The folk conception of knowledge

Abstract

a b s t r a c tHow do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ''Gettier cases'') in which a person's justified belief is true, but only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and ''Gettiering'' on people's knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent's belief is based on ''apparent'' evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers.

Knowledge and luck

“…(It is important to note that disrupting the initial truth-maker does not automatically make the belief false, for it could turn out that some other state of affairs could serve as a backup truth-maker.) Many researchers have claimed that the luck involved with such disruption and replacement-by-backup prevents one from knowing (Lehrer, 1965;Sosa, 2007), but this verdict has been disputed (Hetherington, 1998(Hetherington, , 1999(Hetherington, , 2013Sartwell, 1991Sartwell, , 1992Starmans & Friedman, 2012). To test which side of the dispute better captures the ordinary view of knowledge, we compared rates of knowledge attributions in response to three different stories in a between-subjects experiment.…”

“…Instead, there are several more specific lessons about the relationship between knowledge and the different luckrelated factors, each of which affects knowledge attributions in interesting and importantly different ways. Our results also shed light on the potential theoretical usefulness of a peculiar class of cases, known as "Gettier cases," that have recently generated controversy in the psychological literature (Nagel, Mar, & San Juan, 2013a, b;Starmans & Friedman, 2012Turri, 2013). In the General Discussion, we will examine in greater detail the relationship between our findings and prior work on these issues.…”

“…Participants first responded to a knowledge question standardly used in the study of knowledge attribution (Friedman & Turri, in press;Nagel et al, 2013b;Starmans & Friedman, 2012;Turri, 2013 Participants were not allowed to go back to a previous page and change their answer. Questions were always asked in the same order, and response options were rotated randomly.…”

“…Recent work has also identified at least one form of luck, broadly related to deviant causation, that does not seem to diminish knowledge attribution (Starmans & Friedman, 2012), although subsequent work has claimed to undermine these findings (Nagel et al, 2013).…”

“…Philosophers and psychologists have developed many thought experiments intended to examine intuitions about the relationship between knowledge and luck (e.g., Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010;Shope, 1983;Starmans & Friedman, 2012;Turri, 2014a;Wright, 2010). These thought experiments have varied widely and have focused on different features that different authors have considered relevant to luck.…”