What is knowledge? An exploration of the Justified True Belief model and the challenges introduced by Edmond Gettier.

Transcription

1 What is knowledge? An exploration of the Justified True Belief model and the challenges introduced by Edmond Gettier. The study of knowledge, or Epistemology as coined by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier, is a developed area of philosophical study that has permeated throughout the subject s history. Questions such as the one central to this essay, what is knowledge? or what does it mean to know a thing?, have occupied thinkers from Plato to Russell and other contemporary academics. The journey of the debate over knowledge has been an irregular one however. Since Plato s Theaetetus and Meno it was generally agreed that the necessary and sufficient conditions for being able to say something was known were belief in that thing, the truth of that thing and the justification for that belief. While other epistemological questions such as how can I know a thing? or what do I know? were never really completely agreed on it did seem that, if anything, philosophers could agree the Justified True Belief (or JTB) model solved this preliminary question of what exactly knowledge was. However, in 1963 American philosopher Edmund Gettier published one paper entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (imaginatively enough ) in which he raised scenarios, as philosophers often to do, in which it could be said there was a justified belief in a true thing but knowledge still did not apply. His contribution was ground breaking in the world of Epistemology and called into serious question the most basic assumptions of the subject in the JTB model. We shall explore the challenges raised by Gettier, but first the JTB model must be better explained and analysed in order to understand the problems Gettier brings up. Firstly we shall examine the tools and parameters of the study that philosophers use in discussion of knowledge. The kind or type of knowledge we are dealing with is knowledge that P (proposition P) as opposed to knowledge of a thing or person, or knowledge of how to do things. Why the focus on this kind of knowledge? There are many proposed reasons, chiefly that all other forms of knowledge collapse into this basic kind of knowledge. For example, when I say I know of Lucy, surely all I mean is I know that there is a person called Lucy, I know that she has blonde hair and that she likes tomato soup and other factual aspects that aggregate to my knowledge of Lucy. This might seem like an attractive reason to focus on this type of knowledge, but there do seem to be grey areas of knowledge that knowledge that does not deal with (arguably). For example, when I say I know what the smell of roses is like, do I really know that anything? The kind of knowledge Russell would have referred to as knowledge by acquaintance and focuses on subjective knowledge of immediate sensory experience, arguably, does not involve knowledge that anything. However, there is a danger of collapsing into language games here, rephrasing the problem could solve the issue for knowledge that by saying, for example, when I say I know the smell of roses what I am saying is that I know that this certain smell corresponds to what I understand a rose to be. Again, however, this linguistic bickering does not seem to advance the subject. In actual fact it seems philosophers focus on knowledge that rather than any other type because it is the kind of knowledge the first philosophers who introduced the subject dealt in, and subsequently the type of

2 knowledge the next generation s philosophers read about and naturally adopted in their discussion. Furthermore, when dealing with conditions for knowledge, philosophers focus on necessary and sufficient conditions; these must be explained. In short: P is a necessary condition for Q iff for Q to be the case P must be the case. P is a sufficient condition for Q iff if P is the case then Q must be the case. (I have not spelt if wrongly in these two, in Philosophy iff means if and only if.) What does this mean? Well, in usual philosopher fashion we shall use an example to demonstrate the nature of different kinds of condition. Substitute Q, or the thing we wish to be the case, with Jack (me) eating. Now for this to be the case it is necessary that I am present, because I cannot be eating while not present, however not sufficient because there needs to be an edible object to be eaten by me. It is sufficient for me to be present with a banana but not necessary because although my presence is necessary a banana is just one example of an edible object, an apple is another. Now we see the JTB model beginning to make sense. In Epistemology the JTB model claims that the individually necessary and together sufficient conditions for knowledge are justification, truth and belief. In other words, without any single one there could not knowledge and only together are they sufficient for knowledge. Now we must explore each condition in depth for further understanding of the model. Belief This condition seems to be the easiest to understand and most difficult to take issue with. In short, belief is to accept as true any cognitive content. For example, saying I believe I am currently sitting at my desk can just as easily be understood as I take it to be true that I am currently sitting at my desk. It is a positive psychological stance that the state of affairs in reality directly corresponds to the way any proposition states them to be. Belief is said to be necessary because you cannot know anything without first taking it to be true, regardless of its truth or falsehood. For example, if I am standing behind a screen with people I cannot see on the other side, but they are nevertheless making noise and stamping their feet, even though it is true that there are people on the other side of the screen and I am justified in believing that there are due to empirical evidence, it cannot be said I know the people are there if I wrongly believe that there is a machine creating this empirical evidence on the other side of the screen in efforts to fool me. Here we see that truth and justification without belief are insufficient and belief is necessary for knowledge to apply. Truth The nature of truth differs across different areas of philosophy; the type of the truth we deal with in Epistemology is correspondence. A proposition is true, in this sense, if it corresponds with the objective reality. It seems fairly obvious that truth must be necessary for knowledge because one cannot know an untrue thing. I cannot know that I am currently living in the year 1753 because that simply does not correspond with objective reality. However, a preliminary problem can be raised with the JTB model at this point. When attempting to demonstrate whether I know a thing, the

