This short piece, published in 1963, seemed to many decisively to refute an otherwise attractive analysis of knowledge. Against moderate rationalism in pdf format scroll down on his page and click title to download bealer, george. Edmund gettier is professor emeritus at the university of massachusetts, amherst. If p is epistemically justified for s, and p logically entails q, and s deduces from q p, then q is also epistemically justified for s. Modal epistemology and the rationalist renaissance the incoherence of empiricism brandom, robert. Especially in brian weathersons contribution, and to some extent in. Epistemology cognitive science philosophical logic dynamic epistemicdoxastic logic game theory cs. Dynamic epistemic logic stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Timothy williamson, gettier cases in epistemic logic philpapers.
Hintikkas socratic epistemology meets gettiers counterexamples. The paper explains how gettier s conclusion can be reached on general theoretical grounds within the framework of epistemic logic, without reliance on thought experiments. Knowledge and the gettier problem by stephen hetherington. Evidence in epistemic logic a topological perspective illc. I arrive at criteria for knowledge similar to the solution proposed by clark 1963 to the gettier problem, known as the no false lemmas solution. It argues for a correspondingly nonstandard interpretation of gettier cases, the kind of puzzling cases first described by edmund gettier 1963. Gettier cases in epistemic logic timothy williamson university of oxford, uk received 15 october 2012 abstract the possibility of justi. Experimental procedures can affect how people judge gettier cases.
Therefore, critics conclude that goldmans account of justification cannot solve this certain type of gettier problem. Modal logic epistemic logic artificial intelligence. Some contemporary nonwestern traditions on gettiers cases. Attributed to american philosopher edmund gettier, gettiertype counterexamples called gettiercases challenge the longheld justified true belief jtb account of knowledge. Gettier cases reveal that justification can be more and better without getting you any closer to the truth or any farther away from just gettin lucky. Jaysankar shaw, extrapolating for the nyaya school, shows how it would handle both counterexamples. Timothy williamson, gettier cases in epistemic logic. Categories doxastic and epistemic logic in logic and philosophy of logic. Philosophical studies was founded in 1950 by herbert feigl and wilfrid sellars to provide a periodical dedicated to work in analytic philosophy. The gettier problem in epistemology categorize this paper doi 10. The gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem with our understanding of knowledge. Epistemic logic and epistemology uc berkeley philosophy. This paper shows that it can also be motivated more formally, by a natural class of epistemic models in which both. This paper shows that it can also be motivated more formally, by a natural class of epistemic models in which both knowledge.
This paper shows that it can also be motivated more formally, by a natural class of epistemic models in which both knowledge and. The paper explains how gettiers conclusion can be reached on general theoretical grounds within the framework of epistemic logic, without reliance on thought experiments. Epistemic justification in post gettier epistemology. No previous exposure to epistemic logic is assumed. I will conclude with one final thought on gettier cases.
The case of the gettier cases 2 of 3 by blog contributor. Logical knowledge and gettier cases the philosophical. It is often used in combination with the original paper by gettier in elucidating the nature of the gettier problem. An initially popular proposal was to ban beliefs resulting from false premises from counting as. His interests include the epistemology of intuition. Epistemological thought and its consequent epistemic stances and knowledge claims have changed over time. In these cases, you start with a justified belief in a false proposition and then use deductive generalization existential generalization in 1 and 3, disjunctive generalization in 2. Dynamic epistemic logic is an extension of epistemic logic with dynamic modal operators for belief change i.
It extends the argument to permissive conceptions of justification that invalidate principles of multipremise closure and require neighbourhood semantics rather than semantics of a more. Gettier cases in epistemic logic university of oxford. Philosophical studies, volume 172, issue 1 springer. It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called gettiering. A more recent development is called dynamic epistemic logic. We start by presenting the main concepts of standard del as covered e. These cases have the core feature of gettier casesthey aim to show a disparity between justified true belief and knowledgeand there is no clear reason to consider them atypical. A note on gettier cases in epistemic logic springerlink. On the jtb account, knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief, and if all three. It also contains an overview of the handbook, and a brief history of epistemic logic and pointers to the literature. Dynamic epistemic logic 20182019 alexandru baltags.
