Epistemology

Lecture 1

Gettier - Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

Zagzebski - The Inescapability of Gettier
Problems

njhou@ntu.edu.tw
周先捷
 The Issue
• What’s less controversial: knowledge requires
truth and belief.
• What’s a little controversial: knowledge also
requires justification. (Epistemology concerns
mainly justification.)
• What’s the most controversial: is knowledge
only justified true belief? Is justification
sufficient to make true belief knowledge? If
not, what is missing? If no satisfactory account
can be found, can we have knowledge at all?
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 Gettier’s problem
• Traditional analysis of the necessary
and sufficient conditions for
knowledge:
S knows that P IFF
(i) P is true,
(ii) S believes that P, and
(iii) S is justified in believing that P.
Edmund Gettier, 1927-
• Gettier’s problem:
These conditions are not sufficient for
knowledge.

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 Gettier’s problem

• Smith believes:
(a) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his
pocket.
(b) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

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 Gettier’s problem
• Smith believes:
F (a) Jones is the man who will get the job, and
Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
T (b) The man who will get the job has ten coins in
his pocket.
• Smith’s justification:
(Ja) The president told Smith so, and Smith
counted the coins in Jones’s pocket.
(Jb) Smith deduces (b) from (a).
• Facts unknown to Smith:
(Fa) Smith, not Jones, will get the job, and Smith
also has ten coins in his pocket.

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 Gettier’s problem

• Consider
(b) The man who will get the job has ten coins
in his pocket.
• (b) is true, Smith believes (b), and
Smith is justified in believing (b).
• However, (b) is true in virtue of (Fa)
unknown to Smith.
• Hence, Smith doesn’t know (b).
• Hence, the three conditions are not
sufficient for knowledge (JTB ≠ K ).
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 Gettier’s problem

• What do you think? Do you agree

with Gettier?
• Is there any way to get around
Gettier’s problem?

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 Possible solutions
• Rethink the justification Smith has.
• Smith believes:
(a) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten
coins in his pocket.
(b) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
• Smith’s justification:
(Ja) The president told Smith so, and Smith counted the
coins in Jones’s pocket.
(Jb) Smith deduces (b) from (a).
• The principle:
For any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P
entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result
of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q.
• So, response? (1)K (2)~J; (3)remove J (4)new J

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Closing Questions
• Can you come up with a
(new) case in which we
would be inclined to ascribe
“justified true belief” but
not knowledge?

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Given the common and reasonable
assumption that the relation
between justification and truth is
close but not inviolable, Gettier
Linda T. Zagzebski (1946 - )
problems are inescapable for
virtually every analysis of knowledge
which at least maintains that
knowledge is true belief plus
something else.

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 Analysis of Gettier Problems
• Gettier problems arise in the theory of
knowledge when it is only by chance that a
justified true belief is true.
• Since the belief might easily have been false in
these cases, it is normally concluded that they
are not instances of knowledge.

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 Efforts
• The moral drawn in the thirty years since
Gettier published his famous paper is that
either justified true belief (JTB) is not
sufficient for knowledge, in which case
knowledge must have an ‘extra’ component in
addition to JTB, or else justification must be
reconceived to make it sufficient for
knowledge.

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 However,
• Since justification does not guarantee truth, it
is possible for there to be a break in the
connection between justification and truth,
but for that connection to be regained by
chance.

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 Example 1

• Smith comes to you bragging about his new

Ford, shows you the car and the bill of sale,
and generally gives you lots of evidence that
he owns a Ford.
• You believe the proposition ‘Smith owns a
Ford’, and from that you infer its disjunction
with ‘Brown is in Barcelona.’
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 Example 1

• It turns out that Smith is lying and owns no

Ford, but Brown is by chance in Barcelona.

• The fact that you end up with a true belief

anyway is due to a second accidental feature
of the situation — a feature that has nothing
to do with your cognitive activity.

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 Example 2

• Unknown to you, the inhabitants have erected

three barn facades for each real barn in an
effort to make themselves look more
prosperous.

