The Gettier Problem: An Infallibilist Route to Resolution

Transcription

1 The Gettier Problem: An Infallibilist Route to Resolution Abstract Almost overnight, Edmund Gettier changed epistemology forever. Prior to his paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?, the tripartite account of knowledge, dating back millennia ago, was widely accepted. Now, it is largely agreed upon that a justified true belief ( JTB ) and an instance of knowledge are not exactly equivalent. Response after response has been published, refuted, amended, confounded and then discarded, tentatively preserved, or both, in attempt to exclude all so-called Gettier cases. After analysing some prominent efforts to solve the problem, we are lead to infallibilism. Not only is infallibilism sufficient to block Gettier cases from slipping through an account of knowledge, I argue (with particular reference to Zagzebski and Almeder) that it is the only way that the Gettier problem can be conclusively thwarted. It would seem that the primary reason infallibilism has been avoided by critics is due to its relationship with radical skepticism. It is argued that this is a poor basis for rejecting infallibilism, and further that radical skepticism need not be entailed by an infallibilist account of knowledge. Page 1

2 The tripartite account of knowledge and introducing the Gettier problem Edmund Gettier s 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? single-handedly dissembled an account of knowledge that had gone largely unchallenged since Plato first offered it in his dialogue Theaetetus over two millennia ago; that is, the tripartite account. Unsurprisingly, it has been described as the most influential paper of modern analytic epistemology (Sturgeon 156). Though some responses to Gettier are more prominent than others, like Goldman s causal theory of knowledge (1967), Nozick s truth-tracking (1981), Plantinga s warrant (1993) and the defeasibility conditions proposed by Lehrer and Paxson (1969), no single revised analysis of knowledge has achieved long-lasting prominence without serious challenges and ever more intricate revisions in a systematic attempt to eliminate the possibility of all Gettier cases. It has been claimed since that its literature [has become] so complicated, its thought experiments so baroque, that commonsense [has been] stretched beyond limit while the deep significance of Gettier's work drowned in the resulting cacophony (Sturgeon 156) of those rushing to patch up the tripartite account. In fact, whether the so-called Gettier problem can ever be solved has been called into question by a number of critics, including, but not restricted to, Zagzebski (1994) and Floridi (2004). Kirkham (1984) suggests that many years of back-and-forth debate on the Gettier problem will yield the conclusion that the only analyses which are immune to all Gettier type counterexamples are those with very powerful sceptical implications (502). For the most part, my position is Page 2

3 similar to Kirkham s, but rather than immediately take the shortcut to the same [skeptical] conclusion (502) that he proposes, I would like to dedicate the earlier parts of this essay to introducing Gettier s seminal work, sketching out some of the more prominent responses and explaining their inadequacies. Following this, I will present some arguments against the general solvability of the Gettier Problem (primarily Zagzebski s), discuss infallibilism as a possible solution, as well as its skeptical implications which are largely regarded as epistemically unpalatable and finally consider the possibility that skepticism is not required by infallibilism as it is commonly assumed to. Though it varies from one individual to another, we have an intuition of what we understand knowledge to be. Firstly, knowledge must be true and believed by 1 the subject. However, it seems that our intuition of the notion of knowledge does not accommodate coincidence. See Pritchard s book Epistemic Luck (2005) for an in-depth analysis of the relationship between knowledge and luck. A simple illustration of how knowledge seems to not be luck-permitting could go as follows. I might claim it is raining in Greenwich presently without investigation. This belief may be true, but it seems that we cannot conceive that I know it is presently raining in Greenwich without good reason behind this belief. In some 1 This is not an entirely uncontroversial claim, but I will assume it to be analytically implied in any notion of knowledge. Briefly: if I know that it is raining, then it is raining. If it is not raining, then I cannot know that it is; furthermore, the conjunction I know that it is raining and I do not believe that it is raining is clearly a contradiction even with a limited understanding of what it means to know. Page 3