Gettier problems internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Gettier cases arise when a fallible justification happens to lead to a true belief in one context, a case of lucky belief. Pdf the five commentators on my paper gettier cases in epistemic logic gcel demonstrate how fruitful the topic can be. The possibility of justified true belief without knowledge is normally motivated by informally classified examples. Dynamic epistemic logic is the study of modal logics of model change. In this short article, gettier argues by means of two hypothetical cases that the criteria or definition stated by thinkers before him for justified true belief does not constitute knowledge as it is possible for one to have a justification for ones. Here, the sound true arguments ascribed to smith then need also to be valid believed and convincing justified if they are to issue in the realworld.
As mentioned briefly in 1, goldmans process reliabilism is not designed to handle some forms of epistemic luck, such as gettier cases. It extends the argument to permissive conceptions of justification that invalidate principles of multipremise closure and require neighbourhood semantics rather than semantics of a more standard type. This is a great paper on the gettier problem for epistemic justification. These cases as well as gettiers originals reflect two very common and wellunderstood facts about us and our epistemic condition. This diagnosis of gettier cases motivates a constraint on solutions to the gettier problem. The five commentators on my paper gettier cases in epistemic logic gcel demonstrate how fruitful the topic can be. Gettier and justified true belief umd department of. A note on gettier cases in epistemic logic penultimate draft of paper in philosophical studies, published online on 1 august 2014, doi 10.
Gettier cases vary by culture weinberg, stich and nichols, 2001, which might weaken further the idea that such intuitions are reliable. Indeed, when, san juan, nagel and mar in preppresented participants with eight different gettier cases, eight ordinary knowledge cases, eight justified false belief cases, and eight cases in. It is conceived, rather, as an alternative to and improvement over traditional theories of justification, and we saw above how a belief can be true and justified but not a case of knowledge because of luck. The problems are actual or possible situations in which someone has a belief that is. Constructive empiricism and epistemic modesty empiricism naturalized aune, bruce. The models involve a distinction between appearance and reality. While epistemology has a long philosophical tradition dating back to ancient greece, epistemic logic is a much more recent development with applications in many fields, including philosophy, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, economics and linguistics.
Pdf gettier cases in epistemic logic penultimate draft. Edmund gettier, is justified true belief knowledge. The journal remains devoted to the publication of papers in exclusively analytic philosophy. Philosophical studies, published online on 1 august 2014. The role of perspective in acquiring and justifying beliefs viktor, eben on. The analysis of knowledge stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Papers applying formal techniques to philosophical problems are welcome. We will analyze artemovs formalizations of the gettier problems to nd out whether the logic of justi cation is capable to give an adequate formalization of gettier problems. Apr 10, 2014 the widespread response to the gettier problem as it has come to be known has been to admit that justification, truth, and belief are individually necessary but jointly insufficient for knowledge and to propose some fourth condition on knowledge. A robust dichotomy of gettier cases in epistemic logic at the end of gcel, i distinguish two types of gettier case in epistemic logic. The models also exhibit an epistemic asymmetry between good and bad cases that sceptics seem to.
An analysis of the logic of justi cation and its use to. Gettier cases arise because the agents ignorance increases as the gap. Attributed to american philosopher edmund gettier, gettier type counterexamples called gettier cases challenge the longheld justified true belief jtb account of knowledge. Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires. While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks. They function as challenges to the philosophical tradition of defining knowledge of a proposition as justified true belief in that proposition.
