scholarly journals Knowledge Judgments in "Gettier" Cases

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri

“Gettier cases” have played a major role in Anglo-American analytic epistemology over the past fifty years. Philosophers have grouped a bewildering array of examples under the heading “Gettier case.” Philosophers claim that these cases are obvious counterexamples to the “traditional” analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and they treat correctly classifying the cases as a criterion for judging proposed theories of knowledge. Cognitive scientists recently began testing whether philosophers are right about these cases. It turns out that philosophers were partly right and partly wrong. Some “Gettier cases” are obvious examples of ignorance, but others are obvious examples of knowledge. It also turns out that much research in this area of philosophy is marred by experimenter bias, invented historical claims, dysfunctional categorization of examples, and mischaracterization by philosophers of their own intuitive judgments about particular cases. Despite these shortcomings, lessons learned from studying “Gettier cases” are leading to important insights about knowledge and knowledge attributions, which are central components of social cognition.

Author(s):  
Marshall Swain

Based upon an analogy with the legal and ethical concept of a defeasible, or prima facie, obligation, epistemic defeasibility was introduced into epistemology as an ingredient in one of the main strategies for dealing with Gettier cases. In these cases, an individual’s justified true belief fails to count as knowledge because the justification is defective as a source of knowledge. According to the defeasibility theory of knowledge, the defect involved can be characterized in terms of evidence that the subject does not possess which overrides, or defeats, the subject’s prima facie justification for belief. This account holds that knowledge is indefeasibly justified true belief. It has significant advantages over other attempts to modify the traditional analysis of knowledge in response to the Gettier examples. Care must be taken, however, in the definition of defeasibility.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
John Turri

AbstractThe term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier case” in a favour of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge.


Author(s):  
Peter Blouw ◽  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
John Turri

The term ‘Gettier case’ is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called ‘gettiering.’ While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a ‘Gettier case’ in favor of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge.


Author(s):  
Edouard Machery ◽  
Stephen Stich ◽  
David Rose ◽  
Amita Chatterjee ◽  
Kaori Karasawa ◽  
...  

Gettier cases describe situations where an agent possesses a justified true belief that p, without, at least according to mainstream analytic epistemology, knowing that p, while the “Gettier intuition” is the judgment that a protagonist in a Gettier case does not know the relevant proposition. Our goal in this chapter is to show that we can make the Gettier intuition compelling or underwhelming by presenting it in different contexts. We report a surprising order effect whereby people find the Gettier intuition less compelling when a case describing a justified but false belief is presented before a Gettier case. We also report a surprising framing effect: two Gettier cases that differ only in their philosophically irrelevant narrative details elicit substantially different judgments. Finally, we discuss the metaphilosophical implications of these effects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
Gábor Forrai ◽  

In recent articles in this journal Benoit Gaultier and John Biro have argued that the original Gettier cases and the ones closely modelled on them fail, and the reason for the failure is that the subject in these cases does not actually have the belief that would serve as a counterexample to the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge. They claim that if our evidence pertains to a particular individual (as in the first case) or to the truth of one of the disjuncts (as in the second case), we do not genuinely believe the existential generalization or the disjunction which logically follows. I will challenge their arguments and suggest that our unwillingness to assert the existential generalization or the disjunction under these conditions does not stem from lack of belief but from pragmatic principles.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
Patrick Bondy ◽  

According to anti-luck approaches to the analysis of knowledge, knowledge is analyzed as unlucky true belief, or unlucky justified true belief. According to virtue epistemology, on the other hand, knowledge is true belief which a subject has acquired or maintained because of the exercise of a relevant cognitive ability. ALE and VE both appear to have difficulty handling some intuitive cases where subjects have or lack knowledge, so Pritchard (2012) proposed that we should take an anti-luck condition and a success-from-ability condition as independent necessary conditions on knowledge. Recently, Carter and Peterson (2017) have argued that Pritchard’s modal notion of luck needs to be broadened. My aim in this paper is to show that, with the modal conception of luck appropriately broadened, it is no longer clear that ALE needs to be supplemented with an independent ability condition in order to handle the problematic Gettier cases.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sayori Kobayashi ◽  
Takashi Yoshiyama ◽  
Kazuhiro Uchimura ◽  
Yuko Hamaguchi ◽  
Seiya Kato

AbstractUniversal Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccination is recommended in countries with high tuberculosis (TB) burden. Nevertheless, several countries have ceased universal BCG vaccination over the past 40 years, with scarce comparative epidemiological analyses regarding childhood TB after the policy change. We analysed data on childhood TB in countries that ceased universal BCG vaccination. Data sources included national/international databases, published papers, annual TB reports, and public health authority websites. Childhood TB notification rate increased in one of seven countries with available data. Pulmonary TB and TB lymphadenitis were the main causes of increasing childhood cases, while changes in severe forms of TB cases were minor. Maintaining high vaccine coverage for the target group was a common challenge after shifting selective vaccination. In some countries showing no increase in childhood TB after a BCG policy change, the majority of childhood TB cases were patients from abroad or those with overseas parents; these countries had changed immigration policies during the same period. Heterogeneity in childhood TB epidemiology was observed after ceasing universal BCG vaccination; several factors might obscure the influence of vaccination policy change. Lessons learned from these countries may aid in the development of better BCG vaccination strategies.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 273-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted O'Donoghue ◽  
Matthew Rabin

While present bias is an old idea, it only took hold in economics following David Laibson's (1994) dissertation. Over the past 20 years, research has led to a much better theoretical understanding of present bias, when and how to apply it, and which ancillary assumptions are appropriate in different contexts. Empirical analyses have demonstrated how present bias can improve our understanding of behavior in various economic field contexts. Nonetheless, there is still much to learn. In this paper, we give our assessment of some lessons learned, and to be learned.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 669-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milica Pejovic Milovancevic ◽  
Veronika Ispanovic ◽  
Dusko Stupar

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