4 way, we think of knowledge as requiring that the subject is deserving of the true belief they hold. If I were presently standing outside in Greenwich in the rain, for instance, we would probably accept that I know it is raining in Greenwich because I am currently experiencing the truth of the proposition, and adequate experience is sufficient to qualify as knowledge under common understandings of it. Therefore, supposing that merely true belief does not fully describe knowledge, there is something else that connects the former to the latter. This converting factor was first described as justification by the tripartite account of knowledge. There is much debate over what qualifies exactly as a justification for a proposition (much of it inspired by Gettier), but let us suppose that justification is non-deontological as follows: S is justified in believing that p if and only if S believes that p on a basis that properly probabilifies S's belief that p. (Steup) So we can understand justification, roughly, as evidence or warrant of some kind: something that gives us reason to believe the truth of a certain proposition. This account of knowledge sits much more comfortably with how we understand knowledge, and with the new inclusion of the condition of justification, formulating counterexamples to it is much more difficult. But, as Gettier has shown, such counterexamples are not unobtainable. Page 4

5 In opening his paper, Gettier refers to three formulations of the tripartite 2 account (those of Plato, Chisholm and Ayer), all of which amount to the following conditions for knowledge: S knows that P IFF (i) P is true, (ii) S believes that P, and (iii) S is justified in believing that P. (Gettier 121) The above conditions articulate the tripartite account of knowledge. That is: if someone knows something then their corresponding belief is true and justified, and conversely, if someone holds a belief that is true and justified then that belief is considered knowledge. Note that the condition of justification is regarded as fallible: justification does not require truth. Why is this? Firstly, if justification entails truth then condition (i) that P is true is unnecessary. Secondly, and more importantly, if justification is infallible it is generally believed that then many of our empirical beliefs cannot be considered knowledge. Recall the unresolved problem of induction introduced by Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), from which we learn that we cannot, seemingly, prove any truth absolutely from 2 That is, by substituting has adequate evidence for and has the right to be sure that for is justified in believing that in Ayer s and Chisholm s accounts respectively (Gettier 121). Page 5

6 empirical evidence alone. Infallibilism and its alleged skeptical implications will be discussed later in this essay. Gettier presents a devastating blow to the traditional account of knowledge in the form of two cases of justified true belief that cannot be considered 3 knowledge. The first of these cases (in short) is as follows: Smith has observed that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Both have applied for a job and the president of the company has just told Smith that Jones will get the job. From this evidence, Smith forms the justified belief that Jones will get the job. Since Smith is aware that Jones has ten coins in his pocket, he forms the (entailed) belief that the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket. However, Smith in fact gets the job and discovers that he himself had ten coins in his pocket too, meaning that the latter proposition is true and is thereby a justified true belief. (Gettier 122) The above is commonly referred to as a Gettier case, and sometimes as a Gettier-type counterexample (Floridi 61). We can generalise its structure to the recipe described by Zagzebski (1994) in which one element of luck counteract[s] another (69): 3 Unless we are to take one of the following lines of argument: (a) that they in fact are instances of knowledge, or (b) that they are not justified (assuming truth and belief to be predicates that cannot be contested). Both of these possibilities will be explored later in this paper. Page 6

7 Start with a justified false belief. Make the element of justification strong enough for knowledge, but make the belief false The falsity of the belief is therefore due to some element of luck. Now emend the case by adding another element of luck which makes the belief true after all. (Zagzebski 69) In the example above, Smith s belief that the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket would be false and justified because by some chance the President did not tell the truth (but was sufficient to qualify as justification). So Smith would have had a justified false belief, were it not for the fact that by chance, Smith himself had ten coins in his own pocket. What Gettier s paper shows is that the traditional account does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition (Gettier 123). It is important to realise that it remains largely accepted that instances of knowledge are indeed justified true beliefs. What has been brought into question by Gettier is whether the criteria of justification, truth and belief are enough to guarantee knowledge. It is widely accepted, now, that they do not. That is, we generally accept that knowledge entails justified true belief, but Gettier has given that it is not the case that justified true belief entails knowledge by illustrating examples to the contrary. Attempted solutions to the Gettier problem Page 7

