Linda Zagzebski - The Inescapability of Gettier Problems

[@WindTheClock]

Excellent presentation! Clear, lucid, cogent, accessible. If only more KZbin videos were like this. Thank you.

[@clumsydad7158]

never heard of this, sounds like a big semantic rabbit hole though. closely related are the ghettio problem, concerning inequality; and also the giddyup problem, when an equine refuses to budge

[@APaleDot]

Really good! The idea that the justification must guarantee the truth of the belief is exactly what I was trying to articulate in my response to the last video. I think this is the common sense understanding of justification. For example, if I believe I am justified in believing something, and then that thing turns out to be false, well then it turns out my justification was not actually sufficient. I was not _actually_ justified in my belief, I merely believed I was. It's also the form of justification embraced by science, where the understanding is that a theory can never be fully justified. We can never know based on empirical evidence if a theory is actually true. I disagree that we need "perfect" evidence. We simply need sufficient evidence, and evidence which is incorrect is obviously _not_ sufficient. You may say that we basically lose all knowledge at that point, but I don't quite think it's that bad. If I read the time off of an accurate clock, I do indeed have knowledge of the time, even if I don't know that the clock is actually accurate or not. So, the knowledge we really lose is simply the knowledge that we have knowledge. Namely, I may have sufficient evidence for a belief, but not know that it is sufficient. Indeed, it's basically impossible to know if it is sufficient. Nonetheless, it may be true that it is _actually_ sufficient and I do indeed have genuine knowledge. But that doesn't mean I know that I have genuine knowledge. I merely believe I have genuine knowledge, and I'm okay with that. That seems to line up with our common, mundane interactions with the world; it leaves most knowledge available to us, while prohibiting us from having absolute knowledge which was probably impossible anyway.

[@andreasbrey6277]

What a nice discovery your philo-channel is! Excellent voice and explaining style, good structure of the arguments. Carry on!

[@jeanblique389]

I don't get why we dismiss so rapidly the first answer, that the justification must be a perfect one. Yep, that would mean that perhaps all of our beliefs (at least, our empirically verified beliefs) aren't really knowledge... But I think that that's something we should acknowledge, since in fact, some of our former best justified beliefs turned to be false, and thus, not knowledge (Archimedes had quite good justifications for dismissing Aristarchus' heliocentrism). We shouldn't allow ourself to call "knowledge" a belief we have that could turns out to be false, that would be presumptuous, and it may be the first of all the epistemological vices. I think that this approach (acknoweldging that there's no proper empirical knowledge, but some epistemic virtues that enable us to be confident enough) is the one of Plato. That's what I get of the Meno, and of the final refutation by Plato of it's own "justified true belief" definition at the end of the Theaethetus.

[@cliffordhodge1449]

I can't see how anyone could be comfortable claiming knowledge rests on good luck. Great good luck, unbelievable luck, just a little luck, or what? Just exactly how much luck is required? I mean, if you were to put a probability value on your belief not being undercut by a Gettier type of situation, what value would you assign it, and why? It seems once you are asked to talk about the degree or sort of luck you need, and have to assign probabilities, you should be embarrassed about mentioning luck at all. I have a Socratic bias, but I was never sympathetic with the view that we just simply must be able to say we have knowledge of so many things, rather than beliefs that we are to some degree satisfied with or committed to. Our language is full of colloquialisms, figurative terms, and idiomatic terms. If I say, "I know I will see it raining when I get up tomorrow," we don't mind viewing this as an idiom which reflects confidence. But if I say, "I know this is April 15, the deadline for mailing my income tax return," people think that because I need it to be true, there must be a way for me to say, "Yes, I know this; it is not mere belief." The luck account drags in a comparison with gambling; if you know that A is true, I take it you would bet ANYTHING on it. If you wouldn't, why the need to call it knowledge? What is the harm in calling it a belief which is supported by something close to the core of your personal conceptual monolith? (with apologies to Putnam, I believe).

[@penssuck6453]

I agree with a lot of what you say, especially when you say people should be embarrassed to invoke luck in explaining what knowledge is. I think Gettier problems are not problems at all, and because Zagzebski swallows the lessons Gettier has to teach us in his famous paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" that she too is clueless about knowledge.