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 Example 2

• Your eyesight is normal and reliable enough in

ordinary circumstances to spot a barn from the
road. But in this case the fake barns are
indistinguishable from the real barns at such a
distance.
• As you look at a real barn you form the belief
‘That’s a fine barn’. The belief is true and justified,
but is not knowledge.
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 Example 2

• It is only an accident that visual faculties normally

reliable in this sort of situation are not reliable in
this particular situation; and it is another accident
that you happened to be looking at a real barn
and hit on the truth anyway.
• Again the problem arises because an accident of
bad luck is cancelled out by an accident of good
luck.
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Example 3
• Mary has very good eyesight,
but it is not perfect. It is good
enough to allow her to
identify her husband sitting in
his usual chair in the living
room from a distance of
fifteen feet in somewhat dim
light. Each time her faculties
have been working properly
and the environment has been
appropriate for the faculties.

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Example 3
• If she goes on to form the
belief ‘My husband is
sitting in the living room’,
that belief has enough
warrant to constitute
knowledge when true
and we can assume that
it is almost always true.

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Example 3
• Mary simply misidentifies
the chair-sitter who is, let
us suppose, her
husband’s brother. Her
faculties may be working
as well as they normally
do. Mary’s defect need
not be sufficient to bring
her degree of warrant
down.
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Example 3
• Mary’s husband could be
sitting on the other side of
the room, unseen by her.
• In that case her belief ‘My
husband is sitting in the
living room’ is true and has
sufficient warrant for
knowledge on Plantinga’s
account, but she does not
have knowledge.

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 Analysis
• It really does not matter how the particular
element of knowledge in addition to true
belief is analysed.
• As long as there is a small degree of
independence between this other element
and the truth, we can construct Gettier cases
by using the following procedure:

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 Analysis
– Start with a case of justified (or warranted) false
belief.
– Make the element of justification (warrant) strong
enough for knowledge, but make the belief false
due to some element of luck.
– Now emend the case by adding another element
of luck which makes the belief true after all.

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 An Approach to Solution
• Defeasibility-condition approach:
– Gettier cases the justified belief depends upon or
otherwise ‘goes through’ a false belief.
– So add to the requirement for knowledge the
restriction that the belief in question must also be
justified in certain counterfactual situations:
‘the evidence e must be sufficiently complete that
no further additions to e would result in a loss of
justification and hence a loss of knowledge’.

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 An Approach to Solution
• Your belief that either Smith owns a Ford or
Brown is in Barcelona is undermined if you
discover that Smith does not own a Ford.
• Your belief that this is a barn is undermined if you
discover that most objects that look like barns in
this vicinity are not real barns.
• Mary’s belief that her husband is sitting in the
living room is undermined if she discovers that
that man sitting over there in a particular chair in
the living room is not her husband.
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 An Approach to Solution
• In each case were S to be advised of the falsity
of the underlying belief, S would retract the
belief under discussion.
• The belief would be defeated by such new
information.

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• What do you think?

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 A Criticism
• Obviously, if the belief is false, further
additions to e will result in a loss of
justification, and hence a loss of knowledge.
• Strong defeasibility conditions, then, threaten
the independence between the justification
(warrant) condition and the truth.
• But weaker defeasibility conditions are subject
to Gettier-style counter-examples.

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• What now?

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 In the End
• (1) To give up the independence between the
justification condition and the truth condition.
– the element of truth in the account of knowledge
is superfluous and knowledge is simply justified
(warranted) belief.

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 In the End
• (2) To make the justification condition and the
truth condition almost completely
independent.
– Most justified beliefs will be false.
– Gettier cases would simply be accepted as cases
of knowledge.
– After all, knowledge is mostly luck.

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 In the End
• (3) Knowledge is true belief + x (e.g.,
justification) + luck.
– The notion of knowledge requires success, both in
reaching the goal of truth, and in reaching it via
the right cognitive path.
– The notion of justification or warrant is less
stringent, requiring only that the right path is one
that is usually successful.
– Gettier cases will never go away!

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Closing Questions
• What is the independence
between the justification
condition and the truth
condition? Why does
Zagzebski think neither
complete dependence nor
complete independence is
plausible? Do you agree?
What’s your reason?
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