8 The early response to Gettier s article was to simply tweak the tripartite account of knowledge to make an account of knowledge that is Gettier-proof (Pritchard 26). Considering that, as far as we know, the only instances of not-knowledge that the tripartite account permits are Gettier cases, this does not seem like an unreasonable approach. After all, if an upgraded account of justification - or an additional condition - could be added to the account that successfully excluded Gettier cases, then the problem would be no more. That is, we seemingly must either add an extra component to JTB [justified true belief], or else justification must be reconceived to make it sufficient for knowledge (Zagzebski 65) in an attempt to weed out the problematic Gettier cases. More generally, an argument in defence of the tripartite account or an account of a similar form must try to show that Gettier-type counterexamples are avoidable, at least in principle (Floridi 62). This is the general form of post-gettier analyses of knowledge, of which there are many. However, resolving the Gettier problem has proved much harder than might initially be expected. Many philosophers attempts have adjusted the criteria for knowledge to be too weak, too strong, or both. Weak solutions permit some Gettier cases to slip through their accounts. Conversely solutions that are too strong may succeed in eliminating Gettier cases, but overshoot their target by excluding cases that the authors desire to consider knowledge. Hereunder I will outline three popular solutions to the Gettier problem that have emerged, and explain, briefly, why they do not succeed. The accounts have Page 8

9 merits, granted, but ultimately they do fail. My concern is their demerits for the purpose of establishing that some prominent solutions are not watertight, thereby inviting a radically different solution. Plantinga (1993) thinks it is not justification that converts true belief to knowledge but warrant generated by the subject s faculties working properly in the appropriate environment (Zagzebski 67). This account may seem appealing but introduces a host of problems. For instance (borrowed from Zagzebski 67-8), we could imagine someone misidentifying her husband s twin as her husband in an environment identical to that in which she would normally identify her husband, with her faculties working as well as usual. To Gettier-ise, just add the husband, hidden, to the location (say, a room) and her belief my husband is in the room is coincidentally true. Then, if Plantinga is to argue that this does not count as knowledge, he will be lead to argue that the woman s faculties or environment are insufficient for knowledge. This would result in the woman s everyday, true, non-gettier belief that her husband is in the room not qualifying as knowledge, which Plantinga does not seek to exclude. So Plantinga s account is either too strong or too weak. Goldman (1967) appeals to the notion of a causal chain that the subject should be able to reconstruct correctly. He diagnoses the origin of a Gettier case as arising from the fact that there is no causal connection between [the fact] and [the subject s belief in that fact] (Goldman 358). So, by amending the notion of justification as requiring some such causal connection, Goldman believes that he Page 9

10 can solve the Gettier problem. However, there exists possible situations in which Smith s belief that p [is] caused by the fact that p in ways that are irrelevant to his knowledge (Collier 351). Collier illustrates a case to exemplify this. Suppose that someone suspects his wife of having an affair, and gets unknowingly dosed with a hallucinogenic drug. He hallucinates that his wife is having an affair, and coincidentally she is. Thereby we could say that the fact was in some part causing his belief (supplemented by the drug) (Collier 350-1). But he cannot be thought of as knowing that fact. This satisfies Goldman s conditions, and thereby his analysis does block all Gettier cases. It seems that adding a condition or conditions that eliminate breakdown in causal relationships does not stop all Gettier cases, though it manages to avoid many of them. This issue is acknowledged by Goldman himself in drawing up a similar thought experiment involving fake barns (Goldman, 1976) in which the causal chain allows for a Gettier case to count as knowledge. Dutant summarises the fake barn case as follows. Suppose Ian is driving through an area where unbeknownst to him barn facades have been erected for a movie set. Ian points to one of the buildings and says to his son that it is a barn and in fact it is one. (Dutant, 81) Nozick s theory of truth-tracking involving sensitivity conditions emerged in his 1981 book Philosophical Explanations. His solution exemplifies one that does not adapt justification in any way, discarding it instead. In addition to belief and truth, Nozick argues that two further conditions bring about knowledge: if p Page 10

