A Phenomenological Solution to Gettier’s Problem

It took about ten years for people to get the idea that there was something wrong with the Gettier Problem. By the early 1970s, a number of analyses had been offered to accommodate Gettier’s (1963) counter examples to the traditional ‘JTB’ view: Michael Clark’s (1963) simple no-false-lemmas proposal, various ‘indefeasibility’ analyses beginning with Lehrer (1965) and Lehrer and Paxson (1969), and Goldman’s (1967) original causal theory, among others. Those analyses had run into further counterexamples; revision after revision had been offered, only to meet further and more elaborate counterexamples. Not only was there no end in sight; there was not even a sense of beginning to converge.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse David Lewis’ version of contextualism and his solution to the Gettier problem and the lottery problem through the employment of his Rule of Relevance and Stewart Cohen’s response to these problems. Here I analyse whether Stewart Cohen’s response to David Lewis’ solutions to these problems is on the right track or not. Hence, I try to analyse some concept in David Lewis and Stewart Cohen which has remained unanalysed. Cohen tries to show that when we try to solve some variation of the lottery problem and the Gettier problem by applying Lewis’s Rule of Relevance, then it generates some counterintuitive result. So Cohen gives Lewis some alternatives (which are explained in “The Strategy of Biting the Bullet and the Problem of Interference” and “Biting the Bullet Strategy as a Natural Extension of Contextualist Resolution to the Sceptical Problem and the Pity Poor Bill Variation of the Lottery Problem” sections) to avoid this counterintuitive result; this attempt, however, affects some other presuppositions of the contextual theory of David Lewis. My aim in this paper is to show how without taking these alternatives suggested by Cohen, Lewis can apply his Rules of Relevance to solve the lottery problem and the Gettier problem without any counterintuitive result.

In short, knowledge is true belief through cognitive virtue. People can call this family of views 'robust virtue epistemology'. 'Robust' reflects the claim that virtuously formed true belief suffices for knowledge, and no other conditions are invoked to explain the nature and value of knowledge. Robust virtue epistemology enjoys several virtues. It posits an elegant, simple structure for knowledge. But even as a mere schema, robust virtue epistemology faces a dilemma. This chapter illustrates this dilemma with two putative counter examples, which appear to pull robust virtue epistemology in conflicting directions: attempts to rescue the view from one line of objection render the view more vulnerable to the other. Critics of robust virtue epistemology contend Morris's knowledge fails to satisfy the posited conditions: the true belief is not due to Morris's abilities, but rather it is due to the testifier's abilities.

I challenge a cornerstone of the Gettier debate: that a proposed analysis of the concept of knowledge is inadequate unless it entails that people don’t know in Gettier cases. I do so from the perspective of Carnap’s methodology of explication. It turns out that the Gettier problem per se is not a fatal problem for any account of knowledge, thus understood. It all depends on how the account fares regarding other putative counter examples and the further Carnapian desiderata of exactness, fruitfulness and simplicity. Carnap proposed his methodology more than a decade before Gettier’s seminal paper appeared, making the present solution to the problem a candidate for being the least ad hoc proposal on the market, one whose independent standing cannot be questioned, among solutions that depart from the usual method of revising a theory of knowledge in the light of counterexamples. As an illustration of the method at work, I reconstruct reliabilism as an attempt to provide an explication of the (externalist) concept of knowledge.

In this chapter, the author focuses on Timothy O’Connor's provocative defense of incompatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility based on his agent-causal approach to freedom and moral responsibility. O’Connor presents various criticisms of the doctrine of semi-compatibilism: the thesis that even though causal determinism evidently rules out alternative possibilities, it does not rule out moral responsibility. The author discusses articulating the way in which Frankfurt-type cases challenge the notion that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities. He explores the question of whether agent-causation has distinctive resources for responding to the Frankfurt-type cases in which it is alleged that an agent is morally responsible although he lacks alternative possibilities. The author considers whether the assumption of causal determinism does in fact call into question the contention that the agent is morally responsible. Finally, O’Connor considers what he calls the ‘strongly revisionary conclusion’ that some philosophers draw from the Gettier counter examples to the justified true belief (JTB) analysis of knowledge.

