Goldberg on Gettier Cases and Internalism

Sanford Goldberg has an interesting new argument against mentalist internalism about justification in Analysis. I'm working on committing myself to an internalist approach to justification at the moment; Goldberg's new paper isn't enough to force me to reconsider.

The master argument of the paper, which Goldberg lays out quite succinctly, is this, which I quote:

P1. The property of being doxastically justified just is that property which turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge.

P2. No property that is internal in the Justification Internalist’s sense is the property which turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge.

Therefore

C. No property that is internal in the Justification Internalist’s sense is the property of being doxastically justified.

I think internalists have two fairly natural lines of defence. First, one might reject the very notion of some property that turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge, at least if we read 'turns into' in some kind of truth-making sort of way. No doubt there is in some weak sense a property P such that one has knowledge if and only if one has true belief, has P, and is not in a Gettier situation, but I see no reason to suppose that it will be a property any more interesting or natural than the disjunction, knows or false or Gettiered. (I rather suspect "Gettiered" itself can be understood at best conjunctively.) And I don't think there's any interesting sense in which this disjunction turns unGettiered true belief into knowledge.

In defence of this way of setting the issue up, Goldberg writes:

After all, ‘doxastic justification’ is a term of art, and so if we are to continue to use it, it must pick out something that is epistemically interesting. It picks out something epistemically interesting if P1 is true; but it is unclear whether it picks out something interesting if P1 is false. At a minimum, the burden of proof will be on those internalists who deny P1: if this is how they respond to the present argument, then we are owed an explanation of why we should care about the property of which the internalist is purporting to give us an account.

But there are other fairly natural reasons to care about justification available. For example, justification may be that property which permits knowledge, without being one that guarantees it.

The second way an internalist might resist Goldberg's argument is to reject the considerations he brings to bear in favor of his P2. He imagines someone in an evil demon situation who is an intrinsic duplicate of someone with a justified belief. Take her perceptual belief that p. Her belief must be justified, by the internalist's lights, but is not knowledge, since she is in an evil demon scenario. It is not knowledge, even if it happens to be true. This doesn't support the argument unless we can also establish that this is not a Gettier case; at the moment it rather looks like one. (She has misleading evidence for p, and reasonably forms the belief that p on that basis; it turns out that p happens to be true.)

To close off this avenue, Goldberg asks us to suppose that it is probable that our subjects beliefs are true, due to the machinations of the demon.

Still, it is easy to tell yet another variant of the Evil Demon case on which this move – to explain away the ‘no knowledge’ verdict by appeal to Gettierizing luck – is not plausible in the least. Imagine the following scenario, involving the Not-so-Evil Demon: it is just like the ordinary Evil Demon scenario except the Not-so-Evil Demon has conspired to make 65% of your Doppelgänger’s beliefs true (the other 35% being false owing to systematic illusions sustained by Not-so-Evil). Imagine your Doppelgänger in this world. For any perceptual belief (s)he has, there is a 65% chance that the belief is true. If it’s true, this is not merely lucky.

But stipulating facts about luck is a dangerous game. There is of course some sense in which the not-so-evil demon victim isn't merely lucky to believe truly, but is it the one relevant to Gettier cases? Probably not. Nothing in Gettier's original cases precludes probability of true belief of this sort. Go back to Jones and the Ford and Brown in Barcelona; suppose Brown is in Barcelona 65% of the time, and Smith believes that Jones has a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona, as in the original case, solely on the basis of the misleading evidence about the Ford. This is still a paradigmatic Gettier situation, even though there may be some sense in which the belief is true not merely by luck. Given this parallel, I think the internalist has every reason to regard the subject of the not-so-evil demon as in a Gettier case. So there are good grounds for resisting Goldberg's argument.

Against Contrastivism

A conversation last night with Yuri and Andy helped me to get clearer on the argument I was trying to press in my last post. Here's the much more succinct way to make the point. It's an argument against forms of contextualism that put relevant alternatives into the proposition expressed by knowledge attributions.

Suppose I'm in a nonskeptical conversation, talking about Henry, who is standing in front of a barn. I have no reason to suspect any funny business, so I say, sensibly enough:

(K) Henry knows that he is standing in front of a barn.

Here are are three pretty plausible claims:

(1) If there isn't any funny business going on, my utterance of K is true.

(2) If it turns out that (unbeknownst to me) Henry is in fake barn country, (looking at the only real barn) my utterance of K is false.

(3) My sentence (K) expresses the same proposition, whether or not it turns out that Henry is in fake barn country.