11 were true, S would believe that p [and] if p weren t true, S wouldn t believe that p (Nozick 179). This account seems to do a relatively good job of avoiding Gettier cases, but only to a point. That is, it succeeds in avoiding Gettier cases only in which had the proposition in question been false, it would have been believed anyway (Ichikawa and Steup). But this is not reflective of all Gettier cases, and it 4 fails an adapted version of the fake barn scenario as Kripke has shown. In general, accounts of knowledge that do not involve some version of justification tend to manage to avoid many Gettier cases that other accounts fall victim to, but do not show clearly why their other conditions are constituent of knowledge, or at the very least satisfy our intuition of what knowledge is. Of course, this is unlikely to be reason enough to disregard such theories altogether, but truth-tracking has been shown to allow for some Gettier cases anyway. I certainly do not claim to have shown that all similar solutions that attempt to solve the Gettier problem fail. That would be onerous and tedious. But Zagzebski (1994), Floridi (2004), Kirkham (1984), Moon (2009) and others offer explanations of why, perhaps, no account of knowledge that resembles the tripartite account can solve the Gettier problem. 4 Kripke s example was not published. For a full explanation of why Nozick s account fails the red barn case, see Luper, Steven, "The Epistemic Closure Principle", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < Page 11

12 The issue, as I see it, is that the aforementioned solutions (and most others) have not managed to capture exactly what a Gettier case is. Adequately blocking all possible Gettier cases without excluding more instances of knowledge than is intended depends on accurately identifying what it is that causes a Gettier case and formulating a corresponding condition of knowledge. Zagzebski on the inescapability of Gettier problems As has been mentioned earlier, a Gettier case can be described as one element of luck counteracting with another (Zagzebski 69). More to the point, it is the difference between the notion of knowledge and the notion of justification (Zagzebski 73) that allows these elements of luck to permeate the tripartite account and tripartite-like analyses of knowledge and thereby bring about the Gettier problem. Zagzebski is not alone in this reading of the problem. Floridi (64) also gives us that a Gettier-type counterexample arises because the truth and justification of p happen to be not only independent but also opaquely unrelated. Responses to Gettier are generally lacking in this articulation of the problem, which is unsurprising because these accounts suggest that it cannot be solved by any analysis of knowledge resembling the tripartite account. Specifically, Zagzebski (72) suggests that any analysis of knowledge that has a small amount of independence between the conditions of truth and justification can never be immune to Gettier cases. This is an unappealing implication for those hoping to solve the problem. Page 12

13 Why does Zagzebski come to this conclusion? Because in any such analysis, justification is fallible. So it is possible for a belief to be justified and false and therefore it can be coincidentally true too, thereby qualifying as a Gettier case (72). This analysis applies to justification by virtue of the fact that justification of a proposition probabilifies the subject s belief in the proposition (i.e. offers the subject reasonable grounds for belief that the proposition is true). Thereby, this argument is not limited to analyses of knowledge that call such a condition justification per se: As long as the property that putatively converts true belief into knowledge is analysed in such a way that it is strongly linked with the truth, but does not guarantee it, it will always be possible to devise cases in which the link between such a property and the truth is broken but regained by accident. (Zagzebski 69) So Zagzebski s argument extends to any of the solutions to the Gettier problem that fit the above criteria. It can be applied to Plantinga s warrant, Goldman s causal theory, revised definitions of justification, etc. Many commentators refer to this condition, i.e. whatever precisely it is that makes the difference between knowledge and mere belief (Moon 290), as warrant (see also Plantinga 1993). (Sturgeon calls this full justification (158).) Page 13

14 Howard-Snyder et al., challenge Zagzebski s argument, claiming that it is wrong to assume that necessarily, if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can be transferred to an accidentally true belief (317). Zagzebski s argument may indeed rest on this assumption, but Howard-Snyder et al. do not mention any cases in which this transfer does not occur, which would be enough for them to disprove the entailment. Instead they argue that the entailment is unconvincing because sheer reflection on the seeming possibility of cases [in which such a transfer happens] is all we've got to go on here (Howard-Snyder et al. 317). Considering this, to my mind they pose no serious objection to Zagzebski s argument. Accepting Zagzebski s conclusion, what analyses of knowledge (that include the conditions of truth and justification, or variations thereupon, like warrant) remain? Two: both of which Zagzebski believes unlikely to be adopted by philosophers. The first is discussed in the following paragraph; the second, infallibilism, will be discussed slightly further on. Following Zagzebski, one theory that could block Gettier cases is one in which truth and justification (or warrant, etc.) are almost completely independent (Zagzebski 72). In such an analysis, most justified beliefs are false because the justification condition is only distantly correlated with truth. Zagzebski appeals to an example in reference to the metaphysical theories of the likes of Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, Plato, etc. Accepting that most of their theories are false from a modern perspective with the information that scientific enquiry has given us, Page 14