Considering socrates remarks in the theaetetus brings us to some concerns raised by turing and to wittgensteins famous comment explanations come to an end somewhere. Abstract the paper explains how gettiers conclusion can be reached on general theoretical grounds within the framework of epistemic logic, without reliance on. This entire discussion seems, in many ways, to suffer from an oversimplification of the way in which people know. This paper shows that it can also be motivated more. Pdf gettier cases in epistemic logic timothy williamson. A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth. The models also exhibit an epistemic asymmetry between good and bad cases that sceptics seem to ignore or deny.
We examine the relationship between the justified true belief jtb account of knowledge and platos theory about it as expounded in the theaetetus. Del pronounced dell is a highly active area of applied logic that touches on topics in many areas, including formal and social epistemology, epistemic and doxastic logic, belief revision, multiagent and distributed systems, artificial intelligence, defeasible and nonmonotonic reasoning, and epistemic game theory. Pdf response to cohen, comesana, goodman, nagel, and. Figure 1 displays a simple epistemic model for the spymaster example, where. It is the focus of our contribution, but its relation to other ways to model dynamics will also be discussed in some detail. Gettier cases in epistemic logic timothy williamson a a university of oxford, uk published online. The stroke of good epistemic luck is that the clock stopped exactly twelve hours earlier, thus displaying the time correctly. The inescapability of gettier problems diversity reading. Epistemic justification in postgettier epistemology. This entire discussion seems, in many ways, to suffer from an. Gettier cases in epistemic logic penultimate draft. It assures us that contrary to what plato and later philosophers have thought knowledge is not merely a true belief well supported by epistemic justification.
Holliday university of california, berkeley abstract this chapter provides a brief introduction to propositional epistemic logic and its applications to epistemology. Gettier cases, fallible justi cation and inductive. In some cases two or more stances have coexisted, while others have fallen out of favor, in their strictest sense. In this article, it is argued that students studying science may. This dissertation brings together epistemic logic and topology. Inexact knowledge without improbable knowing 33 have the potential to make an epistemic difference if we impose the following. Philosophical studies, published online on 1 august 2014, doi. Nov 15, 2019 the gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem concerning our understanding of descriptive knowledge. Standard epistemic logic cannot represent bases of belief. This interpretation will also provide further support for the hypothesis that epistemic absolutism is false. Edmund gettier s 1963 verdict about what knowledge is not has become an item of philosophical orthodoxy, accepted by philosophers as a genuine epistemological result. For example, we might imagine someone objecting that these responses only deal with gettiers actual cases, what about variants, such as lehrers havit, or goldmans fakebarn, which both involve epistemic luck of a different kind, but dont involve the exact features present in the original cases. They are also used as model gettier cases in epistemic logic williamson, 20.
Knowledge first virtue epistemology christoph kelp. Some important central tendencies in judging gettier cases appear to be robust against demographic variation in biological sex, age, language, and culture, although there could be some interesting differences related to culture and personality traits. The paper explains how gettiers conclusion can be reached on general theoretical grounds. Svenonius has examined epistemological stances key to ko svenonius 1992, 2004. Introducing a logic of false lemmas towards an epistemic.
The role of perspective in acquiring and justifying beliefs. Gettier problems or cases are named in honor of the american philosopher edmund gettier, who discovered them in 1963. Attributed to american philosopher edmund gettier, gettier type counterexamples called gettier cases challenged the longheld justified true belief or jtb account of knowledge. Timothy williamson 20 gettier cases in epistemic logic, inquiry. Epistemic modal logic is a subfield of modal logic that is concerned with reasoning about knowledge. Informally, we interpret w as a set of mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive. It stimulated a renewed effort, still ongoing, to clarify exactly what knowledge comprises. The gettier problem is formally a problem in firstorder logic, but the introduction by gettier of terms such as believes and knows moves the discussion into the field of epistemology. Modal logic epistemic logic eric pacuit university of maryland, college park ai. The term gettier case is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. Epistemology, theory, and methodology in knowledge.
560 416 405 968 1547 1225 721 440 1049 760 816 1259 1533 557 382 270 891 323 1412 1094 660 1266 9 1142 172 1197 930 107 51 766 613 1291 1235 274 644 195