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Is the Standard Reading of Gettier Cases an Expression of Infallibilism?

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Is the Standard Reading of Gettier Cases an Expression of Infallibilism? IS THE STANDARD READING OF GETTIER CASES AN EXPRESSION OF INFALLIBILISM? Stephen Hetherington Professor of Philosophy The University of New South Wales Abstract Philosophers are routinely confident of Edmund Gettier’s having established a real result about knowledge. Often, that confidence is said to require no supporting argument, because it is ‘intuitively obvious’. This paper asks whether ‘Gettier intuitions’ successfully ground the putative Gettier problem. We confront the question of whether they might actually be reflecting an unwitting infallibilism about knowledge. That would be inappropriate for understanding, let alone solving, what the Gettier problem is supposed to be. The possibility that this is underlying those supposedly intuitive assessments is developed here by reflecting upon the way in which infallibilist sceptical possibilities are intuitive to many epistemological neophytes. 1. The epistemological category of what swiftly became known as Gettier cases burst upon the philosophical world in 1963. That was when Edmund Gettier described two possible situations which, he inferred, revealed that being true and well-although-fallibly justified by evidence does not guarantee a belief’s being knowledge. Epistemologists at the time agreed with Gettier, readily and repeatedly. They still do: the standard interpretation of Gettier cases says that no Gettiered belief – no belief at the core of a Gettier case – is knowledge.1 I will argue, however, that this standard interpretation is at least not adequately supported by our claimed uses of intuition – its being ‘intuitively obvious’, when perusing a particular Gettier case, to deny that the case’s central belief is knowledge. Indeed such claims, far from strengthening Gettier-orthodoxy, undermine it. 1 Sometimes – but not in this paper – the term ‘Gettiered’ is used as obviously meaning, in part, ‘fails to be knowledge’. Whether all Gettiered beliefs fail to be knowledge is my topic here. 1 2. I will discuss intuitions in the sense of intellectual seemings, not inclinations to believe.2 The latter does not do justice to ‘Gettier intuitions’. Descriptions of Gettier cases have long had an intellectually visceral effect upon readers. Moreover, if a belief that p is a disposition to respond in relevant circumstances with ‘p’ or an equivalent,3 an inclination to believe that knowledge is absent from a particular Gettier case is an inclination to be disposed to respond with something like this: ‘That case’s central belief is not knowledge.’ Even for this inclination – a more or less strongly dispositional disposition – we may wonder as to its basis. What grounds it? The answer may return us to a version of intellectual seemings as essential data for activating the dispositional disposition. 3. What would be an appropriate epistemic standard to accord with when evaluating whether a particular Gettiered belief is knowledge? Gettier told us, in effect, what a minimally correct standard should be. It is encapsulated in the first epistemic principle – one of fallibilism – he applied in developing the cases’ details (1963: 121): in that sense of ‘justified’ in which S’s being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S’s knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false. Thus, at stake within Gettier’s cases was the correctness of any fallibilist conception of knowledge-as-justified-true-belief. Correlatively, the knowledge routinely denied to be present in the cases should be understood as knowledge which, if it had been present, would have satisfied a fallibilist standard. Gettier did not introduce the cases via his fallibilism with the aim of presuming that, even once this fallibilist standard is satisfied by a true belief, not enough has been done for the thereby (fallibly) justified true belief to be knowledge. His aim was to test whether, once this fallibilist standard is satisfied, enough has been done for the thereby (fallibly) justified true belief to be knowledge. So, when Gettier proceeds to deny that knowledge is present through a given case’s true belief satisfying the fallibilist standard he has highlighted, this amounts to his denying that fallible knowledge is present. The knowledge being said to be absent is the knowledge which would have been present (other things being equal) through the true belief’s satisfying the fallibilist standard – if that would ever suffice for making a true belief knowledge. Consequently, only that kind of knowledge – fallible knowledge – is at stake in the cases. This gives us a methodological moral. When interpreting Gettier cases, we must react initially as though we are knowledge-fallibilists, regardless of whether we actually are. Any interpretation, of a particular Gettiered belief, that reflects an 2 Chudnoff (2011) parses this distinction as a choice between perceptualist conceptions of intuition and doxasticist ones. Jackson (2011) is a prominent advocate of our responses to Gettier cases taking the latter form. 3 This is how Cohen (1992) conceives of belief. 