ManM

John takes a walk in the park and spots a cardinal sitting in a tree. And so he constructs the following argument:

1) There is a cardinal in the tree.
2) A cardinal is a bird.
Therefore,
3) There is a bird in the tree.

Later, Bob is taking a walk in the same park and spots a bluejay sitting in the same tree. Likewise, he constructs an argument:

1) There is a bluejay in the tree.
2) A bluejay is a bird.
Therefore,
3) There is a bird in the tree.

At the end of the day, both Bob and John begin talking about their experience in the park. They both agree that there was a bird in the tree. Are they talking about the same thing?

Intuitively, we would say no. Sure they may both originally agree that 'there is a bird in the tree', but a simple line of questioning would easily show that they in fact do not agree. For John, 'a bird' refers to a cardinal; for Bob, it refers to a bluejay. And so Bob's position would be as follows: "Yes, there was a bird in the tree, but not the bird John is thinking about." We find that different sets of premises can lead to the same conclusion. In order to retain the full meaning of the conclusion, we must somehow preserve the premises and include them in our understanding of the conclusion. Therefore when John says '"There is a bird in the tree"', we must correlate 'bird' with 'cardinal' in order to truly understand what John believes.

Now let's go back to a Gettier type counterexample. John spots the cardinal and concludes that there is a bird in the tree. The cardinal then flies away and is replaced by the bluejay. The statement 'There is a bird in the tree' is still true. John believes it to be true, and he is justified in doing so. Still, we would hesitate to admit he has knowledge that there is a bird in the tree. But if we understand that for John 'a bird' is correlated with 'cardinal' (as shown in my example), we have a problem with Gettier's analysis. John believes "there is a bird in the tree" only if 'a bird' refers to a cardinal. Since 'there is a bird in the tree' refers to a bluejay at the end of the Gettier counterexample, we can say that John does not in fact believe it. And so the counterexample fails to cast doubt on the justified true belief model of knowledge, for the belief is missing.

Thoughts?

tronvillain

ManM:
No, he is not. Once he is not looking at the cardinal (regardless of whether it is still in the tree), the premise "There is a cardinal in the tree" is no longer justified, and must be replaced with "There was a cardinal in the tree when I was looking at it." His conclusion thus becomes "There was a bird in the tree when I was looking at it."

So, when Bob and John meet, the belief they each hold is "There was a bird in the tree when I was looking at it." Now, since "I" references an individual, the statements are "There was a bird in the tree when Bob was looking at it" and "There was a bird in the tree when John was looking at it." To believe anything more than "We have both seen a bird in the tree", such as "We saw the same bird in the tree" requires that they establish that it was in fact the same bird.

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>

ManM

Ah, thank you. Maybe I should just stick to the original Gettier cases.

Smith and Jones are competing for a job. Smith has good evidence for the following:

a) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

In this case, the president of the company has assured Smith that Jones will get the job, and Smith himself has counted the coins in Jones's pocket. And so from (a), it can be deduced that:

b) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Well by some fluke, Smith is in fact the one who gets the job, and he also happens to have 10 coins in his pocket.

Therefore (b) turns out to be true. Smith believes (b), and Smith is justified in believing (b). But we have a hard time believing that Smith actually knew (b). This is how the original argument went.

I am proposing that Smith's belief in (b) only holds if (a) is affirmed. But (a) is not affirmed, and so Smith does not believe (b) in the sense that the argument uses it.

jpbrooks

Gettier is somewhat new to me.

What I find puzzling in these particular examples is that if the whole concept of justification is in question, how would anyone know that one is justified in believing that premise 2 in each example is true?

But if the whole concept of justification is not in question, what part of it is
supposed to be problematic?

-John Phillip Brooks

Bill Snedden

IIRC, Bertrand Russell had some interesting things to say along these same lines, in the context of his discussion on universals & particulars in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019511552X/qid=thesecularweb/" target="_blank">The Problems of Philosophy</a>.

Again, from memory, it would seem that Russell felt that our knowledge can't consist solely of unrelated universals floating around inside of our head; that would get us nowhere. A necessary characteristic of knowledge is context; the conjunction of universal and particular.

So, to go back to your "bird" example, Russell might respond that neither John nor Bob could have thought merely "there is a bird in that tree." They would have, of necessity, thought, "there is a cardinal/bluejay in that tree." Seen this way, the Gettier-style "enigma" is resolved.