If you think all of these things, then you can't think that the proposition I express builds in the relevant alternatives. Either the possibility that <the thing Henry is standing in front of is a fake barn> is relevant, or it's not, but it's his environment, not my context, that makes it relevant.

So if you want a Schaffer-style extra-argument-place approach to knowledge, this provides a reason not to let that argument place be one for a set of relevant alternatives. You might instead be a function from subject's situations to sets of relevant alternatives.

Yesterday I also included a parallel argument relying on pragmatic encroachment sorts of cases. I think it's a good argument too, but this one proceeds on less contentious premises.

Generality of Gettier Judgments

I'm teaching a contemporary epistemology course with Yuri to Honours students this year. We started with Linda Zagzebski's "The Inescapability of Gettier Problems", which, to my mind, helpfully turns attention away from attempts to analyze knowledge on which students may have spent much of their intro epistemology courses. I read it a few years ago, and found it totally convincing; I read it again this week, and found it totally convincing again, but noticed that the argument wasn't nearly so straightforward as I'd thought it was. In fact, I'm not sure what it is. (But I still find it compelling.)

Here's what Zagzebski says. She understands Gettier as having refuted the JTB theory thus: imagine a case in which JB but not T. Now change the case so that T, but just by luck -- not in a way connected to JB. Now you have a Gettier case -- an intuitive counterexample to K = JTB. That's what she said Gettier did. Then she says we can generalize the argument. Her target is any view that tries to analyze knowledge as T + X, where X doesn't entail T. Do just the same thing, she says, as Gettier: take a case in which X and not T (guaranteed possible), then tweak the case so as to make T true in a way unrelated to X.

(One might worry here as to whether this latter step is always possible. Juan Comasaña told me via Twitter that he wants to resist the argument here. I have a hard time seeing how it couldn't be done, for any X that's plausibly natural enough to figure into an analysis. We'd need X to be consistent with not-T, but for X & T together to entail that X and T are closely connected. That seems, at least, really weird. Maybe there's an argument lurking that this is impossible? Or maybe it's possible after all? I'm not sure. Thoughts? Anyway, this isn't the point I wanted to press.)

Ok, so, modulo the parenthetical, we've generated a case according to Zagzebski's recipe. Now, she tells us, we have a counterexample to the K = T + X theory. She offers:

...a general rule for the generation of Gettier cases. ... Make the element of justification (warrant) strong enough for knowledge, but make the belief false. ... Now emend the case by adding another element of luck, only this time an element which makes the belief true after all. The second element must be independent of the element of warrant so that the degree of warrant is unchanged. ... We now have a case in which the belief is justified (warranted) in a sense strong enough for knowledge, the belief is true, but it is not knowledge.

What's interesting about this passage is that she's making a general claim about the ultimate outcome of all instances of her argument schema. But the original Gettier argument, it is traditionally thought, depends on a particular sort of judgment about a particular case; we think about the story about Smith and Jones and Brown in Barcelona, and see that this is a case of JTB without K. If that's right, then it's totally mysterious how Zagzebski or anyone could be confident that the same pattern will hold of other attempts to analyze. But the argument isn't a non sequitor; it's (at least) prima facie compelling. Why?

At a workshop on thought experiments I attended in Brazil this summer, Anna-Sara Malmgren suggested that thought experiment judgments carry with them a kind of implicit generality that is best explained by their being products of nonconscious inferential reasoning. This, it seems, might be just the sort of case to support her suggestion. Our initial Gettier judgment constituted a kind of commitment to a general principle that rules out the kind of luck that Zagzebski is focusing on. If that's right, then metaphilosophical emphasis on cases may be misplaced; lots more of our thought experiment judgments may be more based on theory than is always realized. Without a move like that, it's hard for me to see how Zagzebski's argument could make any sense.

Real-World Deviant Gettier Case

Something cool happened in our methodology seminar last week. Some people like to remark on real-world Gettier cases they find themselves in. I found myself last week in the presence of a real-life deviant Gettier case.

A deviant Gettier case (what Ben Jarvis and I have also called a 'bad Gettier case') is a situation in which the literal text used to describe a Gettier situation is satisfied, but in such a way so as to fail to provide a counterexample to JTB=K. Deviant Gettier cases play a central role in a disagreement Ben and I have with Timothy Williamson. What's cool about this deviant Gettier case is that (a) although I played a central role in producing it, I did so entirely without design, and (b) it's deviant with respect to one of the standard paradigms of Gettier cases.

Here's what happened.