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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you never believed that in the first place?
Then, to be consistent, you should not trust either your deductions or even your choice of axioms. In other words, it looks like a form of solipsism.
But isn't the paper-mache cow case solved by simply adding that the evidence for the justification also needs to be true?
The definition already requires the belief to be true, that's a whole other rabbit hole, but assuming that's valid, it's rather obvious that if your justification is based on false evidence then it is not justified, if it's true by dumb luck of course it doesn't count as knowing it.
EDIT: Okay I see how it gets complicated... The evidence in this case is "I see something that looks like a cow", which I guess is not false evidence? Should your interpretation of the evidence be correct? Should we include into the definition that the justification cannot be based on false assumptions (existing false beliefs)? I can see how this would lead to more papers.
EDIT: I have read the paper and it didn't really change my view of the problem. I think Gettier is just using a sense of "justified" that is somewhat colloquial and ill defined. To me a proposition is not justified if it is derived from false propositions. This kind of solves the whole issue, doesn't it?
To Gettier it is more fuzzy, something like having reasonably sufficient evidence, even if it is false in the end. More like "we wouldn't blame him for being wrong about that, from his point of view it was reasonable to believe that".
I understand that making claims of the absolute truthfulness of things makes the definition rather useless, we always operate on incomplete evidence, then we can never know that we know anything (ah deja vu). But Gettier is not disputing the part of the definition that claims that the belief needs to be true to be known.
EDIT: Maybe the only useful definition is that know = believe, but in speech you tend to use "he knows P" to hint that you also believe P. No matter the justification or truthfulness.
EDIT: I guess that's the whole point that Gettier was trying to make: that all accepted definitions at the time were ill-defined, incomplete and rather meaningless, and that we should look at it closer. It's all quite a basic discussion on semantics. The paper is more flamebait (I did bite) than a breakthrough, but it is a valid point.
The non-bovine examples are in a way more complex (but also more common), since they involve multiple possible causes for an event. In software engineering, bugs and outages and so on are not just caused by lack of testing, but lack of failsafes, lack of fallbacks, coding on a Monday morning, cosmic background radation, too many/few meetings, etc. etc. And it's hard to pinpoint "the cause" (but perhaps we shed some l…
For the autofocus example, if the statement in question was "my patch broke the autofocus," it would not be Gettier because it is not true (the unrelated pushed changes did); if the statement in question was "my PR broke the autofocus," it would not be Gettier because it is JTB, and the justification (it was working before the PR, but not after) is correct, i.e., the cause of the belief, the perception, and deduction, are correct; Same if the statement in question was "the autofocus is broken."
It would be Gettier if the person reporting the bug was using an old (intact) version of the app but was using Firefox with a website open in another window on another screen, which was sending alerts stealing the focus.
The most common example of true Gettier cases in software dev is probably the following: A user reports a bug but is using an old version, and while the new version should have the bug fixed, it's still there.
The statement is "the current version has the bug." The reporter has Justified Belief because they see the bug and recently updated, but the reporter cannot know, as they are not on the newest version.
Gettier cases tell us something interesting about truth and knowledge. This is that a factual claim should depict the event that was the effective cause of the claim being made. Depiction is a picturing relationship: a correspondence between the words and a possible event (eg a cow in a field). Knowledge is when the depicted event was the effective cause of the belief. Since the paper mache cow was the cause of the b…
In classical logic statements can be true in and of themselves even if there as no proof of it, but in intuitionistic logic statements are true only if there is a proof of it: the proof is the cause for the statement to be true.
In intuitionistic logic, things are not as simple as "either there is a cow in the field, or there is none" because as you said, for the knowledge of "a cow is in the field" to be true, you need a proof of it. It brings lots of nuance, for example "there isn't no cow in the field" is a weaker knowledge than "there is a cow in the field".
https://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf
It's really worth a read, it's remarkably short and is written in very plain language. It takes less than 10 mins to go through it.
It's likely that I'm wrong, I need to look deeper into it. But isn't the paper-mache cow case solved by simply adding that the evidence for the justification also needs to be true? The definition already requires the belief to be true, that's a whole other rabbit hole, but assuming that's valid, it's rather obvious that if your justification is based on false evidence then it is not justified, if it's true by dumb lu…
The problem is that when you're working at such a low level as trying to define what it means to know something, even simple inferences become hellishly complicated. It's like trying to bootstrap a web app in assembly.
Gettier cases tell us something interesting about truth and knowledge. This is that a factual claim should depict the event that was the effective cause of the claim being made. Depiction is a picturing relationship: a correspondence between the words and a possible event (eg a cow in a field). Knowledge is when the depicted event was the effective cause of the belief. Since the paper mache cow was the cause of the b…
I'm not sure I see the big deal. Justification is on a scale of 0 to 1, and at 1 you are onmiscient. We live in a complicated world; no one has time to be God so you just accept your 0.5 JTB and move on. Or for the belief part, well, "it's not a lie if you believe it". And as for the true bit, let's assume that there really is a cow, but before you can call someone over to verify your JTB, an alien abducts the cow an…
edit : Then there's the whole "what is a cow" thing. Like if you you stuffed a cow carcass with a robot and no one could tell the difference, would that still be a cow? Or what if you came across a horrifying cow-horse hybrid, what would you call that? Or if the cow in question had a unique mutation possessed by no other cow - does it still fit the cow archetype? For example, what if the cow couldn't produce milk? Or…
A cow-horse hybris is not a cow, it's a cow-horse hybrid.
A cow with a genetic mutation is a cow with a genetic mutation.
A cow created in a lab, perhaps even grown 100% by artificial means in-vitro is of course still a cow since it has the genetic makeup of a cow.
The word cow is the word cow, its meaning can differ based on context.
Things like this is why philosophers enjoy zero respect from me and why I'm an advocate for abolishing philosophy as a subject of study and also as a profession. Anyone can sit around thinking about things all day. If you spend money on studying it at a university you're getting scammed.
Also knowledge is finite based purely on the assumption that the universe is finite. An observer outside the universe would be able to see all information in the universe and they would conclude; you can't pack infinite amounts of knowledge into a finite volume.
I'm not sure I see the big deal. Justification is on a scale of 0 to 1, and at 1 you are onmiscient. We live in a complicated world; no one has time to be God so you just accept your 0.5 JTB and move on. Or for the belief part, well, "it's not a lie if you believe it". And as for the true bit, let's assume that there really is a cow, but before you can call someone over to verify your JTB, an alien abducts the cow an…