I think the same approach might be employed against the actual Gettier argument ManM posted. It seems clear to me that Smith couldn't possibly have been justified in separating the "ten coins in the pocket" (quasi-"universal") from the "Jones will get the job" (quasi-"particular"), and thus his "knowledge" that the "man with ten coins in his pocket" will get the job is not justified, unless Jones actually gets the job (as ManM suggests). It would seem to me that the conjunction of "coins" to "Jones" is inseparable if it is the case that context matters (as I think Russell seemed to say).

Regards,

Bill Snedden

P.S. Regardless of whether or not my memory is correct, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019511552X/qid=thesecularweb/" target="_blank">The Problems of Philosophy</a> is a great book. Slim, well-written, & easy to follow, it's a great introduction to some of the classic & sometimes intractable difficulties in the history of philosophy.

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

jpbrooks

Thanks Bill. I was using a copy of that book that I had obtained from the UIC library before it was recalled. But I am going to purchase a copy for myself.


Does "affirmed" mean "stated as a confirmed truth or fact"?

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

tronvillain

Actually "The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket" doesn't turn out out to be true, it turns out to have been true. Anyway, you are right, pointing out the difference between an accidentally true belief and a justified true belief - only justified true belief is knowledge.

Clutch

ManM, without going into the vexed question of justification, I can say that your particular complaint is highly dubious. The reason why actually comes from linguistics or the philosophy of language: "the man", "a bird", and so forth, are analyzed as quantifier phrases, and not as complex names. The rationale is explained beautifully in Russell's "Descriptions", a chapter from Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy; I could not do any better.

But to condense Russell into a very small nutshell: "I met a man" has different truth conditions than "I met Jones", even if it was my meeting Jones that makes the former true. Proof: had I said "I met a man, but it was not Jones", I would have lied -- but I would not have said something logically contradictory. And in general, the expression "a man" in such a sentence refers to no specific man. Proof: Consider, "I did not meet a man" -- one could hardly ask in reply, "Which man did you not meet?"

These are just some of Russell's arguments for concluding that descriptions ("an F", "the F") do not designate individuals directly; they are actually existential quantifiers whose truth-conditional effects are distributed across the logical form of the whole sentence. So "a bird" and "the man" in your examples do not designate actual individuals; they are, at bottom, groups of propositional functions into which the world itself plugs the relevant individuals. They are unspecific as to which individual it is that will satisfy the descriptions.

Hope that helps!

(Edited ps: The so-called Gettier problem is actually completely anticipated by Russell in Problems of Philosophy, in the chapter "Knowledge, Error and Probable Opinion" -- check out the bit about the late Prime Minister's name starting with 'B'. Smart fella, that Russell!)

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>

bd-from-kg

ManM

You say:

But this doesn’t work in general. The real problem comes from the conjunction of three things:

(1) X is justified in believing A and A-&gt;B
(2) Either A or A-&gt;B is false
(3) B is true anyway

The “Gettier problem” is that X is justified in believing B by virtue of (1), and B is true by virtue of (3), so X has a justified true belief in B. But in view of (2) X can’t be said to know B, since his reason for believing B is false. Thus knowledge is not the same thing as justified true belief.

Your solution, as I understand it, is to deny that X “really” believes B (much less that he’s justified in believing it); all that he “really” believes is A and A-&gt;B. But this leads to absurdity.

Suppose that I believe that, if it has rained heavily recently, the XYZ Racetrack will be muddy for several hours. Moreover, I believe that it has been raining heavily there for some time. Both beliefs are justified: I have attended the track every race day for twenty years and this has always been true, and I live very near the track and have watched the rain coming down.

Unfortunately, unknown to me, the track has just instituted a new policy of putting a tarp over the track when it rains. But also unknown to me, a water main near the track broke earlier today, making a mess of the track in spite of the tarp. So (according to Gettier’s analysis) I have a justified true belief that the track is muddy, but I cannot be said to have “knowledge” that it’s muddy because my reason for believing it is false.

Your solution is to say that I don’t “really” believe that the track is muddy. But then how do you explain the fact that I’ve just placed a bet on Slush Lightning on the basis of the fact that I happen to know he’s a good mudder?

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

tronvillain

I'd say that you don't have a justified true belief, you have an accidental true belief. You have reasons for believing that the track will be muddy, but that belief is only justified if those reasons are actually the case. Since "if it has rained heavily recently, the XYZ Racetrack will be muddy for several hours" is no longer the case because of the tarp over the track, the belief that the track will be wet being true is an accident, a coincidence, a fluke... that is, not justified at all.

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>