Gettier's examples show that someone can believe a truth, have good reasons for believing it, and yet lack knowledge.1 How can this be? One explanation is that a man's good reasons can depend upon or include false beliefs. Another possibility is that a justified true belief can fail to stand in an appropriate causal relation to the fact which makes the belief true. Both explanations fit Gettier's examples, but perhaps neither is sufficiently general: each assumes, as indeed Gettier's exposition does, that someone is adequately justified or not in virtue of evidence he actually has for a truth. Might not a man's good reasons be said to be defeated, undermined, or rendered inadequate, by further evidence he would, but happens not to, take into account? This is the possibility adverted to by certain defeasibilist analyses of knowledge and nonknowledge. Such analyses grant that Gettier's subjects are justified in believing a truth, but they explain in a distinctively general way the fact that those subjects lack knowledge. The lack ensues from incomplete justification. If someone's actual justification for a true belief admits of supplementation or correction that would disclose evidence against the belief, then one's actual basis for believing is incomplete. Conversely, if correction or supplementation were not to detract from one's reasons, one is actually completely justified, and one's true belief is knowledge-ranking. In Gettier's cases, conditions of complete justification fail to be met. But complete justification might be absent, too, where one's reasons involved no falsehoods, and where one's true belief was non-deviantly caused. In those circumstances it could still turn out that exposure to further evidence would warrant the retraction of some actually held true belief. Defeasibilism thus seems to alert us to, and to account for, cases of non-knowledge that Gettier did not prepare us for.

<i>Epistemic Values: Collected Papers in Epistemology</i>

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.' The moral drawn in the thirty years since Gettier published his famous paper is that eitherjustified 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. I shall argue that given the common and reasonable assumption that the relation between justification and truth is close but not inviolable, it is not possible for either move to avoid Gettier counter-examples. What is more, it makes no difference if the component of knowledge in addition to true belief is identified as something other than justification, e.g., warrant or wellfoundedness. I conclude that Gettier problems are inescapable for virtually every analysis of knowledge which at least maintains that knowledge is true belief plus something else. Notice first that Gettier problems arise for both internalist and externalist notions ofjustification. On internalist theories the grounds for justification are accessible to the consciousness of the believer, and Gettier problems arise when there is nothing wrong with the internally accessible aspects of the cognitive situation, but there is a mishap in something inaccessible to the believer. 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. The original 'Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona' case is an example of this sort. Here we are to imagine that 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. Basing what you think on the evidence, you believe the proposition 'Smith owns a Ford', and from that you infer its disjunction with 'Brown is in Barcelona', where Brown is an acquaintance and you have no reason at all to think he is in Barcelona. It turns out that Smith is lying and owns no Ford, but Brown is

It has been argued that virtue reliabilism faces difficulties in explaining why the “because-of” relation between true belief and the relevant competence is absent in Gettier cases. However, prominent proponents of this view such as Sosa and Turri suggest that these difficulties can be overcome by invoking the manifestation relation. In his Judgment and Agency, Sosa supports this claim based on an analogy between Gettier cases and what in the literature on dispositions is called mimic cases. While there are initial motivations for the alleged analogy, I claim there are at least two arguments against it: 1. there is an asymmetry in the nature of context-sensitivity between the problem of mimicking and the Gettier problem; 2. while causal deviance and double luck can be found in both the mimic case and the Gettier case, their causal processes are different in important respects, making it challenging to see them as both falling under the same category. If these arguments are on the right track, the upshot is that virtue reliablists such as Sosa and Turri who describe the “because-of” relation in terms of the manifestation relation still owe us an account of why the manifestation relation is absent in Gettier cases.

