into account all the evidence I have, then I am blameless, I'm doing the right thing (internally speaking), and I'm justified. And all that even if the evidence turns out to be misleading. So in the clock example, I seem to have been behaving just fine. (We don't normally require people to wait for a few minutes and check whether the clock has been moving before drawing any conclusions from what they see.) And so I would have been justified, even though something went wrong. Of course, you may be unhappy with this kind of theory, and could push things into one of two directions. The first direction is to strengthen the concept of justification such that it requires not just blamelessness, but absolute certainty. You could claim that I'm only justified if I am absolutely certain, and looking at the clock can't make me absolutely certain. The problem with this type of theory is that it makes knowledge almost impossible to arrive at. We are rarely if ever certain. The second direction is to abandon this 'internal' justification, and instead focus on the actual reliability of the process of belief formation. You would then embrace an 'externalist' theory of knowledge. It would say something like: 'S knows p if and only if (1) p is true, (2) S believes p, and (3) S formed the belief that p through a reliable process'. There are many variations, but the point of all of them is that you could be blameless, you could be doing everything right from the internal perspective, but still there could be something externally wrong with your belief formation. And then it wouldn't count as knowledge. What you say makes me believe that this type of theory would sound good to you. Here's the problem: if the reliability in (3) is so strong that it implies infallibility, then again we never have knowledge. For we never use infallible belief formation processes. But if the reliability in (3) is so strong that it doesn't imply infallibility, that it leaves room for error, then we can construct Gettier cases against it. Indeed, the clock example might be one: looking at the clock is pretty reliable, and this was one of the unfortunate cases in which it didn't work. In a few weeks time I'll be releasing a video in Linda Zagzebski's article "The Inescapability of Gettier Problems" which tackles these issues head on. You might be able to already check out that article if you want to!

[@cryptocoin5318]

@@VictorGijsbers In Plato's epistemological formulation, knowledge is justified true belief, that is to say, I can only assert that a belief (an observation if you will) is knowledge if it can be justified and it turns out to be true.

[@thephilvz]

But how do you know that your justification is true? I would say you just only pushed the problem back a step and didn't solve anything.

[@APaleDot]

@@thephilvz In this view, knowledge doesn't require that you know the justification is true, only that the justification is, in fact, true. In other words, you can have knowledge without knowing you have knowledge, because you can have justifications which you don't know whether or not they are true. But that's still a perfectly good response against skepticism. We don't need to be able to know the entire chain of justification back to the first cause or whatever as long as all our justifications are in fact true. The view that you need to know that every justification is true would require us to be omniscient in order to have any knowledge at all, at least in my reckoning. So that just seems like an unreasonable standard.

[@clumsydad7158]

Foundation, foundation,,, where is the foundation? 🙂Truth has always been a silly question in a way as we've been well aware of our continual ignorance. We keep pursuing the only sensible path - to keep whittling it down. In the meantime, do as little harm as possible while simultaneously developing our civilizations. A tricky balance.

[@clemderrick7236]

It falls short of necessary knowledge

[@purefake7097]

Great stuff! btw i have a question... What's your thought on our universe?do you think it's contingent or it's a necessary?

[@VictorGijsbers]

I'm tempted to dismiss the question. Of course there's a long, long tradition of philosophers asking this question and believing that it must have an answer. But this requires us to think of possibility and necessity as independent of actuality: what is possible or necessary is possible or necessary independently of what is the case. I think that's a mistake. Our only grasp of possibility and necessity is tied to the actual world. If it is possible for me to reply to you, that is because of certain capacities I actually have. If it is necessary for me to breathe oxygen if I'm to stay alive, then that too is because of the actual way that my body functions. I'm very sceptical of attempts to apply these modal words outside of such concretely anchored scenarios! But let me add that this is very much a minority position in (at least analytic) philosophy nowadays.

[@purefake7097]

@@VictorGijsbers thanks.. it helps!are you skeptical about Modality or you're a necessitarianist?

[@nathanwycoff4627]

@@VictorGijsbersAs Goodman put it in FFF: "We have come to think of the actual as one among many possible worlds. "We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within in the actual one".

[@pigetstuck]

are hunches not a form of epistemic justification? maybe only a small justification?

[@skullnetwork4482]

Sir Is this problem solve or still unsolved ?

[@VictorGijsbers]

There's certainly no consensus answer!