Talk:Gettier problem
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Good job, Radgeek!
In the formulation of the JTB account, I provided internal links for the philosophical terms occurring for the first time in this article. I don't know what to do with "evidentially justified". Currently there is no article about evidence in philosophy (there should be, of course), and in the article "Theory of justification" evidence (or evidential justification) is not mentioned. Does "evidentially justified" here mean the same as "epistemically justified"? Andres 11:44, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Goldman's theory is discussed also in the article "Reliabilism". I think there should be an article "Causal account of knowledge" or "Causal theory of knowledge" (as that article proposes).
In this article, I miss a bit more explanations about Goldman's account. What examples does he bear in mind when he talks about "inappropriate" causality? How exactly does reliabilism help? Andres 13:25, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, Andres, for your kind words about my submissions, and for your revisions today. I'm using "evidentially justified" here to mean the same thing as "epistemically justified" Thus, "evidence" is being used here in a sense that's weak the the point of redundancy--it's whatever sort of stuff counts toward justifying or warranting a belief. I mainly included the phrase as a way of pointing out to beginning readers, what may not be immediately obvious, how "justification" is being used by epistemologists who are concerned with it. I think "evidentially justified" is the best way to get at the point without throwing on tags of episte-this, -that, and -theother. But it does indicate a certain bias towards aposteriori empirical justifications that I wish it didn't indicate. Perhaps there is a better locution; or perhaps we should just turn the issue over to an entry on "evidence" which could make the proper distinctions between stronger and weaker senses of the term.
- R.G. 10:18 EST, 9 Dec 2003
- I had an eye on the article Theory of justification. It does mention evidence as one type of justifier. This article requires a lot of work to be done on it. I think the appropriate title should be "Justification (epistemology)". So when we have such an article I would like to link "justified" to that article instead of "Theory of justification". It would begin from explaining how is an epistemic justification of a belief different from a moral justification or a prudential justification of a belief.
- I share your point that the presentation should be clear for the beginner. Probably "evidentially" makes more or less clear what kind of justification is meant, though it could be misread to be a technical term. I think that the best solution is keep the word "evidentially" for time being; and when the article "Justification (philosophy)" is there then substitute "epistemically justified" to that article. In that case anyone would feel that this is a technical term, and would follow the link if she doesn't know what mean. So at least she would avoid misunderstanding. Andres 16:42, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I agree with Andres that there ought to be another essay on "causal theory of knowledge." Indeed, we would probably benefit from a cluster of "causal theory of..." pages, given the importance of causal theories of meaning, perception, etc. over the past couple decades. I also would like to see more explanation on Goldman and causal responses (both their assets and their liabilities), but I'm somewhat tentative because, while I know a bit about the Gettier problem, I don't know *that* much about causalist responses to it. I'd hope that I might be able to defer to someone more knowledgeable than I about filling in the details. (One particularly vexing detail is that causalist accounts tend to be particularly hard to classify. Sometimes they seem to read like JTB+G accounts looking for a fourth condition; sometimes they seem to chuck out the J condition and replace it with a new condition; and sometimes they seem to be saying that causal requirements are part of a properly externalist J condition. I -think- Goldman leans towards the third option more than the first or second; but I've also seen him widely read as taking the first, and I'm not familiar enough with his work to strongly say one way or the other. Additionally, it looks like even if he does take the third requirement, he also has an additional requirement of 'correct reconstruction' that he wants to add on--so what to say? In any case, other causalists/reliabilists seem to take different stances towards how exactly to classify themselves.)
In any case, the typical examples of "inappropriate" sorts of causality are cases where a fact is involved in a particular perception or belief, but where the causal chain runs in such a way that we are inclined to classify it as a hallucination or a delusion. For example, suppose that Fred has a psychosis, which causes him to falsely believe that he is Caligula. Fred knows a lot about Caligula, including the fact that Caligula was psychotic; and since Fred believes that he is Caligula, he believes that he has a psychosis. This looks like a perfectly good causal chain from the fact that Fred has a psychosis to his belief that he does. But I doubt that we could call Fred's belief an instance of self-knowledge--rather, it's a very peculiar sort of delusion. (It's peculiar because it's one that happens, by accident, to be true.)
