Tom Morris

The John Birch Society are co-sponsoring CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee. It looks like it might actually be winding up the Liberty Council, the theocratic wing of the U.S. conservative movement.

My new favourite Gettier case

I’m just reading John Pollock’s explanation of the Gettier problem - it’s in Bernecker’s Reading Epistemology (part of the excellent Blackwell series Reading Philosophy), but it’s originally from Pollock’s book Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. As examples of Gettier cases, Pollock cites Gettier’s Smith and Jones “owns a Ford” example, and Alvin Goldman’s “barns” example from “Discrimination and perceptual knowledge” in the Journal of Philosophy vol. 73 p. 771-91. I had heard that example in some lectures on reformed epistemology which I heard during my first year of undergraduate study, but had rather naturally misattributed them to Alvin Plantinga, and as an example of the role of defeaters rather than as a clearly explained Gettier case.

Pollock gives an even simpler perceptual example: Suppose S sees a ball that looks red to him, and on that basis he correctly judges that it is red. But unbeknownst to S, the ball is illuminated by red lights and would look red to him even if it were not red. Then S does not know that the ball is red despite his having a justified true belief to that effect. Furthermore, his reason for believing that the ball is red does not involve his believing that the ball is not illuminated by red lights. Illumination by red lights is related to his reasoning only as a defeater, not as a step in his reasoning. For further examples, Pollock points to Brian Skyrms’ 1967 Journal of Philosophy paper The Explication of “X Knows That P”.

I saw a good example of a Gettier case in a blog comment recently by painquale on MetaFilter.com: Implications of white lies also give rise to real-life Gettier cases. If Jenn can play three musical instruments, but tries to impress Angela by telling her that she can play five instruments, Angela will form the true justified belief that Jenn can play at least three instruments. But she doesn’t know it because it was founded on a lie.

Obviously, one example of a Gettier case is all you really need to show that Gettier’s analysis is obviously true. Gettier’s paper is an example of a superb piece of philosophy - a few thousand years of tradition overturned with two pages of logic that is understandable by pretty much anyone with basic training in philosophy. I think the musical instrument example is a lot clearer than the rather contrived “owns a Ford” or man-with-coins-in-his-pocket-at-job-interview examples. Anyone know if painquale’s example is original or if it’s somewhere in the literature?