07b. The Meaning of Knowledge. Part 2/2.
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But justification can come in other forms, too.
Another common type is first person observation – information you acquire through your senses. If I believe that a cat is a cat, because I already have robust and well-informed beliefs about cats, then, having had extensive experience with them in the past, I'm identifying the cat as a cat through my direct contact with it. It looks, feels, acts like a cat. Ergo: cat! But!
Philosophy wouldn't be any fun if the key to knowledge were that easy, right? Until American philosopher Edmund Gettier came along in the 1960s, philosophers were in pretty widespread agreement about the definition of knowledge -- that it's justified true belief. Because, you can believe any old thing, but in order to know something, it just makes sense that you must also have evidence for your belief, and it must be true. In other words, you can have a false belief, but you can't have false knowledge. And if something you thought you knew turns out not to be true, then the fact is, you never actually knew it, you just believed it. And likewise, you might happen to hold a true belief, but if you don't have any justification for it, if you just accidentally happened to be right, which happens sometimes – that doesn't count as knowledge, either. Enter Edmund Gettier.
Gettier wrote a short but fabulously influential paper that turned the standard understanding of knowledge upside down. He did this by proposing what came to be known as Gettier cases – situations in which one can have justified true belief, but not knowledge. Which brings us to this week's Flash Philosophy!
Let's go to the Thought Bubble. Here's one of Gettier's original cases. Smith and Jones have both applied for the same job. The president of the company told Smith that Jones will get the job.
This counts as evidence; the president of the company would seem to be a reliable source of this information. Meanwhile, Smith counts the coins in Jones' pocket and sees that there are ten coins in there. Smith then forms a belief, based on his first person observational evidence of the coins, as well as the testimony of the company president. He comes to believe that: The person who gets the job has 10 coins in his pocket. But, it turns out, the testimony of the president was false, and it's Smith, not Jones, who gets the job. AND, it just so happens, unbeknownst to Smith, that he also has 10 coins in his own pocket.
So, Smith has a belief – that the person who gets the job has 10 coins in his pocket. And that is justified – because he counted Jones' coins, and the president told him Jones was getting the job. And his belief also turns out to be true – the person who got the job did have 10 coins in his pocket. However, neither pieces of justification actually pointed Smith to the right answer.
The president's testimony was wrong, and the 10 coins that he saw were in Jones' pocket, not his own. So it seems Smith simply lucked into being right. Gettier argued that we now have a case of justified true belief that is not knowledge. As he pointed out, you don't KNOW something if you simply stumbled into the right answer. Thanks Thought Bubble, the philosophical world was turned upside down by this idea, and philosophers – loving a good counterexample – began generating their own Gettier cases.
American philosopher Roderick Chisholm proposed this one: Looking across a field, you see an object that looks like a sheep, and you form the belief that “there is a sheep in the field.” It turns out that the object you see is actually a dog.
Yet, there is also a sheep, obscured from your vision by a hill. So, you have a justified true belief, but the justification for your belief -- the object that you saw – is not a sheep. You just lucked into being right. Once you understand how it works, it's pretty easy to generate Gettier cases of your own.
And many philosophers today think that Gettier successfully destroyed the “justified true belief” definition of knowledge. But even though the 1960s might seem long ago to you, remember: philosophers are in the business of having millennia-long debates about stuff. So it shouldn't surprise you that the philosophical debate about this is still a-raging. But if knowledge is not justified true belief, then…whaaat is it? Next time, we will look at one possible answer. In the meantime, you learned about some of the key concepts we use when discussing belief and knowledge.
You learned what defines an assertion and a proposition, and that belief is a kind of propositional attitude. We also learned about forms of justification and the traditional definition of knowledge, which Edmund Gettier just totally messed with, using his Gettier cases. And the cat did not pee on my desk! Because the cat was unable to spend any time at all on my desk. So it turns out the assertion that I made was false. But it is a true assertion that this episode was brought to you by Squarespace.
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You can head over to their channel to check out amazing shows like Game/Show, The Chatterbox, and Physics Girl. This episode of Crash Course was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio with the help of these awesome people and our equally fantastic graphics team is Thought Cafe.
