Abstract
In a recent series of papers, Timothy Williamson argues that one can reach Edmund Gettier’s conclusion that the justified-true-belief (JTB) theory of knowledge is insufficient for knowledge by constructing Gettier cases in the framework of epistemic logic. In this paper, I argue, however, that Williamson’s Gettier cases in the framework of epistemic logic crucially turn on an assumption that the JTB theorist can plausibly and justifiably reject. In particular, I argue that it is rational for the JTB theorist to reject Williamson’s preferred epistemic accessibility relation in favor of one for which Gettier cases in epistemic logic do not arise. Thus, I conclude that Williamson’s Gettier cases in epistemic logic do not genuinely threaten the tripartite theory of knowledge.
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Notes
Although Schmidt-Petri and Bernecker restrict their criticism to Gettier’s job/coins case alone.
Not all of Williamson’s constraints on D and R live happily with my preferred epistemic accessibility relation, but, so far as I can tell, all such constraints minus the one above live happily with my preferred epistemic accessibility relation.
For the purposes of his argument, Williamson in (2013a) assumes that agents only form beliefs on the basis of appearances. I respect this assumption in the above counterexample. Without such an assumption, though, we might simplify the example: Suppose the agents in w1 base their relevant beliefs about green apples, not on other appearances, but on the reliable testimony of a revered, known-to-be-infallible science text.
A referee worries that the above view might imply infallibilism about knowledge. It doesn’t, however, since there could be epistemically inaccessible* worlds where the target proposition is false, and so the agent’s justifier(s) doesn’t entail the truth of the target proposition.
Note that justified belief in M* does not allow for an epistemic agent to have a justified belief in a necessarily false proposition. But neither does Williamson’s M. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
It is worth noting that a JTB theorist might simply embrace Williamson’s argument in some sense but reject the assumption that there are at least two worlds in R(x) that are not in R(w). On such a view, either x and w differ significantly with respect to justification such that D(w) and D(x) aren’t close together, since x is a case where at least two things that S knows in w are false in x (i.e., if x is a bad case and w is a good case, then, contra many analytic epistemologists, justification can’t be constant between them—note well, this doesn’t require going infallibilist about justification), or if w and x don’t differ significantly with respect to justification, since x isn’t a serious skeptical case, and so D(w) and D(x) are very close together, then R(x) contains at most one world, x, that is not in R(w).
It seems to me that a JTB theorist should adopt an epistemic model of the following sort: M*** = <W, R*, D*, V>, but she only needs M** to escape the conclusion of Williamson’s very general structural argument, so I focus on M** in this section.
Thanks to a referee for bringing this point to my attention.
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Simpson, J. A note on Williamson’s Gettier cases in epistemic logic. Synthese 203, 84 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04506-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04506-1