15 under this analysis if it happened to turn out that one such theory was true, it may be treated as knowledge even if it were true not for the reasons the philosopher had cited. Because the element of luck permitted in the state of knowledge is so great (Zagzebski 72), Gettier cases could themselves be considered instances of knowledge. The fact that the subject has a true belief only by coincidence would in this case not necessarily disqualify them from knowledge. Therefore we could think of this approach as a luck-permitting solution. This way, provided the degree of independence between justification and truth is large enough to allow for all Gettier cases to be treated as knowledge, the Gettier problem will cease to be a problem. However, even if we contest the given wording of the definition of justification above, it is difficult to conceive of how justification could be considered as something other than probabilifying the truth of a given proposition. This would be a counterintuitive position to hold. For any true belief we have, we could under this metric invent an outlandish justification which would elevate the belief to knowledge whether or not the justification accurately described the situation in question. For this reason, someone wishing to take this route in solving the Gettier problem would probably be better off arguing for merely true beliefs being constituent of knowledge while leaving out any further conditions altogether. Since the tripartite account of knowledge and the Gettier problem itself both originate from the intuition that knowledge is more than mere true belief, I will not consider this avenue any further. Page 15

16 Infallibilism as a solution As has been shown, though an analysis of knowledge that has a lot of independence between truth and justification can block Gettier cases, it is so far from our conception of what justification actually is that it shows itself to be an implausible solution. Now, let us consider why, further to Zagzebski, any independence between truth and justification at all could be problematic. Almeder (1974) questions the tripartite account s assumption that truth and justification (or evidence as he refers to it) are logically distinct : that the satisfaction of the latter does not entail the former (Almeder 365). Considering that evidence is what we compile in probabilifying the truth of some proposition or other, if it is the case that truth is not guaranteed by knowledge-sufficient (albeit fallible) evidence, then how could the truth condition be satisfied at all? (Almeder 367) After all, we believe a proposition to be true when we are satisfied that the evidence for it can not be contested. How else could we determine a proposition s truth? Clearly, an epistemology seeks to avoid appeals to knowledge brought about by mysticism. But if evidence does not necessarily guarantee truth, then once the condition of evidence (i.e. justification, warrant) has been met, there remains the separate task of determining the truth of what the person professes to know (Almeder 367). Furthermore, what is the response when someone s apparent knowledge is brought into question? We move immediately and directly to questions about the adequacy of the evidence offered (Almeder 368). If it is discovered that the evidence is insufficient, then Page 16

17 the evidence/justification/warrant is no more. If it so happens that the proposition involved is true, then it is separate from knowledge because the converting condition was absent. This can aid us in clarifying what Zagzebski s argument illustrates. If truth is not entailed by the justification-like condition(s) then the epistemic possibility, that the belief in question is true but not for the perceived reasons, is preserved. And such an instance satisfies what we consider a Gettier case to be. So, given that we seek to include a condition that probabilifies the truth of a proposition in our account of knowledge, we seemingly cannot block all Gettier cases without truth being entailed by this probabilification. Which brings us to consider infallibilism, the second solution Zagzebski suggests in answer to the problem of Gettier cases arising from a close link between justification and truth. That is, we reconceive of justification and define it in this analysis in such a way that no false belief can satisfy it (Zagzebski 72). (J T) J T J T, where J denotes the proposition in question is justified and T denotes the proposition in question is true. If it is not the case that we can have justification for a belief that is not true, we can deduce that justification entails truth, as illustrated above, i.e. infallibilism. First of all, let it be clear that Gettier cases are impossible if the condition that converts true belief into knowledge entails truth. Let us refer to this condition as warrant. So warrant guarantees truth. The impossibility of a Gettier case in this Page 17

