The Inescapability of Gettier Problems

Zagzebski, Linda

doi:10.2307/2220147

Cited by 239 publications

(112 citation statements)

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“…Epistemologists since Gettier have struggled hard to produce a closed list of factors that would need to be added to true belief (or relationships in which truth and belief would need to figure) in order to constitute the state of knowledge, evidently without success (for surveys, see Plantinga, 1993;Shope, 1983;Steup, 2008). Increasingly complex analyses have been crafted to sidestep intuitive counterexamples to earlier analyses, but new counterexamples have steadily emerged to confront the new analyses (and perhaps not only steadily but inevitably, as argued in Zagzebski, 1994). Other, simpler efforts at the analysis of knowledge have collapsed into circularity, managing to analyze knowledge only by adding to true belief a condition which 5 Some philosophers add further mental conditions, maintaining that the mental state or psychological component of knowledge is not simply belief, but particularly confident belief, or perhaps justified belief, where 'justified' is understood in mental terms; these elaborations of the standard view will be discussed in due course.…”

Section: What the Two Disciplines Mean By 'Mental States' And 'Knowlementioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge as a Mental State

Nagel¹

2013

Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 4

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Section: What the Two Disciplines Mean By 'Mental States' And 'Knowlementioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge as a Mental State

Nagel¹

2013

Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 4

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“…However, many proposed explanations center on two properties shared by Gettier cases. One property is the element of luck (Pritchard, 2005;Unger, 1968): Sam does not know there is a silver dollar under Lucky's saddle because his belief is only true due to luck, or more precisely, due to ''double luck'' (Turri, 2011;Zagzebski, 1994). Though Sam starts with a justified true belief, bad luck interferes (the silver dollar is stolen), and then a stroke of good luck ''cancels out the bad'' (a different silver dollar ends up under the saddle).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The folk conception of knowledge

Starmans¹,

Friedman

2012

Cognition

119

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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.

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“…Indeed, even the seeming intractability of the Gettier problem has been subject to investigation (see e.g. Zagzebski (1994) and Craig (1990)). …”

Section: Examples Of Thought Experiments Acting As a Discovery Heurismentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophical thought experiments as heuristics for theory discovery

Praëm

Steglich‐Petersen

2015

Synthese

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The growing literature on philosophical thought experiments has so far focused almost exclusively on the role of thought experiments in confirming or refuting philosophical hypotheses or theories. In this paper we draw attention to an additional and largely ignored role that thought experiments frequently play in our philosophical practice: some thought experiments do not merely serve as means for testing various philosophical hypotheses or theories, but also serve as facilitators for conceiving and articulating new ones. As we will put it, they serve as 'heuristics for theory discovery'. Our purpose in the paper is two-fold: (i) to make a case that this additional role of thought experiment deserves the attention of philosophers interested in the methodology of philosophy; (ii) to sketch a tentative taxonomy of a number of distinct ways in which philosophical thought experiments can aid (and historically have aided) theory discovery, which can guide future research on this role of thought experiments.

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The Inescapability of Gettier Problems

Cited by 239 publications

References 0 publications

Knowledge as a Mental State

Knowledge as a Mental State

The folk conception of knowledge

Philosophical thought experiments as heuristics for theory discovery

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