What Is ‘Knowledge’ and How Is It Known?

(Or The Folly of Philosophers)

As is typical, the title of this post is much more grandiose than the conclusions that I will be able to come to by the end of the essay. What I intend here is a response to a specific problem that has floated about in philosophical circles, but I believe that it has broader implications that can open us up to more fulsome thinking. What I am referring to are ‘Gettier Problems,’ and they have seemingly baffled philosophers since 1963 when they were ‘discovered.’ Their initial theorist, Edmund Gettier, proposed them as a challenge to the sufficiency of the traditional, philosophical definition of knowledge. What my essay here reveals, therefore, can be – at best – but an intimation of a more robust argument about the nature of knowledge and how it is deemed sufficient.

What, then, are Gettier Problems? In brief, they are proposed situations wherein there is a supposed insufficiency in what is traditionally held to constitute knowledge: justified true belief (often abbreviated to JTB in the literature). But what does it mean to say that justified true belief is an insufficient set of criteria for knowledge? Let me first clarify why this would be thought of as a sufficient notion of knowledge, and I will lead with an example: I believe Socrates will die; I am justified in this because Socrates is a man; and it is true that all men are mortal. Stated syllogistically, Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, ergo Socrates will die. This claim can be referred to as ‘knowledge,’ as a ‘fact,’ based on it being justified by my reasoning, such reasoning is true, and I sincerely hold it as a belief.

Gettier, however, invented situations in which such conditions are seemingly satisfied but we intuit that something is wrong and that a given agent does not have knowledge. The key example that Gettier uses involves a man named Jones going to a job interview where he knows – based on the testimony of the company’s CEO – that another man, Smith, is going to get the job; while sitting in the waiting room for his interview, Jones sees Smith empty his pocket into his hand, count out ten coins, and then put them back. Jones, therefore, thinks, ‘The man who will get this job has ten coins in his pocket.’ Jones then goes into the office for the interview and, much to his surprise, is awarded the job on the spot (despite the testimony of the CEO, by some mishap)! Upon leaving for home, Jones decides to treat himself to a celebratory cola, so he makes his way to the local corner store and begins fumbling in his pocket for some change – which reveals to him that he, unbeknownst to himself, also happens to have ten coins in his pocket! Ergo, his thought that ‘the man who will get this job has ten coins in his pocket’ is actually true! But most people are hesitant to say that Jones knew this, that he had knowledge that this would happen. Nevertheless, Gettier claims that Jones has a justified true belief – the claim turned out to be true, he had a reason for justifying it, and he earnestly believed it to be the case.

There are certain responses that can be made to this argument, and two interrelated objections strike me as being particularly salient here: the necessity of the informing propositions being true (not just the conclusion), and the problem of abstraction. I will provide an example for each to highlight what these mean. Firstly, a basic distinction made in formal logic is that of validity and soundness; the former has to do with the structure or form of an argument, whereas soundness has to do with whether or not the premises are true which (if paired with a valid argument) can then claim to have a veritable conclusion. In short, validity is formal and soundness is substantial. Let’s further consider an example of a valid argument: P1) Half of murder victims are murdered by their own kin; P2) Jane Doe was murdered; C) There is a 50% chance that Jane Doe was murdered by a family member. Conversely, this would be invalid: P1) Half of murder victims are murdered by their own kin; P2) Jane Doe has family members; C) Jane Doe has a 50% chance that she will be murdered. There is no way in which the second example can be made sound, even if the statistics used in the premises of the argument (which I entirely fabricated) are true. An argument can, as well, be valid but unsound even if the conclusion happens to be true when it uses false premises. For example: P1) All dogs are brown; P2) I have a dog named Reginald; C) Reginald is brown. Even if I do in fact have a dog named Reginald who happens to be a chocolate lab (meaning the conclusion is true), this argument cannot be called sound and veritable because the first premise is simply untrue – dogs can be white, black, yellow, beige, or many other colours. What justified true belief rides upon is that not just the conclusion but the premises themselves are true.

