This is a post about how one of the most famous, enviable papers in philosophy is misleading and irrelevant–misleading because it is irrelevant.

The paper in question is officially titled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” but is commonly just called the “Gettier Paper” because it’s the only famous paper it’s author, Edmund Gettier, wrote. It’s actually one of the few papers he wrote, though while I was told by my theory of knowledge prof that it was the only paper he wrote, another prof, who was teaching at the same college as Gettier at the time, says that isn’t true. Gettier published a couple other papers. However, it’s the famous one. Amazingly famous, given how short it is, commonly thought to have the highest ratio of times cited:pages of any philosophy paper ever.

“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” answers its own question with a firm “no,” based on cases where the source of justification is a misleading one, in spite of happening (more or less by accident) to give the right answer. Here’s an example of my own devising:

Smith is citing on the jury for the murder trial of Jones. Smith becomes firmly convinced of Jones’ guilt, based on what is, as far as Smith can tell, solid physical evidence, and the testimony of Officer Brown, who is as far as Smith can tell upright and credible. Furthermore, Jones is in fact guilty. However, Office Brown actually has no idea whether Jones is guilty, he has fairly strong suspicions Jones is innocent and perjured himself because he thinks putting Jones away will help protect his mob contacts. On top of that, Brown faked the main physical evidence that convinced Smith.

It seems like in cases like this, Smith doesn’t know, even though he has a justified true belief that Jones is guilty. No one wants to conclude, on this basis, that knowledge doesn’t require truth or belief, but cases like these suggest to philosophers that either you need something else on top of justified true belief, or the justification condition needs to be replaced entirely. There has been a strong trend towards externalism–thinking that the difference between true belief and knowledge involves things beyond our control. Internalists want to say that there’s an imporant part of knowledge, beyond belief, that we have access to. Richard Feldman, for example, says that knowledge is justified true belief that doesn’t essentially depend on anything false, and further claims justification is a matter of things we have access to. However, a lot of philosophers are convinced Feldman’s style of approach doesn’t work, and this is partly for reasons of the Gettier case.

My question: why should anyone care? Why should we care what the concept of knowledge is? When we answer this question, I think we see why Gettier-inspired thinking is misleading. We think knowledge matters because it matters in our decision making. Sometimes, an action may be right if we know certain relevant facts, but not if we don’t know them. But the sort of knowledge that matters in our decision making is largely stuff we have access to. It makes sense to condemn a juror for voting “guilty” even when he doesn’t /know/ the defendant is guilty, but it doesn’t make sense to condemn a juror for voting “guilty” on the basis of evidence that looks perfectly sound but happens to be misleading, as in the Officer Brown case.

What to make of this? We need another “so what” question: why is conceptual analysis so important? I don’t think it is. The sort of conceptual analysis represented by debate over the Gettier question assumes there is one true concept out there for us to discover, but there isn’t. Knowledge means slightly different things to differnet people, and in some cases it represents a rather confused notion. Some people, for example, think you don’t know something unless you’re absolutely certain, but as Descartes realized this would make it almost impossible for anyone to know anything.

As something close, but not identical, to common sense ideas of knowledge, which also avoids problems, I propose this: knowledge is sufficiently safe belief. I know, thanks to Richard Chappell, that Keith DeRose has proposed this to deal with another problem, but I don’t know if it’s been applied to the Gettier case. Here’s how it solves the Gettier case: knowing that some true belief is based on misleading, accidental justification sets off a warning saying “hey, that’s not very safe belief.” It also deals with a much simpler counter-example to knowledge as justified true belief: what about the jury member who votes “guilty” because it kinda seems like the guy is guilty, but doesn’t really know? If we interpret “justified” as “any reason at all,” and knowledge is justified true belief, that shouldn’t even be possible. (As an aside: I suspect a lot of people who endorsed the JTP idea were thinking of justification as “quite strong reasons” rather than merely “any reason.”)

Broader lesson: when dealing with philosophy, always ask why we should care. It doesn’t just make doing philosophy more fulfilling, it also prevents mistakes based on ignoring large parts of how we think about the world. Thinking about belief, truth, reason, and so on philosophically can help us get at questions that people seriously care about. I’ll try to find time for future posts explaining how this is so, but for now, here’s hoping for more theory of knoweldge focused on things that matter.