Knowing and Gettier’s gotcha

In a philosophy class last night, I was reminded of why I enjoy philosophy so much. In 1963, an American philosopher called Edmund Gettier wrote a three-page paper that upset thousands of years worth of consensus on the definition of knowledge.

I was amazed at the thought of such a short piece of thought having such a big impact, but also the simplicity of the form of his ‘counter-examples’. So simple, in fact, that I can give one in this blog post!

The historic definition of knowledge had three parts. To say you have ‘knowledge’ of something, you need:

• Truth (the thing you claim to know must be true)
• Justification (you must have reasonable grounds for your claim to knowledge)
• Belief (you must genuinely believe something to say you ‘know’ it)

This would seem a fairly comprehensive definition of knowledge, but Gettier found a gaping hole in it. Take the following example:

You are walking through London, at two minutes to noon. You’re not wearing a watch, and so look at Big Ben to check the time. It shows the time as 11.58. So, you have justification for believing something which is also true. But is your claim to know the time watertight?

Imagine the following condition applies to the scenario:

Unknown to you (and those around you), Big Ben stopped working at 11.58pm the night before. In this case, your ‘knowledge’ about the time is mere coincidence. Does it still seem right to claim that you ‘know’ the correct time?

(This ‘counter-example’ is not one that Gettier used in his paper, but it has exactly the same form. You can probably think of other ‘counter-examples’ pretty easily)

Philosophers have responded to Gettier in a number of ways. One approach is to add an extra condition to the definition of knowledge- that the match between the way the world is and your knowledge is non-accidental. Other philosophers have argued for a narrower definition of justification, which would exclude Gettier’s counter-examples. However, there doesn’t seem to be a neat answer to Gettier’s challenge yet (see this Princeton lecture).

Hard luck

Just had a new hard drive fitted to my nearly-new Macbook, after the original one suddenly died. I feel a mixture of emotions:

Sad that I had to fork out for a new one

Glad that I didn’t lose any data

Glad that I had a (reasonably) recent backup

Glad that the repair was quick and effective

A bit bemused that something so useful and ubiquitous (my laptop) can come a cropper so easily