[Vocabulary] The Gettier Problem

The traditional defintion of knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB) met its refutation at the hands of Edmund Gettier in 1963. Today there are multiple cases that classify as Gettier; over time the Gettier Problem has come to stand for a particular brand of arguments that expose weaknesses in the JTB definition of Knowledge. However, Gettier himself proposed a single two-part case, part I of which will be outlined here.

Smith and Jones are both applying for the same job. Smith has been informed by the management that Jones will be hired. He also has empirical evidence that Jones has exactly ten coins in his pocket. Therefore, he believes that the person with ten coins in his pocket will be hired. The justification for Smith's belief seems reasonable too. According to the JTB definition of knowledge, the only element left to examine is the truth.

In reality, the person with ten coins in his pocket does get hired. So the belief itself concurs with what eventually happens; it is a true belief. But, it turns out that while waiting for the result, one coin fell out of Jones' pocket. Unbeknownst to Smith, he himself had ten coins in his pocket to begin with too, and just so happens that none of them fell out. Smith got the job. Smith was the guy with ten coins in his pocket who got the job.

Smith's belief undoubtedly classifies as JTB. However, Jones was the one who was to be hired in Smith's mind concurrently. With that in mind, it can't really be said that Smith "knew" who was going to get the job, can it? Therefore, we see that every justified true belief is not knowledge. A question - is all knowledge justfied true belief though?

What is Knowledge? - Part I: Definition

Epistemology is the branch of Philosophy that deals with the nature and construction of Knowledge. Theories of Knowledge, which comprise the field of epistemology, attempt to uncover the meaning of this term that we use almost in an offhand manner in day to day conversations. “I knew you were going to say that!” is the common response to an expected answer. Of course we all know that the Sun will rise tomorrow. The question really is what does it mean to know something? And what is knowledge?

Knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB)
The definition of Knowledge that has survived most successfully in my opinion is that of Knowledge as Justified True Belief. There are three conditions for anything then to classify as knowledge. Firstly, I must believe it. Secondly it must be true. Lastly, I must be able to justify my belief. There are major problems with this definition from my perspective. Deciding on whether something is true or not attains a high degree of subjectivity in certain regions of knowledge construction and getting beyond the belief stage is difficult. An example would be deciding whether there is too much salt in a dish or a greenish-blue colour is really green or blue. You would need to establish stringent and specific standards so as to objectively define a truth, such as concentration of salt and the wavelength of light reflected in the above two cases. These axiomatic standards are arbitrary for the most part and would only serve to complicate our body of knowledge if we set out to define standards in order to be able to answer every subjective question.

The second major problem with knowledge as JTB is deciding on what justification counts as sufficient. Justification in society very often comes in a historical context – this is how it has been happening over years, so this is how it will happen now/tomorrow. This mode of argumentation is not airtight. One black swan and the claim that all swans are white falls flat. Inductive justifications are not black and white, but shades of grey – probabilistic. Another famous justification – because he said so. Even if he has college degrees and experience to back his claim, he can still be wrong. It is a fallacious appeal to authority (despite its prevalence in society). So what degree (pun unintended) of justification counts as enough? Another arbitrary standard to answer the question?

Lets say we define our standards and now adopt the definition of knowledge as JTB. The problem is that it still fails as an airtight classification of knowledge/Knowledge (a capital K denotes absolute Knowledge and a lowercase k every other kind). How? Two words – Gettier Problem.

A Defintion of Knowledge?
A few of us over millenia have tried to define knowledge. It is possibly an indication of the difficulty of this endeavour that most of us presume to know what it is. If Socrates were alive and went on a journey across the world asking every person for a workable definition, I can say with reasonable conviction that he would find not one answer he could not decimate. Given that, I don't suppose to be able to come up with a satisfactory definition. In fact, I do not think that one definition of knowledge is possible. Knowledge is like ice cream, and there's more than one flavour of that around; in fact, I counted 53 flavours in Ben and Jerry's ice cream tub selection alone. Why do I say that? Substantiation for that claim in Part II after looking at the nature of knowledge...

(Then again I can I really claim to know there are 53 flavours there? Not really. I believe there are 53 commercially available flavours of Ben and Jerry's ice cream tubs because that's what I counted on the website - only as accurate as my math and their representation.)

THE PRESENT

Time in embedded in the very essence of our lives. Even our languages have evolved to take into account the pervasiveness of time. There is an extensive vocabulary to include past, present and future in our communication. Of course, we assume the arrow of time to be unidirectional. Until the black swan proves otherwise, thats acceptable. Theories say certain antiparticles are particles moving backward in time, but until they're proven (and they're far from that yet) we can assume what came before is the past and what will come after is the future. So the present then is the now, or is it?

If you're standing outside in the garden one fine morning and looking at the beautiful sunflower turning its face to the sun, you'd call it your present. But how is it the "now"? It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach the Earth. Some more time for it to be reflected off the said sunflower and reach your eyes. And then it takes your eyes time to send the optical signal to your brain, some time yet again for your brain to sort it out and tell you its a sunflower you're looking at. By the time all this is done, the sunflower in your brain is the sunflower as it was a split second ago. Is that still a "now"?

Okay, that was probably a bit mild. Lets take it to a whole new level. Say its a clear cloudless night. You have a telescope (lets just imagine you do for now) and you're looking up at the billions upon billions of stars sprinkled through the night sky. Light from the stars takes anywhere from 4 light years to billions of light years to reach us here at Earth. So we see the star as it was those many years ago. In some cases the star that you see now could have become a white dwarf or exploded as a brilliant super nova people on Earth could maybe admire how many ever years later (if we don't become extinct due to global warming or nuclear explosions or something of the sort). It could even be a black hole if it was massive enough initially! The star you see "now", isn't really the star "now" is it? 

THE PRESENT. Such a pervasive concept. "What are you doing now?" - common question right! Honestly, i don't even know what now is! The absolute concept of the present is this indistinguishable mass of various "pasts", so how is it not a part of time gone by? Because you see it now? But since when did the world revolve around one person? 

The logical solution would then be that there is no "THE present". There is your present and there is my present, which could consist of "current" perceptions. There "current" perceptions could then correspond to events or objects temporally separated in the "physical world". Not that this solves all the issues. For one, its a slippery slope leading to fallacious justifications for relative knowledge. I'm not saying knowledge is something concrete, i'm just saying its problematic to accept the notion of all knowledge as relative. 

And then there's the part where the "now" changes all the time. Even if change is the only constant, something that is now now is no longer now now because some finite amount of time has passed making the now now different from now then. (Inducing brain-numbness is just another hobby of mine, fyi) The entire part when the present is balanced on such a thin and rapidly shifting line just adds to the ambiguity (or maybe the ambiguity is only in my head?).

Its surprising to me, that after all the centuries and thinkers gone by, there isn't one explanation of the all to common and widely employed concept of "the present". A present=a gift, that's the only uncomplicated definition i'm aware of!