Abstract
Adrian Heathcote and I agree that a stopped clock does not show—as the adage has it—the right time twice a day, but he thinks, as I do not, that it does show what time it stopped. To think that it does is to treat the position of its hands as evidence of its stopping at the time it did. Add to the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge the requirement that the evidence on the basis of which the believer is justified be evidence of what is believed in this sense, and you have the long-sought fourth condition to block Gettier cases. I argue that requiring that one’s evidence be evidence in this sense is incompatible with the fallibilism on which Gettier cases are predicated.
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Notes
Ah, but what about a 24-hour watch? One that even shows the date? Should such a watch stop, it would, surely, show exactly when it did! But, first, saying this would take us even further from the usual sense of ‘showing the time,’ one that allows, even requires, the use of background information. If I ask you in broad daylight what time it is, and you answer that it is two o’clock, you do not need to add that it is two in the afternoon, much less the date. And, second, with the digital watch, too, we have to rely on collateral information. That it had ever worked is not something we can read off the numbers we see, any more than we can from the position of the hands of an old-fashioned clock.
It is not that we do not speak of someone’s exhibiting the symptoms of a disease even when he does not have it, indeed, even when we know that he does not have it. What we mean then is that he has the symptoms usually associated with the disease, which is to use ‘symptom’ to mean what I mean by ‘indicator.’
This shows that the fallibilism Gettier examples trade on is not that one may have a justified belief that is in fact false, but that even if one’s justified belief is true, one’s justification is not connected to what makes the belief true. In my terms, the frown indicates anger but is not as symptom of it. Requiring that it be the latter makes one’s account infallibilist.
It is, of course, fallibilism about justification that is in question here. One cannot be a fallibilist about knowledge—not as long as one adheres to the near-universal view that the truth condition is necessary (I think there are reasons not to—but that is quite another story).
We are concerned with knowledge of contingent facts and with propositions concerning these. Things are, obviously, different with necessary propositions.
I know, alas, that I shall die. Would Heathcote deny this? Yet whether we think that what makes my belief that I shall die true is a future-tense state of affairs that obtains now or that it is a present-tense one that will do so only in the future, neither is any part of the evidence (justification) I have for my belief. (Perhaps Heathcote could sign on to the way out of doing so offered by Vance, who suggests that there is a version of the truthmaker requirement on which “…the fourth criterion does not state that the truthmaker must cause [one’s evidence] (though that would suffice). The criterion is simply that the two must be causally related. Thus, the fourth condition for knowledge would still be satisfied, for instance, if the truthmaker and the [evidence] merely shared a common cause.” (Vance 2014:7) Vance himself rejects the truthmaker approach for other reasons.)
Not of the former, if the clock is inaccurate, and not of the latter because while the clock’s stopping is the cause of the hands’ being where they are, the latter does not tell us when (day or night, yesterday or last week) it stopped.
This is not to say that one could not be mistaken as to which of the two things it is indicating.
Then, again, one may not, for a different reason: one may think that a glance at a clock is not enough, without such further checking as the importance of the situation demands, to justify one in believing that the time is what the position of the hands indicates.
References
Biro, J. (2013). Showing the time. Analysis, 73(1), 57–62.
Heathcote, A. (2014). Truthmaking, evidence of, and impossibility proofs. Acta Analytica. doi:10.1007/s12136-013-0207-3.
Vance, C. (2014). Truthmaker theory does not solve the Gettier problem. Ratio, 26(4). doi:10.1111/rati.12044.
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Biro, J. Clocks, Evidence, and the “Truth-Maker Solution”. Acta Anal 29, 377–381 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-014-0235-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-014-0235-7