Lay denial of knowledge for justified true beliefs

Abstract

Intuitively, there is a difference between knowledge and mere belief. Contemporary philosophical work on the nature of this difference has focused on scenarios known as "Gettier cases." Designed as counterexamples to the classical theory that knowledge is justified true belief, these cases feature agents who arrive at true beliefs in ways which seem reasonable or justified, while nevertheless seeming to lack knowledge. Prior empirical investigation of these cases has raised questions about whether lay people generally share philosophers' intuitions about these cases, or whether lay intuitions vary depending on individual factors (e.g. ethnicity) or factors related to specific types of Gettier cases (e.g. cases that include apparent evidence). We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge. Although participants rated true beliefs in Gettier and Skeptical Pressure cases as being justified, they were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge for these cases than for matched true belief cases. This pattern of response was consistent across different variations of Gettier cases and did not vary by ethnicity or gender, although attributions of justification were found to be positively related to measures of empathy. These findings therefore suggest that across demographic groups, laypeople share similar epistemic concepts with philosophers, recognizing a difference between knowledge and justified true belief.

Armchair‐Friendly Experimental Philosophy

“…The authors of the conference presentation no longer maintain that there is good evidence of gender differences in Gettier case responses; they themselves have been unable to replicate their earlier results, and in their subsequent published work they have reported no variation correlated with gender (Starmans and Friedman 2012). Other researchers have also failed to find gender differences in responses to Gettier cases (Wright 2010, Nagel, San Juan, and Mar 2013, Seyedsayamdost 2014. The practice of soliciting reports concerning statistically significant gender differences is not a balanced way of finding genuine gender differences; given the threshold for statistical significance in psychology, such differences should emerge in 5% of all studies even if there is no systematic correlation between gender and philosophical intuition, so the fact that some studies turned up differences is meaningless without information on the size of the pool of studies from which they were drawn (which was not supplied).…”

“…In the first major statement of the Diversity Challenge, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001) claimed to find systematic variation by culture and socio-economic status in responses to epistemological scenarios. For Gettier cases in particular, a series of subsequent studies have failed to show statistically significant crosscultural differences (Nagel, San Juan, andMar 2013, Turri 2013, Kim andYuan unpublished). A more thorough replication study examines not only Gettier cases, but also the other epistemological scenarios tested by Weinberg, Nichols and Stich, including the TrueTemp cases, and does so using a variety of in-class and online methods: here, also, no significant crosscultural differences were found for any case (Seyedsayamdost forthcoming).…”

Knowledge Judgments in “Gettier” Cases

“…People who read the authentic-evidence version tended to attribute knowledge, but people who read the apparent-evidence version tended to deny knowledge. The basic finding that people tend to deny knowledge in apparent evidence cases has been replicated (Turri 2013, section 2), and so has the finding that people tend to attribute knowledge in authentic evidence cases (Nagel, San Juan, andMar 2013, in light of Starmans andFriedman 2013, 664;Turri, Buckwalter, and Blouw in press). …”

Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition

“…During the last half decade experimental philosophers, along with a number of psychologists, have become increasingly interested the idea that there may be cultural differences in people's intuitive responses to philosophically important thought experiments, and this has led to a growing body of experimental work that has also begun to explore differences in intuitions across a variety of other demographic categories, including gender, age, personality, academic affiliation, and native language (Abarbanell and Hauser 2010;Ahlenius and Tännsjö, 2012;Buckwalter and Stich 2013;Colaço et al 2014;Costa et al 2014;Feltz and Cokely 2009;Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc 2009;Machery et al under review;Nagel, San Juan, and Mar 2013;Friedman 2103, 2014;Turri 2013;Vaesen, Peterson, and Van Bezooijen 2013). Some of these studies report partially conflicting findings, most have small sample sizes, and some raise other methodological issues.…”