[@defiantfaith324]

From what I remember Zagzebski gives a clue unless the JTB independence of truth then the GP inescapable

[@OdairJunior-xc2bq]

Knowledge and truth are distinct things. A statement can be true, but unknown to us. Some that we now consider as knowledge can be proved false tomorrow. We consider truth as eternal and immutable, while many of us consider currently knowledge as the best we have now, but in no way immutable. Anyway, defining a simple statement S as knowledge seems wrong. Knowledge isn't merely a set of independent statements. There must be some synergy between them. We at least need them to be consistent. If we were to ask all the statements in our knowledge to be true, who will be the judge of their truthness? And how would this person decide it? I will call a statement S part of my knowledge if: 1) S is logically consistent with the other statements i accept as my knowledge; 2) i knew of no fact contradicting S; 3) i have no better alternative or, if i have alternatives in the same level, i opted for S. No use of "justified" or "true" or "belief".

[@fluxpistol3608]

Justified true belief is understanding not knowledge

[@nameless-yd6ko]

The Gettier Problem is no more than tilting at imaginary, mirages of windmills! The "traditional definition of knowledge" fails from all angles and Occam's Razor leaves nothing behind! Knowledge, in an excellent Universal definition, is that which is perceived. Moment by unique moment by/from all Perspectives, ever, whatever is perceived is conceived is all we can ever Know is Concepts/Memory/Mind! What exists is perceived, what is perceived exists. There can never be evidence to the contrary. Thus, everything perceived by the One Consciousness, is Knowledge. 'Justified' and 'true' are no more than 'local mythology and fairy tales'!

[@tomrobingray]

This is typical skepticalist clap-trap. Where they pick some unlikely scenario, and pretend it has some relevance to general reality. Such is the so called Gettier problem" or paradox which goes like this:- Smith and Jones are both interviewed for a job. Smith believes Jones will get it (because he was told so) and he believes Jones has ten coins in his pocket (perhaps he gave them to him). Smith then makes the claim: "The The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." But unbeknownst to Smith it is himself who will get the job, and also unknown to him he also has ten coins in his pocket. The point of all this is that in the statement "The The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." Smith has a perfectly justified true belief and therefore true knowledge, even though something has clearly gone wrong with his reasoning, and he happens to be right by a weird stroke of fate. This so called paradox is I think really a non starter! In the first place what IS Justification, and why is it necessary anyway. I could just have hunch that something is true, and if turns out to be true, then I have perfectly good knowledge of reality! If you say "well we cannot just rely on having hunches to gain knowledge, we must have some sort of system!", I would reply YES exactly we have SYSTEMS for acquiring knowledge. For instance mathematics allows me to state: 1+1=2, 2+1=3 ... but I do not need belief and Justification that one plus one equals two ectcetra, *I have justified belief in the system itself* And that is whole point: In this particular case "The The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." might be true in THIS case, but as a generalized system it is totally useless. therefore It is not true knowledge, and there is NO paradox!

[@johannes-diederik2538]

What do you mean by 'system'? Does the system provide justification by being some process through which true belief is guaranteed? Is it a single system, or several? I fail to see how mathematics can be extrapolated to your coin example.

[@tomrobingray]

@@johannes-diederik2538 Yes you are right that that the system we use to gain knowledge is difficult to define. It may involve the formal languages of math and logic, but these of necessity are embedded within natural human language. So the mechanisms of justification we use are complex and evolving, but no less substantial for that. I'm not saying that arithmetic can be used in this case: I'm saying the whole scenario is farcical, because it doesn't use ANY general method of justification.

[@johannes-diederik2538]

@@tomrobingray I think what you're describing is that justification is 'a priori'. There is a later video on this channel that discusses that notion, so you might want to check that out. In any case, what you describe fails to elude the gettier cases. This is because you still need to *utilize* the 'systems' in order to gain knowledge and have it be justified-you must have gone through some cognitive process. Now, the validity of this process matters, and touches the nucleus of why justification is argued to be a necessary condition for knowledge. Following your train of thought, does it necessarily follow that when I utter some belief in natural language, some a priori system within natural language justifies my belief if it happens to be true? Indeed it does not. It is only when I use logic and deduction that my belief becomes justified. Now, Gettier cases go a step further and proves that it is possible to have some instances of knowledge obtained through some weird way such that we would prefer to not consider it knowledge anymore. However, what you claim seems to ignore justification altogether.

[@tomrobingray]

@@johannes-diederik2538 No Gettier doesn't: what he presents is just gobbledygook, because it doesn't reflect the way we really gain knowledge and justification of it. Your point is really just a restatement of Münchhausen trilemma. The solution of this newly cited problem is obviously not an arbitrary accumulation of "a priori" truth, but is possibly in the redemption of The Circular Argument. This I regard as the the basic dialectic of all human thought and culture.

[@das.gegenmittel]

Whith that attitude you dont have to care for nothing. my wife is a sceptical clap-trap too. There are no dishes.