How One Man Accidentally Changed Philosophy Forever

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[TechnicallyTrent]

It seems like it is about being "correct" for the wrong reasons. The interesting thing is what happens when we are "correct" over and over again even though we are mistaken for the cause. For example, if you say "Heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones", you'll be correct the vast majority of the time. But your basis of understanding is fundamentally flawed.

[Knightfall]

Gettier cases are hilarious because they're real, they happen all the time and are common occurrences, but almost every presented example will STILL somehow feel forced and contrived.

[psychonaut]

False premises can lead to true conclusions - the problem then is "how do we know that the conclusion is true?"

[edvardkvist]

Yes! Discussing Gettier I find Linda Zagzebskis paper "The inescapability of Gettier problems" (1994) very relevant, such a short but revelational paper and definitely helped me understand the nature of Gettier problems much better rather than just in terms of examples and thought experiments. In short the paper sheds light on how fallibilism, always, lead to the possibility of constructing a new Gettier case. Worth a read, not here to start a discussion but merely recommend a truly great philosophy paper.

[perkinscurry]

The problem I have with JTB is that it seems inherently circular as a criterion for knowledge. When presenting it, just as Alex did, people always glide right over the truth part without addressing how one knows that the justified belief is true. The circularity is evident in the preceding sentence "knows that the JB is true".

To use JTB as a criterion of knowledge presupposes that truth is accessible to us, i.e. that we can know the truth, but in that case we have to have JTB about the truth of the matter and, then, JTB about the JTB of the truth of the matter, and, then, JTB about ... etc.

[glorytoarstotzka]

you gave that example of the voodoo witch and then you gave the raining example exactly when it started raining outside for me, that is insane

[primecat]

When i burned my hand on the stove, i realized that pain was a universal truth.

[BUSeixas]

Hi Alex. I don't think you usually read comments, but the physicist David Deutsch made a pretty convincing argument against the "justified true belief" idea in his book The Beginning of Infinity. Maybe you should check it out.

[robotermann]

It's synchronicity. Synchronicity is an inner event (a vivid, stirring idea, a dream, a vision or emotion) and an outer, physical event, which is a (physically) manifested reflection of the inner (mental) state or its equivalent.

[natanbridge]

Gettier was on the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit when he published his famous paper. Wayne is my local university (I live in a suburb of Detroit) and I take philosophy classes there all the time (I am currently taking an excellent class in Free Will, Determinism, and Moral Responsibility taught by a wonderful philosophy professor named Jada Twedt Strabbing). On the wall in the philosophy department lounge are pictures of the faculty from most (though not all) years going back to the early 1960s. Gettier is in several of those pictures. A strikingly handsome fellow.

Another very famous philosopher who belonged to the WSU department in the 1960s was Alvin Plantinga. I can't remember at the moment if they were both at Wayne at the same time.

[demarcoroyes]

It literally struck half past three on my watch as soon as you said half past three

[xyzbesixdouze]

Knowledge for yourself = a belief of something you think you can proove in your mind until disprooven.

[Izurag]

Two things about this:
Knowledge isn't just a JTB, it is a JTB in a certain context in the confines of space and time; in both attempts to disprove that is very obvious. If you look outside and it's raining at that moment - you have a JTB. But notice that with the interview and horse example these are both things you BELIEVED to be true, then parameters changed and you have a separate event.

You can have two pieces of knowledge with similar parameters, but that doesn't make them both the same piece of knowledge!

[Sam_on_YouTube]

JTB has been so widespread that, in my opinion, it has become definitional. It can now be taken for granted as the definition of knowledge based purely on linguistics, not philosophy. I take Gettier to have actually challenged the concept of "justified." And he is far from the first or the last to challenge that term, which does not have a widely agreed upon definition.

I take Gettier to have shown that "justified" must require some level of knowledge of each step in the justification. To know something that is a conclusion to a logical conclusion, you must be justified in the belief. To be justified, you must know each premise in the argument. And to know each of the premises, you must have a justified true belief in that premise.

So for the horse, you know you are seeing a child bounce over the hedge, you know the movement and context justify the conclusion that she was on a horse. But it wasn't true, so you didn't know she was on a horse. You believed she was on a horse and that was your justification for believing you would see a horse. But that belief was false and so it was insufficient justification.

There is nothing wrong with calling that a challenge to JTB, but because that term has become so definitional, I think it is more sensible to call it a challenge to the definition of justification and not to the sufficiency of justification as a part of the definition of knowledge. But technically, it could be either.

[ImHeadshotSniper]

knowledge is definitely fascinating. even in the case where you look outside and see rain to confirm a belief into knowledge, there is the possibility that this is some one-off illusion, in which case, what *appears* to be rain outside is *really* something else entirely.

the weirdest part is that this illusion of reality is technically provably true everywhere. the fact that we can't see radio waves, infared, ultraviolet, etc. etc. with our eyes means that we're completely blind to everything which happens under those frequencies unless we build something to detect them and transmit them into a frequency we can understand, what we call "visual" and "audio" frequencies.

[Demonizer]

When I first read about Gettier's thought experiment about the cow in the field, it sent chills throughout my body. I absolutely love those kinds of deep and insightful contributions to philosophy. I also love that Alex O'Connor is covering this and educating other people about it.

[nelsonrushton]

Once I got pulled over for running a stop sign and was asked for my insurance documents. I had just cancelled my insurance and switched to a new company, but had not yet received my new documents. I still had my old documents, though they were no longer valid, though their expiration date was still in the future. So I showed those to the cop. He believed that I had insurance, reasonably, but not on evidence that was causally connected to the insurance I actually had. Real life Gettier case.

[josephmiracle]

Getier Case: I was facing away from a co-worker who was talking to someone. I tried to identify the person based on his voice, (I thought it was a friend named Will Hawkins). I looked, and saw I was wrong. I didn’t know the person.

After the person left, I told my colleague my guess, Will Hawkins. My colleague responded, “That was Will Hawkins”

It was not the Will Hawkins I had guessed, but it was, correctly, another person named Willie Hawkins.

[IuliusPsicofactum]

Also, when will you talk about Wittgenstein?

[JeffBedrick]

If you draw a conclusion based on a misinterpretation of data, then that is definitely not knowledge, even if your hypothesis turns out to be true by sheer coincidence. It's only knowledge after it has been verified. The example of the broken clock makes it crystal clear. Even if it's right twice a day, it is obviously not a reliable tool for determining the correct time. All this hardly seems like it rises to the level of some kind of perplexing philosophical paradox. It's just simple common sense.