Or consider the boy who cried wolf: the fact that he saw a wolf caused him to tell the villagers that there was a wolf there. And when he told the villagers that there was a wolf there, this may have caused some of them to believe it, at least until they stopped to think. But the problem with the little boy who cried wolf was that he was a habitual liar--and so the villagers realized that they would hardly be justified in believing him. Even though he happened to be telling the truth that specific time, the point of the tale seems to be that there's no reasonable way that we could have expected the villagers to treat what he told them as knowledge, even after they had found out the truth.
I hope this helps make clearer what Goldman's concerned with in trying to specify the right kinds of causal chains. Reliabilism is supposed to resolve these problems by endorsing any causal chain that -reliably- produces true beliefs. The problem with testimony from the little boy who cried wolf is that he's an unreliable source; but we might be justified in believing someone who reliably told the truth, and the testimony of our senses has, ostensibly, evolved to be reliable by and large and for the most part. I am of the opinion that reliabilism doesn't actually solve the problems that it sets out to solve, and that there are a number of problems with, for example, knowledge by testimony that require a great deal more of what might seem like naive faith than reliabilism allows for. Whatever the case, though, I don't know immediately how best to integrate this material into the article--but all should feel free to make any or no use of it themselves, according to their use for it.
- R.G. 15:44 9 Dec 2003 UTC
- Thank you for your explanations. They are helpful. Currently I am going through Goldman's article (1967). It can be found here (http://liberalarts.unlv.edu/Philosophy/440goldmanreading1.htm). Andres 17:02, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
One other quick note on how reliabilist causal accounts try to solve the Gettier problem. The idea here is that the reason the Gettier cases trouble us is that their beliefs are formed, in some sense, accidentally--that is, they are either not caused by the facts, or caused by the wrong facts, or caused by the facts in the wrong way. Thus, for example, when Smith formed his belief that the man who gets the job will have ten coins in his pocket, he happened to be right--but he would have formed that belief anyway, even if Smith had actually had 24 coins, or no coins, in his pockets, because Smith was mistaken to think that Jones would be the man who got the job. That is to say, Smith would have formed the same belief even if it were false.
The answer is not quite so straightforward when it comes to Fred-who-thinks-he's-Caligula. One of the peculiar features of Fred's belief is that he wouldn't have formed the same belief if it were false (he couldn't think he was Caligula if he didn't have a psychosis of some kind). But there still seems like there's an important sense in which the connection between his belief and the facts is accidental... the same sense, perhaps, in which it seems clear that "having a color" and "having a shape" are not the same property, even though everything which has a color also has a shape. One way to explain this is by appealing to the fact that the beliefs of a psychotic are not a reliable guide to truth (although most psychotics may very well not know this), because the mark of psychosis is the formation of beliefs without regard to whether they are true or false. To pull a distinction from action theory, Fred's psychosis may be a cause for his belief that he has a psychosis, but it isn't one a reason.
(Fred may, incidentally, be a fairly decisive counter-example for Nozick's counterfactual account. The nearest possible world in which Fred does not have a psychosis is one in which he does not believe that he has a psychosis, since it's one in which he does not believe that he is Caligula. But I suppose that Nozick may be able to throw his second counterfactual at it--the sphere of the nearby possible worlds in which it is true that Fred has a psychosis includes the actual world where he believes that he does, but it may also be argued that he could just as easily have thought that he was Napoleon, or Jesus, or George Washington--and in those worlds he might very well not believe that he has a psychosis. In that case, the strict counterfactual would fail.)
- R.G. 16:10 9 Dec 2003 UTC
Another issue. It is put in the article that Gettier's problem is somehow the hard problem of contemporary epistemology. I consider putting it that somehow that problem stimulated the whole development of contemporary analytical philosophy. Would it be true? In any case, there are epistemologists (such as Pollock) who think that Gettier's problem is peripheral in epistemology. Andres 17:02, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I want to notice that there are other articles with similar stuff: Edmund Gettier, justified true belief, knowledge (philosophy), epistemology. I don't think that redundancy is bad. However, we should have an informed choice about where to put our material. Andres 17:02, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
About responses to the Gettier problem - what about fallibilism? Methinks it deserves a mention. --AceMyth 05:32, May 18, 2005 (UTC)