2 infallibilist standard for knowledge amounts to having set aside Gettier’s challenge – ignoring his guiding fallibilist principle. Again, Gettier only intended the beliefs within his cases to satisfy a fallibilist standard. Once a true belief within a Gettier case achieves this, then the question is to be answered of whether the belief is knowledge. To deny its being knowledge, due to its failing an infallibilist standard, is beside the dialectical point established by Gettier early in his paper. Any such knowledge-denial is methodologically inappropriate. It also accords with nothing of what, supposedly, was epistemologically new in Gettier’s paper. We knew already – independently of Gettier – that applying an infallibilist standard for knowledge to a true belief rarely, if ever, results in the belief’s being deemed to be knowledge. Gettier seemed to offer epistemology something new, not merely that old news about knowledge and infallibility. He advanced an apparently distinctive way of showing that a fallibly justified true belief can fail to be knowledge – and not simply because it was justified only fallibly. 4. Yet might epistemologists have been making precisely that mistake when assessing Gettier cases, by applying unwittingly an infallibilist standard for knowing? Is there a realistic possibility that a commitment to infallibilism has silently shaped standard reactions to Gettier cases? Might this at least be so when those reactions are intuitive? We may approach this question by considering what else in this conceptual neighbourhood would strike many as intuitive. Consider how easy it is to induce introductory philosophy students to express what amount to infallibilist sentiments about knowledge. Think of those times of presenting beginning philosophy students with sceptical arguments about the presence, even the possible presence, of knowledge. Immediate reactions like the following occur naturally – intuitively – to many students in that situation: ‘Yes. If I can’t be certain that I’m not dreaming, I don’t really know that I’m writing, or even that I’m sitting here with a pen in my hand.’ ‘Fair enough: if there is even a possibility of my being mistaken about it, I don’t really know it.’ How should we explain the apparent naturalness to many students of such reactions? The reactions sound infallibilist. Hence, one ready answer directs us to the presence within those students of a prior commitment to an infallibilist standard’s needing to be satisfied if a belief is to be knowledge. To many, therefore, it is at least implicitly intuitive to regard infallibility as a definitive criterion of knowing. This bears upon the question of what epistemically substantive commitments could ever be prompting an intuitive knowledge-denial. Intuitions need not reflect a conceptual emptiness on the topic at hand, prior to their being elicited by a particular case. What of Gettier-motivated knowledge-denials, claimed to be intuitive? Might an implicit acceptance of infallibilism be generating these, as it can generate 3 sceptically-motivated knowledge-denials? Being intuitive does not rule out this possibility. A knowledge-denial’s being intuitive could be part of its reflecting an infallibilist standard for knowing. A knowledge-denial’s being intuitive could well be part of its reflecting an infallibilist standard. I am highlighting a realistic possibility, not merely a possibility. 5. Few epistemologists, I expect, would agree with that claim as to what they do when assessing the epistemic status of the central belief within a Gettier case. But how do epistemologists know that this is not what they are doing? Section 4 did not claim that denials of knowledge in Gettier cases are infallibilist because they are intuitive as are also sceptical denials of knowledge. A more threatening possibility was being highlighted – namely, that denials of there being knowledge in Gettier cases are intuitive because they are infallibilist as are also sceptical denials of knowledge. The reasoning for that possibility takes this form: It is intuitive to many in some settings to deny knowledge’s presence, and to do so because (even if only implicitly because) an infallibilist standard for knowing is deemed to have been failed. So, whenever someone describes a denial of knowledge’s presence within a Gettier case as intuitive, this does not rule out an infallibilist standard’s having implicitly produced that knowledge-denial.
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