18 analysis is due to the fact that a warranted belief cannot be false, so it cannot be true by coincidence. However, note that we were initially speaking of that which converts true belief into knowledge as fallibilist accounts suppose. Since warrant now entails truth, we can speak of merely a warranted belief as knowledge because truth is a constituent of warrant. So we arrive at the following account of knowledge: S knows that p IFF S is warranted in believing that p, where warrant entails truth. This is best described as evidential infallibilism, defined by Dutant (2007) as S knows p on the basis of e only if S knows e and e logically entails p (69). However, as Dutant argues, evidential infallibilism fails to cover all putative kinds of knowledge (70). This is because if knowing that p qualifies for evidence that p, evidential infallibilism is trivial. If it is excluded, then p can only be known on the basis of some other evidential proposition that entails that p, and a regress is generated that has to stop at some knowledge that does not satisfy [evidential infallibilism] (Dutant 69). The point is that merely evidential infallibilism is insufficient to capture all kinds of knowledge available to us under infallibilism. Dutant revises infallibilism into modal infallibilism in which S knows that p only if S s belief that p could not have been wrong. (73) Page 18

19 This allows for the foundational beliefs required to avoid the infinite regress problem of the previous analysis and is thereby a fuller picture of what an infallibilist account of knowledge would look like. The Gettier problem is blocked. Now that we have arrived at an infallibilist conclusion, it ought to be investigated why this position is so rarely taken by philosophers, after which a resolution can be sought out. It is taken, generally, that infallibilism leads to skepticism. This is because if we fail to prove conclusively that we are not, for example, brains in vats, then we cannot know that we are not merely brains in vats with all of our experiences being simulated to us artificially. But infallibilism requires that we can guarantee the truth of a proposition in order for it to be knowledge, and it seems that we are unable to provide justification that has no possibility of refutation for a proposition like I am not a mere brain in a vat. Therefore almost all of what we would normally consider knowledge like I have hands, My name is X, etc. seems to collapse, hence skepticism. What could there be left for us to claim knowledge to? Kirkham (1984) posits that we could claim to have knowledge of statements like I believe something, and, deduced from that, someone believes something (502). This is generally taken as sufficient basis for rejecting skepticism, not because there is a widespread claim to be able to prove irrefutably that some of our most basic empirical beliefs are true, but because an analysis of knowledge that denies the status of knowledge to even those beliefs Page 19

20 that we can consider as only having the most miniscule possibility of being false seems hugely impractical and counterintuitive. Must it be the case that infallibilism induces skepticism? Not necessarily. It depends on one s account of possibility (Dutant 79). If we distinguish between notions of metaphysical, logical and real possibilities, then we can extrapolate varying strengths of infallibilism. A strong infallibilist account would indeed have skeptical implications, but a weaker one need not. For instance, contemporary physics ascribes extremely small but non-null chances to such events as a falling apple stopping in mid-air (Dutant 81). If we regard occurrences like this as possible because we cannot categorise them as logically impossible, like Descartes evil-demon thought experiment and the brain-in-a-vat problem it inspired, then radical skepticism seemingly cannot be evaded. But a stance of this nature depends on substantial questions about the metaphysics of possibility and the semantics of modals (Dutant 82). The assumption that infallibilism is equivalent to radical skepticism presupposes more than one is entitled to without a lengthy defense of a very particular notion of probability. It seems that infallibilism has been rejected by so many philosophers because they sought to avoid radical skepticism. Note, however, that I make no claims to have shown that infallibilism will never imply skepticism. That being said, I have illustrated that infallibilism can circumvent the Gettier problem, and that this need not entail radical skepticism. And I think this is reason enough for Page 20

