Abstract
Descriptions of Gettier cases can be interpreted in ways that are incompatible with the standard judgment that they are cases of justified true belief without knowledge. Timothy Williamson claims that this problem cannot be avoided by adding further stipulations to the case descriptions. To the contrary, we argue that there is a fairly simple way to amend the Ford case, a standard description of a Gettier case, in such a manner that all deviant interpretations are ruled out. This removes one major objection to interpreting our judgments about Gettier cases as strict conditionals.
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Notes
This description is taken from Malmgren (2011, p. 272), following Lehrer (1965, pp. 169–170). We have slightly modified Malmgren’s description, in which the last sentence reads “Jones’s Ford was stolen and Jones now drives a rented Ford”, in order to accommodate the fact that one does not cease to own a car just because it was stolen. Thanks to Peter Klein for this point.
There is also an issue about the meaning of proper names that figure in descriptions of thought experiment cases, such as ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ (cf. Williamson 2007, p. 184). Since this issue is tangential to the present paper, we will simply ignore it in the following.
A specific version of this proposal is endorsed by Ichikawa and Jarvis (2009). The two main alternatives to (NGJ) are to understand (GJ) either as a counterfactual conditional (roughly: ford □→ (Something is JTB but not K); cf. Williamson 2007) or as a claim of metaphysical possibility (roughly: ◊ (ford ∧ (Something is JTB but not K)); cf. Malmgren 2011).
See Malmgren (2011) and Horvath (forthcoming) for a more systematic discussion of this point.
See Malmgren (2011, pp. 275–276) for this terminology.
Other authors agree (see, e.g., Ichikawa and Jarvis 2009; Malmgren 2011). Ichikawa and Jarvis add the qualification that “[i]f one is clever and careful enough, one might be able to generate texts that are not susceptible to bad satisfaction” (2009, p. 224). Since they do not in any way explore this possibility, it seems fair to interpret them as at least skeptical about the feasibility of case descriptions without deviant realizations.
Thanks to Timothy Williamson for prompting us to make our overall strategy more explicit.
One might worry that this strategy is not in line with the original intention behind the Gettier thought experiments, for it may seem that Gettier wanted to simultaneously probe our intuitions about both knowledge and justification. However, Gettier explicitly introduced two non-trivial principles about justification, namely fallibilism and closure, in order to strongly incline us to attribute justified beliefs to Smith. This indicates that Gettier did not treat the question of whether Smith’s beliefs are justified as an open question. Thanks to Peter Klein for discussion on this point.
One might worry that on accounts of justification that rule out the possibility of justified false beliefs (cf. Sutton 2007; Littlejohn 2012), the amended version of (ford) simply becomes incoherent, because it implies that Smith has the justified false belief that Jones owns a Ford. Notice, however, that the strict conditional (NGJ) would still be true in that case, and so this would not give rise to another deviant instance of (ford). Rather, it would falsify the possibility premise (PG) of the Gettier reasoning.
This final version of (ford-iii) owes a lot to the penetrating comments of Jens Kipper and Timothy Williamson. In addition, Ernest Sosa helped us to see more clearly that what is relevant here is the metaphysical rather than the causal basis of knowledge (see also Sosa ms).
For this worry about trivialization, compare Malmgren (2011, pp. 288–289).
Malmgren (2011, p. 291) argues persuasively that another psychological aspect of the Gettier judgment (GJ), namely its implicit generality, is not sufficient evidence for the superiority of the (NGJ) proposal—for the same phenomenon also arises with respect to Gettier cases that are known to be actual, e.g., real-life instances of the Ford case. Since we have no tendency to reconstruct our judgments about actual cases as necessity judgments, the best explanation of their implicit generality cannot lie in the content of these judgments, as the (NGJ) proposal would suggest, but rather in our grounds for these judgments.
References
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Acknowledgments
This paper originated from a fully collaborative talk entitled “On the Logic and Structure of Thought Experiments” that Grundmann and Horvath presented at the workshop Thought Experiments and the Apriori at the University of Fortaleza in August 2009 and at the workshop Knowledge and Metaphilosophy—Workshop with Timothy Williamson at the University of Cologne in January 2010. In addition, Grundmann presented (part) of this material at the workshop Intuitionen in Wissenschaft und Alltag (Intuitions in Science and Everyday Life) at the University of Luxembourg in April 2011 and at Rutgers University in February 2013. Horvath wrote a first draft in the summer of 2012 that concentrates on the key idea from the earlier talk. Very helpful comments from and extensive discussions with the following colleagues enabled us to work out the significantly revised final version during Fall 2012–Summer 2013: Merrie Bergmann, Sandy Goldberg, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Jens Kipper, Peter Klein, Anna-Sara Malmgren, Ernest Sosa, Timothy Williamson, and an anonymous editor of Philosophical Studies. Finally, we would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for supporting our research on the topics of this paper as part of the project Eine Verteidigung der Begriffsanalyse gegen die Herausforderungen des Naturalismus (A defense of conceptual analysis against the challenges from naturalism).
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Grundmann, T., Horvath, J. Thought experiments and the problem of deviant realizations. Philos Stud 170, 525–533 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0226-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0226-3