3 JTB model would ask me, among other things, whether the thing I am claiming to know is true. How, though, could I possibly tick or cross the true box without already knowing the truth or falsehood of a thing? This, indeed, would already have to be known and therefore render the JTB model redundant and circular, you would have to know whether you know a thing before deciding whether you know it. Furthermore, how can I ever know any immediate truth about the external world that is always mediated through my senses and therefore subject to some degree of doubt? While the latter of the issues may well be dipping into another area of investigation in Epistemology, namely what can I know?, the former does raise doubt as to the actual utility of the JTB model in my opinion. Nevertheless, for now we concede that truth is a necessary condition for knowledge. Justification Easily the most controversial of the three, justification in short states that to know a thing you must have justification for believing in it. The fact justification itself is needed is of little issue, it is the nature of sufficient justification itself that poses problems. First though, an example to demonstrate the necessity of justification; if I am sitting in my room listening to music with the door closed and an absolute stranger whom I had no prior knowledge of is standing outside my room, out of view or earshot, and I, for some manic reason, take it to be true that there is somebody outside my door then do I really know that the proposition is true? It is certainly true that there is somebody outside my room and I certainly believe it, but surely without justification for that belief my knowledge is nothing more than potluck? It seems therefore that truth and belief are by themselves insufficient conditions for knowledge, but also some kind of justification is needed. The problems then arise in questioning what exactly is justification? The debate here collapses into two schools of thought; internalism and externalism. Internalism the argument that justification for a proposition is entirely internal because all factors that lead to justification, such as evidence, consist in mental states. Externalism the argument that justification goes beyond mental states and must be demonstrated in correspondence to external and verifiable factors. Externalism seems to be more forceful because it avoids the problem of internal psychological delusion that internalism encounters. For example, if a man is drugged with a hallucinogen and begins to see blue monsters everywhere door mats should be then arguably his internal evidence would justify a belief in those monsters (while they still might not truly be there) but the externalist would say due to external factors such as the testimony and experience of others and the rational objective investigation carried out by non drugged subjects into these monsters that shows they are only illusions, justification does not apply. A further issue with justification is when exactly, once the conditions for justification are agreed upon, does justification apply? Let s take sensory evidence as our condition for justification, clearly there are varying degrees of sensory evidence for a given proposition s content. For example, when I see a huge, fast approaching object

4 in the near distance while standing on a train track, its pretty good sensory evidence that a train is coming and I should step out the way. However, when I see a small object I can barely make out in the far distance it is slightly less evidential that a train is coming because it is more possible that I am mistaking the object for something that it is not. Furthermore, when I hear nothing but a low hum in the distance while standing on the train track, it is not very evidential at all that a train is coming because the hum could easily be something else I am mistaking for a train. The question of at what point there is enough evidence to justify your belief seems quite subjective and flimsy when it comes to a hard fast definition of knowledge. Some believed, such as seventeenth century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, that knowledge only applies when the evidence for a given proposition is so strong that justification is unavoidable and there is exactly no doubt in the belief. However this famously lead him to the lonely rock of solipsism and his cogito ergo sum, stating that all he could truly know was that he existed because he must exist to even ask the question, the evidence is therefore immediate and beyond doubt. All other propositions, including factual statements about the external world are based on sensory evidence that is, due to the occasional unreliability or our senses in dreams and hallucinations, always subject to some degree of doubt. However, once again this seems to be drifting into the question of what can we know? rather than the one which concerns us in what is knowledge?, we must therefore concede that justification in some nature and sense is necessary for knowledge and together with truth and belief act as the sufficient conditions for knowledge to apply. Now we must explore Gettier and the issues with this theory. In 1963 Edmond Gettier had taken up his first teaching position at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Due to his lack of recent publications his colleagues urged him to write up any ideas that came to mind simply to please the administration of the university. The astounding result was a three page paper entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? that presented scenarios that shook the foundations of Epistemology and remains the most important paper in the subject written to date. From then on Gettier never published anything again, but his one paper is universally read by students of the subject. While I could simply present the scenarios used by Gettier himself, it is more entertaining to create your own examples, as countless people have done before. So, below is my Gettier problem: Suppose Fred and I am taking a maths test. I have strong evidence that Fred will perform better than me in the test because while I have revised half the subjects on the test I have not revised the other half and I have been told and seen that a friend of Fred who had taken the test an hour earlier has written down all the answers on a sheet for Fred to take into the test and use to score 100%. Furthermore, Fred has a stain on the back of his jacket that I have seen several times today. From these premises it seems quite reasonable for me to extrapolate the proposition: the boy who will perform better in the test has a stain on the back of his jacket (proposition A). I have strong justification for believing that both elements of this proposition are true, I have been told of and seen the answers being given to Fred and I have seen the stain several times including while sitting behind him in the test itself. Therefore, arguably, in accordance with the JTB model, I know that proposition A is true.

