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Gettier Dies


Edmund Gettier passed away last month.

Gettier was best known for a short 1963 article on epistemology, which set off whole new lines of thought. 

He doesn't get on lists of "greatest philosophers of [specific period or country.]" He is too much of a one-trick pony for that. But: what a trick!

Since Plato's time, "justified true belief" or some quite similar phrase has been taken as a sensible definition of Knowledge. 

Gettier's paper made the case that this doesn't work. There are lots of situations in which someone can have a belief that is both justified and true, but in which understanding the whole situation that makes it so will cause us to doubt, or outright to deny, that the situation deserves the title "knowledge."

I won't explain his argument now, but will assume it as a given for the following that he made his point.  Does it follow we are bound to adopt some other definition? 

We could just say, in a Wittgensteinian fashion, that the uses of the word "knowledge" have at most a family resemblance to one another, and that as we look at distant pairs of branches of this family tree the resemblance fades, so it shouldn't surprise or dismay us that there is no definition of knowledge that does not yield counter-examples. Even devastating ones. 

But ... just because we can dissolve a question in this way, it doesn't follow that we should. Perhaps there is something to be gained before we have any business leaving the fly-bottle. Think of the branches of a literal tree, as in the photo above. The ends of different branches are very far away from one another. But there is a core, the trunk, of the tree. 

The trunk of the Gettier problems, I submit, is that they elevate the justification of a belief above its cause. They keep the discussion internal to a believer's belief system, whereas perhaps the true understanding of knowledge would be an external one, focused on what has caused that belief system to be what it is. 

Enough of that for now, though. RIP, Prof. Gettier.  

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