Beginning with Zagzebski (The Philosophical Quarterly 44:65–73, 1994), some philosophers have argued that there can be no solution to the Gettier counterexamples within the framework of a fallibilist theory of knowledge. If true, this would be devastating, since it is believed on good grounds that infallibilism leads to scepticism. But I argue here that these purported proofs are mistaken and that the truthmaker solution to the Gettier problems is both cogent and fallibilist in nature. To show this I develop the notion of evidence of a state of affairs, a crucial concept in the truthmaker theory. I also argue that a common principle of the transmission of evidence through entailment is false, and the cause of much of the trouble.
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Notes
I won’t repeat the basic claims of truthmaker theory, but point the reader to Heathcote (2003) and Heathcote (2006). For a classic full exposition, see Armstrong (2004). Also, I’ve argued previously that the Ginet-Goldman cases—what one could call, mnemonically, the ‘Fake Barn’ cases—are different in character from the classical cases and should be considered and treated separately. But I argued that these cases were solvable as well, or rather that, considered properly, nothing needed to be added to solve them.
This fallibilism was emphasised in Heathcote (2006), p. 166. It was generally agreed, at least before the Zagzebski-Merricks argument appeared, that any plausible theory of knowledge must be fallibilist, since it was widely agreed that infallibilism leads to scepticism.
The crux of Biro’s argument is his claim that ‘If “evidence” in the proposed fourth condition means evidence, then, all the condition does is to reiterate the truth-condition in misleading language’. This is obviously nonsense for it implies that it would then be impossible to satisfy the truth condition without also satisfying condition iv). But we have already seen that it is trivially easy to do so.
In correspondence.
But the right thing to say here is that ‘lucks’ cannot counteract one another at all, they are not positive and negative quantities that can be summed to zero. This is just the wrong way to understand luck.
Hetherington (1998).
Merricks’ footnote 5 only compounds the problem, since it contradicts the footnote immediately before it. It reads: ‘Gettier’s objections to justified true belief accounts of knowledge are often handled by hypothesising some further conditions, other than truth and justification, that is necessary for knowledge. Obviously, it would be confused to respond to the problem illustrated by this example by claiming that a “warranted true belief” account of knowledge is mistaken, and that there must be some further condition, in addition to truth and warrant, that one must add to make belief knowledge. Warrant just is whatever it takes to make true belief knowledge’ (p. 843).
‘Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h) and (i) from a proposition for which he has strong evidence. Smith is therefore completely justified in believing each of these three propositions. Smith, of course, has no idea where Brown is’ [Gettier (1963) p. 123]. We must beware the idea that we can solve the Gettier cases simply by dropping W. The very first response to Gettier’s paper, by Michael Clark, showed that a deductive transmission could be weakened to inductive and one still have the problem. See Clark (1963). In this context note that the proposal in Jacquette (1996) involves modifying W.
In fact we can relax the requirement that B be necessary: let B be contingent, true, but with no evidence for or against it. Inferring B from C—which still has all the warrant supplied by the evidence for A—will not cause B to inherit A’s warrant.
‘I will try to establish that warrant entails truth, however, without assuming any particular analysis of warrant at all’ (p. 842).
See Hempel (1945).
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Heathcote, A. Truthmaking, Evidence Of, and Impossibility Proofs. Acta Anal 29, 363–375 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-013-0207-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-013-0207-3