5 Now suppose the friend that gave Fred the answers is a false friend that actually wishes the naïve Fred to fail, unknown to me, and gave him instead all the wrong answers to score a zero. Fred, due to his assurance of the cheat, did not revise the subjects at all and so will be none the wiser. The friend only told me because he wanted everyone to know that not only was Fred a cheat but also a fool for believing him after his result is revealed. Also, suppose that morning my little brother spilt jam on the back of my jacket at breakfast but was too embarrassed to tell me because we were just about to leave for school and there would not have been time to change, so bit his lip and stayed quiet while I went to school with jam stains on my back. After the result of the test is revealed and, as you may expect, I have beaten Fred, it seems I was correct in my knowledge of proposition A. The boy who performed better in the test did indeed have a stain on his back. But did I know that A? It seems intuitive to say no. But, as we have demonstrated, I was justified in believing the proposition to be true, so according to the JTB model I did know it! The necessary conclusion is that the JTB model is flawed. Gettier argued that his examples demonstrated that while justification, truth and belief are necessary for knowledge; they alone are not sufficient for every circumstance. In certain situations, such as the one above, it seems even though each condition was met it was dumb luck that led us to supposed knowledge of A rather than anything else. Is JTB doomed then? What is this fourth condition? There have certainly been many responses to Gettier s paper which seek to provide a fourth condition (x) making the finished JTBx sufficient for knowledge. However none of these attempts are without controversy or deserve to brought up as the acknowledged solution to the Epistemological issue raised 50 years ago now. For example, American philosopher Robert Nozick attempted to redefine the conditions for knowledge in the face of Gettier s paper as follows; S knows that P iff: - P is true. - S believes that P. - If P were false, S would not believe that P. - If P is true, S will believe that P. Nozick claimed this dealt with the dumb luck issue introduced by Gettier problems with the third condition. As we can see in my example, if A were false (and, say, I did not have a stain on my back) I would still believe A because my belief was not directed at the correct thing and therefore could not be said to know. However, for modern philosophers such as Simon Blackburn this is still insufficient. He claims we do not want to award knowledge to someone who meets each of these conditions in Nozick s model by pure defect. According to Blackburn there must be some further condition that defines the meeting of these conditions for appropriate reasons. As we can see by now the discussion of what exactly knowledge is seems to have reached little agreement past the, in my opinion already circular, JTB model s demise in In conclusion of this brief exploration I will offer my own suggestion as to the reason why analysis of knowledge seems to lead to continuous conflict. Why

6 must we suppose that our cognitive processes are subject to the same rationality as logic or maths? It seems that in all Analytical Philosophy it is optimistically presumed that these abstract concepts such as individuality, knowledge or goodness can be reduced and broken down as perfectly as numbers. Perhaps the reason why these attempts fail so often is because these concepts are indeed just that, abstract, built into us illogically through evolution because at some point it became naturally beneficial to have these ideas as background to our experience. In analysis there seems to be a continual effort to make a perfect circle on a propositional Venn diagram that separates the known from the unknown, but why are we to assume knowledge will ever conform to these stringent mathematical laws? Let us take, for example, epistemic propositions of ethical or aesthetic nature. It is not considered unreasonable by any person when I say I know that rape is wrong, or I know that Picasso s Guernica is a better piece of artwork than the smiley face I just doodled, however the words I use here such as wrong or better are purely subjective and can therefore never fit into the stringent conditional models I have already discussed. The lack of an objective morality, for example, means no statement claiming to know the ethical value of something could ever be objectively true, or correspond with some objective standard, and therefore my statement I know rape is wrong while completely reasonable could never be accepted by the JTB model. In this way it seems the concept of knowledge is more expressive or illustrative than actually concretely presenting some exact correlation between objective standards and cognitive states. It is a verbal or linguistic tool that expresses certainty, and therefore analytic efforts to make it fit with some set of conditions or criteria are redundant due to knowledge s abstraction in our language. Indeed, does the evidence not suggest that knowledge is more of a blurred cloud on the Venn diagram that certain propositions fit into without doubt, others fit to subjective degrees and others still do not fit at all? If this is true then we have nothing but a future of continual disagreement in Epistemological analysis to look forward to. Well, perhaps this is what Philosophy is for in the first place! I leave this to the reader to ponder. Jack Morris September 2013