21 infallibilism to be explored more rigorously than it has in the past, rather than be hastily abandoned for fear of skeptical implications. Conclusion My belief, à la Bird (2007), is that a large part of the difficulty in solving the Gettier problem is that the focus has been on justification and variations thereupon, rather than attempting to define knowledge in a clear way. The traditional approaches have simply grasped the stick at the wrong end (Bird 109). A solution to the Gettier problem will likely not be taken seriously if it does not confine itself to the intuition of knowledge that I have often referred to over the course of this essay. The reason, I would argue, that the tripartite account of knowledge went unchallenged for so long before Gettier s paper, is in some measure because it fitted this intuition so well. Under it, if we have a true belief and good reason for believing so, that counts as knowledge. However, it is now accepted that this does not adequately describe what we understand knowledge to be, close though it may come. The question that I think should be at the centre of the debate is not how can the Gettier problem be eliminated? but what exactly do we mean by knowledge?. I think that attempted solutions to the problem have implicitly been trying to answer this question, but if a clear definition is sought out and defined, the solution will follow, because a Gettier case is clearly not within the parameters of what we understand knowledge to be. And this itself is a useful lesson to learn: the fact that Gettier cases (relatively uncontroversially) don t conform to our intuition of knowledge can aid us in Page 21

22 articulating that intuition clearly. However, seeking to concoct conditions that exclude such cases will be fruitless when the debate on what knowledge precisely is does not precede it. And I have argued that knowledge can be 5 reduced and refined to those beliefs which could not be wrong. An infallibilist account of knowledge asks only that we are more modest about what we claim to have knowledge about - to some degree or other. It does not require that all scientific discoveries are abandoned because their conclusions might not be known ; it simply suggests that the term knowledge ought to be applied less liberally than it typically is. In summary, my line of argument is as follows. Traditional solutions to the Gettier problem appear unable to solve it fully. This inability is likely due to their attempts to incorporate fallibilism. If it is the case that fallibilist accounts cannot solve the Gettier problem, then the only solution is via infallibilism. And if infallibilism is the only way to solve the problem, then it must be adopted. Moreover, the assumption that infallibilism is equivalent to radical skepticism is both incorrect and a poor basis for rejecting it. So perhaps it is time to give infallibilism a chance. 5 With scope to discuss what exactly qualifies as could be wrong, i.e. with a flexible notion of probability. Page 22

23 Bibliography Almeder, Robert. "Truth and Evidence." The Philosophical Quarterly (1974): Print. Bird, Alexander. "Justified Judging." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74.1 (2007): Print. Collier, Kenneth W. "Contra the Causal Theory of Knowing." Philosophical Studies 24.5 (1973): Print. Descartes, René, and John Cottingham. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Print. Dutant, Julien. The Case for Infallibilism. Proceedings of the 4th Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy (LMAP/07), eds. C. Penco, M. Vignolo, V. Ottonelli and C. Amoretti. (2007): Print. Floridi, Luciano. "On the Logical Unsolvability of the Gettier Problem." Synthese (2004): Print. Gettier, Edmund L. "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Analysis 23.6 (1963): Print. Goldman, Alvin I. "A Causal Theory of Knowing." The Journal of Philosophy (1967): Print. Goldman, Alvin I. "Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge." The Journal of Philosophy (1976): Print. Page 23

24 Howard-Snyder, Daniel, Frances Howard-Snyder, and Neil Feit. "Infallibilism and Gettier's Legacy." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66.2 (2003): Print. Hume, David, and Tom L. Beauchamp. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford UP, Print. Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins and Steup, Matthias, "The Analysis of Knowledge", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < Kirkham, Richard L. "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?" Mind (1984): Print. Lehrer, Keith, and Thomas Paxson, Jr. "Knowledge: Undefeated Justified True Belief." The Journal of Philosophy 66.8 (1969): Print. Lehrer, Keith. "Why Not Skepticism?" The Theory of Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub., Print. Luper, Steven, "The Epistemic Closure Principle", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < Moon, Andrew. "Warrant Does Entail Truth." Synthese (2012): Print. Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, Print. Page 24

25 Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford UP, Print. Pritchard, Duncan. What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? London: Routledge, Print. Pritchard, Duncan. Epistemic Luck. New York: Oxford UP, Print. Steup, Matthias, "Epistemology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < Sturgeon, Scott. "The Gettier Problem." Analysis 53.3 (1993): Print. Zagzebski, Linda. "The Inescapability of Gettier Problems." The Philosophical Quarterly (1994): Print. Page 25