I bring this up because I believe that Gettier misunderstood the nature of the justified true belief standard. It seems to me that the knowledge claims made in the Gettier examples tend to employ unsound though perhaps valid arguments – thus, by definition, the various problematizations they supposedly reveal simply do not follow. Why do I say that Gettier problems always contain premises that are unsound? This brings me to the second issue: abstraction. Gettier Problems almost always rely on a specific instance unjustifiably being made general in order to arrive at the conclusion; in the case of the Jones & Smith example, the thought process that Jones had was (if put more properly): P1) Smith is getting this job; P2) Smith has ten coins in his pocket; C) The man who is getting the job (i.e., Smith) has ten coins in his pocket. What you will note is that, in this case, P1 turned out to be false, and therefore the Conclusion cannot be said to hold (it is unsound). The only way for the Gettier Problem to be considered a real challenge to the justified true belief standard is to extract the given claim (‘the man who will get this job has ten coins in his pocket’) from its contingent, historical circumstances – but then it becomes impossible to adjudicate whether is can be considered knowledge or not, for we human beings and the details of our lives and thoughts are indeed embedded in a contingent continuity.

Despite this initial rejection, we can attempt a stronger version of the Gettier case wherein the unjustified abstraction performed in the Jones example is not as obvious. Suppose a man has an appointment with his accountant, who has an office just a fifteen minute walk away, at three o’clock in the afternoon. He looks at his watch, which is analogue, and it reads that it is two-forty. He thinks, ‘I should get going! My appointment is soon.’ As he walks into the accountant’s office, the secretary smiles at him and says, ‘With five minutes to spare!’ The man looks down at his watch to verify and sees that his watch still reads two-forty; it seems to have stopped, but it was precisely the right time when he looked to get him to his appointment on time. We now come back to the Gettier Problem: did the man know his appointment was soon? Most people will answer that he seems not to have known because his method of telling the time was faulty; yet, given that he arrived on time, there is a way in which this simultaneously feels like a justified, true belief.

Though this example does not have quite as obvious an instance of abstraction as does the Jones case, there is still a subtle form of abstraction that we can try to avoid; there is, in this watch example, a faulty premise which means the conclusion is unsound and not knowledge – though that premise is hidden by the presentation of the problem. When the man looks at his watch, we must assume that he thinks that the watch is an accurate representation of the time. We might describe his thought process like so: P1) This watch accurately indicates the time; P2) The watch indicates that it is two-forty; C) Ergo, the time must be two-forty. In this case, the man was incorrect about P1, and therefore the Conclusion can not be said to follow. It is, in fact, mere coincidence that he showed up on time; this would be no different than going into the office breakroom for a coffee and happening to finding a coworker there that wanted to talk to you – the only difference is that the watch example involves a retroactive recognition of the coincidental nature of the occurrence without the intrusion of another agent’s volition. Nevertheless, the abstraction described here is different from the one in the Jones example, wherein it was a faulty move from a particular to a general claim; in this second example, however, the abstraction is instead from the broader thought process that is necessary to even get the supposed Gettier problem off the ground – in other words, this watch example abstracts a specific thought from the assumptions that undergird it which in turn have have their own propositional considerations that we can question.

I have yet to find a Gettier case that I find convincing in that all the premises used in the argument are justifiably held and generate a sound argument that we feel is not acceptable as a knowledge claim. Upon investigation, these examples always appear to hide a false premise somewhere and we should not be justified in saying that it is knowledge – which vindicates the very intuitions that Gettier relies on to make his point. Now, perhaps Gettier thought that Plato (and others) who seemingly employ the definition of ‘knowledge’ as being justified true belief did so in an abstract way that does not take into consideration context or contingent continuity; if that is the case, then Gettier is perhaps onto something by saying that this definition is insufficient. The issue, however, is that we need to understand what we mean by justified and (especially) true, and I would argue that symbolic logic (and syllogistic, as used here) can provide some insight into the fact that many of the claims we make are embedded in and attached to specific situations. This is precisely why R. G. Collingwood argued that historical truth was the highest form of truth with the exception of philosophy, because history seeks to understand and think through concrete facts as such (as opposed to abstract instances).

If you have actually read through to this point, you might be thinking, ‘Who actually cares about any of this?’ Quite frankly, I agree with you. My sense is that philosophy cannot disprove what we tend to intuit as true in our daily goings-on, but it can help clarify the manner in which we think through such happenstances; the reason I am addressing the Gettier problem here is that some theorists have supposed that Gettier Problems indicate that we do not understand what knowledge is – but I think this is both unfounded and hyperbolic. I am also not entirely convinced that knowledge is something as opposed to a process of experiencing, which is even suggested by the term justified true belief. I am, therefore, willing to take on that provisional answer that has seemingly served for the last two and a half millennia.