JTB Knowledge

Confident Learner Joined: Dec 01, 2005 Posts: 75

Greetings, phellow philosphers.

I'm curious as to what you guys think of the Gettier problem for Knowledge as JTB?

An example, if you will:

Asimov observes a tree standing outside his window.

His statement is "there is a tree over there".

1. Asimov believes "there is a tree over there".

Unfortunately, what Asimov observes is not a real tree but a fabrication of a tree. However, there is a real tree directly behind it.

2. "There is a tree over there" is true.

Due to the power of empirical data, Asimov is justified in believing that "there is a tree over there".

3. Asimov is justified in believing that "there is a tree over there".

So far, Asimov has a JTB that "there is a tree over there" but it is not knowledge.

It is true that there is a tree over there, but he does not contain knowledge.

(if anyone has issues with my version of the Gettier problem by all means correct me)

Would you consider this a valid problem for Knowledge as JTB?

Just Arrived Joined: Jan 21, 2008 Posts: 1

It seems to me he has real knowledge although not perfect knowledge. His information is based on evidence. How do we know that the tree behind the fake tree is 'real' ? Perhaps it is just a better fake.

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 9:47 pm

The problem of knowledge is only a problem if you contrast it with the impossible alternative: omnipotence.

I hate statements, and you find many in epistemology books, like, "X belief is true if and only if x belief is true." "'The snow is white' is a true statement if and only if the snow is white."

The problem is that this presupposes some superhuman ability to jump out of our skin to get at the real truth about from our beliefs about what the truth is.

How does Asimov, in other words, know that the tree he is seeing is really a fake or a mirage? He doesn't. And he can't, unless he tests that belief. If he finds out that the tree is a mirage, he will, of course, correct the statement.

But, "'There is a tree over there,' is true if and only if there really is a tree over there," does nothing other than pointing out that without omnipotence, our knowledge statements are really just good educated guesses about what our senses and brains tell us. If they are wrong - as they have been known to be - then we correct them. If they are right, we still have to exercise caution that there is not somethign we are missing.

But as many phillsophers whom I admire point out, the problem of knowledge is not often a huge problem, because our senses seem quite accurate in that they tend to give us beliefs that work.

So, I don't see it as a problem unless we contrast it with omnipotence.

Graduate Thinker Joined: Mar 04, 2006 Posts: 843

The problem with the Gettier problem is that he has a JTB that is knowledge, but its not justified correct? I just learned this stuff in my phil of epistemoloy class Shocked

Isnt the real problem though, that most things can be said to be like that.

And what happens when we through in involuntary beliefs that we have no choice to other than to beleive are true

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 9:29 pm

Kelreth wrote:

And what happens when we through in involuntary beliefs that we have no choice to other than to beleive are true

Immaterial. A belief is a belief.

Newbie First Class Joined: Jun 30, 2004 Posts: 28

I don't know who Gettier is (although I'm about to Google this), or WTF JTB stands for.

I have a tree outside my window, and I know it's real because bats fly out of it and I have to rake the leaves that fall from it every Autumn.

Sorry for butting in.

Newbie Joined: Jun 16, 2008 Posts: 13

I'm a total noob at epistemology (had to look up what a JTB was), but here's my take on it.

Asimov does not have a JTB. He has an unjustified belief, and whether or not it is true is purely coincidental. His belief is unjustified because if the proposition were true, he would believe it, and if the proposition were untrue, he would still believe it to be true.

In a more concise form:

Asimov's belief P is justified iff Asimov believes P only when P, and disbelieves P when ~P.

I suppose you can say justification must be linked to truth.

This requires then that you add another classification, which is semi-justified belief -- a belief that is supported by imperfect or irrelevant evidence but is not causally linked to the truth of the belief.

Now that I think about it (those last three paragraphs took me nearly half an hour of pondering because of the following example, and I'm still totally unsure about it) the big example of the whole justified vs unjustified thing is the problem of heliocentricity.

At the time of its proposition, heliocentricity did not explain the solar system as well as geocentricity + epicycles. The first few chapters of Simon Singh's the Big Bang gives a great writeup about the dilemma. I believe that most scientists at the time were "justified" in accepting geocentricity as the correct model of the universe given the evidence they had at the time. But I thought it was impossible (under what I said before) to have a justified false belief. This is going to take some further thought.

I'm leaning towards the notion that the solution is that there are in this case two competing reasonable models, one less perfect than the other, but both are imperfect. It seems to me that the only reasonable thing to do is to tacitly accept the currently more perfect model while exploring the other, imperfect but tweakable and possibly simpler model, in which case you discover that with the addition of elliptical orbits, heliocentricity is at least as precise as geocentricity + epicycles, and much simpler, and by the application of Occam's razor, accept heliocentricity -- later vindicated by relativity as being undoubtedly more precise while maintaining its simplicity.


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