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Just to be clear, it isn't that people though justification (which, yes, can be probabilistic/non-deductive) invariable leads to knowledge, and these aren't sup

Just to be clear, it isn't that people though justification (which, yes, can be probabilistic/non-deductive) invariable leads to knowledge, and these aren't supposed to be cases of believing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Suppose you grant that justification is probabilistic. What's the extra condition that makes justified belief count as knowledge? Pre-Gettier, one might have been inclined to say that it's that your justified belief is actually right—what you believe is true. Gettier's point is that this can't be the full explanation of the difference between merely justified belief and knowledge. Similarly, suppose you grant that one can have true belief that falls short of knowledge because one lacks "right reasons". Well, "right reasons" is a tricky notion, but suppose this means something like good evidence, or more generally, the sorts of reasons that we take to show your reasoning in a responsible way. Again, Gettier's point is that good evidence or responsible belief (assuming this isn't limited to deduction from things that you're certain about) isn't sufficient to make true belief into knowledge. (Fwiw, Gettier wasn't the first person to point this out, but he did it in an especially vivid way which got a lot of people thinking hard about what else you needed to say if you were going to explain the difference between mere justified true belief and knowledge.)

allturtles 5y ago
> Suppose you grant that justification is probabilistic. What's the extra condition that makes justified belief count as knowledge? Pre-Gettier, one might have been inclined to say that it's that your justified belief is actually right—what you believe is true. I would say that what makes it count as knowledge is the quality of the justification. If Jones had seen a written job offer to Smith rather than just hearsay that he would get the job, his belief that Smith would get the job would probably count as 'knowledge.' Requiring that what you believe be actually true to count as knowledge is begging the question, since that requires either already having 'knowledge' that it's true, or having direct access to objective reality that no one has.
- natt941 5y ago
  If "quality" means something like strength of the evidence, then couldn't you still have Gettier-like cases, so long as the evidence doesn't entail the truth of the belief? (suppose the HR department printed the wrong name on the offer letter, etc.) If "quality" doesn't mean this... then the worry is that you've just labeled what you were trying to explain, because "quality of justification" might mean something like "that thing, whatever it is, which makes a belief count as knowledge". About truth as a condition for knowledge... there's a lot of subtlety here. The claim isn't that you have to first know that P is true in order for you to know that P, or that you have to provide the truth of P as one of the reasons why you know P, or anything like that. It's more of a logical claim about what it means when we say "S knows that P"... knowledge is "factive" in that you can't know P if P is false. At least, that's how philosophers use the word "know", and it's at least one of the common ways that ordinary folk use the word. (For what it's worth, there's a lot of discussion amongst philosophers about whether anyone who knows that P also has to know that they know that P... plenty of philosophers deny this.)
  - allturtles 5y ago
    > If "quality" means something like strength of the evidence, then couldn't you still have Gettier-like cases, so long as the evidence doesn't entail the truth of the belief? (suppose the HR department printed the wrong name on the offer letter, etc.) It would entail Gettier-like cases if you require knowledge to be true in some absolute sense. But I'm discarding the "true" condition as a requirement of a knowledge. Outside of a few domains like math, knowledge of this kind doesn't exist. Knowledge is always subject to revision.
    - natt941 5y ago
      Often we might think we know something and later conclude that we were wrong... but in this case, it's common to say "I thought I knew such-and-such, but I didn't". Also, for what it's worth, most people don't think that knowing that P requires that you're certain that P. At least, that's one way of using the word "know". So if we're trying to give an analysis of this thing, we can't just decide to discard truth as a requirement of knowledge... the goal is to give an analysis of this thing that people talk about, not replace it with something else. That said, it sounds like you're sympathetic to a line of thought on which this so-called "traditional" conception of knowledge isn't very useful, and we should focus on the sorts of things that Bayesian epistemology focuses on... something like degrees of confidence.

allturtles 5y ago

> Suppose you grant that justification is probabilistic. What's the extra condition that makes justified belief count as knowledge? Pre-Gettier, one might have been inclined to say that it's that your justified belief is actually right—what you believe is true. I would say that what makes it count as knowledge is the quality of the justification. If Jones had seen a written job offer to Smith rather than just hearsay that he would get the job, his belief that Smith would get the job would probably count as 'knowledge.' Requiring that what you believe be actually true to count as knowledge is begging the question, since that requires either already having 'knowledge' that it's true, or having direct access to objective reality that no one has.

natt941 5y ago
If "quality" means something like strength of the evidence, then couldn't you still have Gettier-like cases, so long as the evidence doesn't entail the truth of the belief? (suppose the HR department printed the wrong name on the offer letter, etc.) If "quality" doesn't mean this... then the worry is that you've just labeled what you were trying to explain, because "quality of justification" might mean something like "that thing, whatever it is, which makes a belief count as knowledge". About truth as a condition for knowledge... there's a lot of subtlety here. The claim isn't that you have to first know that P is true in order for you to know that P, or that you have to provide the truth of P as one of the reasons why you know P, or anything like that. It's more of a logical claim about what it means when we say "S knows that P"... knowledge is "factive" in that you can't know P if P is false. At least, that's how philosophers use the word "know", and it's at least one of the common ways that ordinary folk use the word. (For what it's worth, there's a lot of discussion amongst philosophers about whether anyone who knows that P also has to know that they know that P... plenty of philosophers deny this.)
- allturtles 5y ago
  > If "quality" means something like strength of the evidence, then couldn't you still have Gettier-like cases, so long as the evidence doesn't entail the truth of the belief? (suppose the HR department printed the wrong name on the offer letter, etc.) It would entail Gettier-like cases if you require knowledge to be true in some absolute sense. But I'm discarding the "true" condition as a requirement of a knowledge. Outside of a few domains like math, knowledge of this kind doesn't exist. Knowledge is always subject to revision.
  - natt941 5y ago
    Often we might think we know something and later conclude that we were wrong... but in this case, it's common to say "I thought I knew such-and-such, but I didn't". Also, for what it's worth, most people don't think that knowing that P requires that you're certain that P. At least, that's one way of using the word "know". So if we're trying to give an analysis of this thing, we can't just decide to discard truth as a requirement of knowledge... the goal is to give an analysis of this thing that people talk about, not replace it with something else. That said, it sounds like you're sympathetic to a line of thought on which this so-called "traditional" conception of knowledge isn't very useful, and we should focus on the sorts of things that Bayesian epistemology focuses on... something like degrees of confidence.