Alvin Plantinga has defined warrant as 'that which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief' (1993a: 3). He has also offered a positive account of warrant which he claims satisfies this definition (1993b: 19). One of the purported virtues of Plantinga's account is that it is able to overcome the celebrated Gettier problem. In this paper we shall argue that it fails to do so, as the positive theory of warrant given by Plantinga satisfaction of certain necessary conditions is not co-extensive with the aforementioned definition of warrant. Thus, there exists an internal inconsistency in Plantinga's account of warrant. Moreover, we shall argue that neither Plantinga's positive theory of warrant, nor warrant as defined as that which when added to true belief yields knowledge, satisfactorily overcomes the Gettier problem. The former, as will be shown, actually yields Gettier cases, while the latter yields the counterintuitive result that there can exist no false warranted beliefs that is, if a particular belief B is to have warrant for a particular believer S, then B must be true. This latter result, as will become apparent, is inconsistent with Plantinga's overall position. In order to avoid confusion, we will hereafter distinguish between the two notions of warrant in the following way: the notion of warrant as that which when added to true belief yields knowledge will be referred to as 'kwarrant', and warrant as satisfaction of the necessary conditions given in Plantinga's positive theory will be referred to as 'p-warrant'. There will be times when it is not exactly clear to which notion Plantinga is referring, as well as times in which he is referring to both notions; in these cases we will simply use the term 'warrant'. According to Plantinga, a particular belief B is p-warranted for a particular believer S just in case the following conditions are met:1

If a subject has a true belief, and she has good evidence for it, and there’s no evidence against it, why should it matter if she doesn’t believe on the basis of the good available evidence? After all, properly based beliefs are no likelier to be true than their corresponding improperly based beliefs, as long as the subject possesses the same good evidence in both cases. And yet it clearly does matter. The aim of this paper is to explain why, and in the process delineate a species of epistemic luck that has hitherto gone unnoticed—what we call propositional epistemic luck—but which we claim is crucial to accounting for the importance of proper basing. As we will see, in order to understand why this type of epistemic luck is malignant, we also need to reflect on the relationship between epistemic luck and epistemic risk.

The topic for this chapter arises out of two sources. In the previous two chapters, we discovered two properties of belief that are valuable beyond that of truth, the properties of subjective justification and intellectual virtuousity. Both of these properties are valuable by themselves, so that it is epistemically better for a belief to be subjectively justified than not and it is better for a belief to be virtuous than not. Moreover, these properties have a value not swamped by the presence of truth, so that it is better to have a subjectively justified true belief than one that is true but unjustified in this sense, and it is better to have a virtuous true belief than to have a true belief that is not virtuous. In the former case, what makes the property of subjective justification valuable in a way not swamped by the value of truth is that this property is a transparent mark of truth. So it has value because of its connection to truth, but its value is not swamped by the presence of truth, as are other properties such as reliability that also have value because of their connection to truth. Intellectually virtuous belief is valuable because when a belief has this property, the believer is due credit for having a true belief.

Lay denial of knowledge for justified true beliefs

A platitude in epistemology is that an individual’s belief does not qualify as knowledge if it is true by luck. Individuals, however, are not the only bearers of knowledge. Many epistemologists agree that groups can also possess knowledge in a way that is genuinely collective. If groups can know, it is natural to think that, just as true individual beliefs fall short of knowledge due to individual epistemic luck, true collective beliefs may fall short of knowledge because of collective epistemic luck. This paper argues, first, that the dominant view of epistemic luck in the literature, the modal view, does not yield a satisfactory account of lucky collective beliefs. Second, it argues that collective epistemic luck is better explained in terms of groups lacking (suitably defined) forms of control over collective belief formation that are specific to the different procedures for forming collective beliefs. One of the main implications of this, we will argue, is that groups whose beliefs are formed via internal deliberation are more vulnerable to knowledge-undermining collective luck than groups that form their beliefs via non-deliberative methods, such as non-deliberative anonymous voting. The bottom line is that the greater exposure to knowledge-undermining luck that deliberation gives rise to provides a reason (not a conclusive one) for thinking that non-deliberative methods of group belief formation have greater epistemic value.

This chapter argues that by attending to the illocutionary force of knowledge attributions — specifically, that they serve to give credit to the believer for getting things right — fallibilists can assuage two problems plaguing their concept of knowledge: namely, the lottery problem and the Gettier problem. Borrowing work from Joel Fienberg on blaming, an account of credit attribution is developed that stresses the relationship between causal salience and causal responsibility. Because causal salience is context sensitive, resolutions to the lottery problem and the Gettier problem contain a significant contextual element. Just as an agent must be causally responsible in order to receive credit for athletic feats, so too must an agent's cognitive character or intellectual virtue be a necessary element to explain why an agent is deserving of credit for obtaining a true belief. This account is tested against cases relative to the above problems and ends with how this account can explain the value of knowledge.