Ep. 344: Gettier and Goldman on Justified True Belief (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is Partially Examined Life, episode 344, part 2. We just discussed Gettier's Is Justified true belief knowledge. And I think now we are going to turn To Alvin Goldman's 1979 paper, what is justified belief as a way of trying to, to fill the hole to respond to those Gettier problems. And of course the problem of what justifies a belief is much more fundamental than just the fact that Gettier came up with these weird exceptions of that you believe something truly, but sort of by accident, not because you had any good reason, but you know, so what is it? To actually have the good reason is what Goldman's going to get at here.

0:46 Wes: Yeah, so the way he frames the problem, he doesn't frame it as, hey, I'm trying to solve the Gettier problem. What he wants to do is to give a reductive account of justification. And that means giving non epistemic substantive conditions for what it means to be justified. And what do we mean by non epistemic? In other words, you can't just. Epistemic terms include terms like justified, warranted, having good reasons, knowing something's being probable. If you're going to explain justification, you don't just want to kind of circularly appeal to similar notions in the same way that ethics. Right. In ethics we might want to look at nonethical conditions for the rightness of actions. For instance, something's being productive of happiness. That's the comparison he uses.

1:40 Dylan: You don't say it's ethical because it's good.

1:42 Wes: Yeah, we want to look at what are the substantive conditions that allow us to say, use this word justified and it'll turn out and as we mentioned, to be, of course to be these reliable cognitive processes, which is where we're going to head with this paper.

1:58 Mark: I mean, you might, Dylan, say what, it's virtuous if it's good or whatever. If you were like GE Moore who thought that it's just sui generis that you can't, you can't actually do define the good in terms of non normative, you know, natural properties, that there just aren't any. And I think we got this in our discussion of truth, you know, in Strawson and somebody was saying that truth. And I forget, maybe it was justification, but there were a number of things that have to be defined in terms that are sort of all in the same realm that have to be defined in terms of another.

If you want to try to define truth in terms of some completely different domain, you just couldn't do it. So I think we should be open to the idea that what he's trying to do here, Goldman is trying to do here with knowledge actually just is impossible. That the epistemic is, it is irreducibly normative. It is about, as you were saying, Wes, in part one of this knowledge is about an ideal that we're trying to shoot for and trying to say like, well, we know we've, we've achieved the ideal and if it has these visible characteristics, if it has these characteristics that we can describe in non normative, non epistemic terms, I'm just not sure why we would think that would possibly work.

But let's at least hear about.

3:14 Wes: Okay, so one thing that in this preamble that he tells us before we get into section one is that he's not going to assume, and he thinks it's typically assumed, that if a subject knows that it's justified and can explain the justification, can support the belief with reasons, he's not going to make that kind of assumption. He's going to assume that there is a process or property that makes the belief justified, but it's not necessarily going to be that kind of internalist criterion. So he warns us of that up front because I think, you know, a reader of the paper might make that typical assumption that's going to be internalist in section one. He wants to get us into these base, into these different clauses for giving these substantive conditions for justification.

4:04 Mark: I think if you're not an analytic philosopher, you might think, wait, if you're trying to explain justification, wouldn't you do like what Descartes does and say like, well, here's some specific things. Okay, so perceiving directly with my senses, that's a good justification. But he's just going to gloss over all that kind of stuff and say, well, there's some things that appear to us like perceiving something directly with your senses or having, you know, a good memory, a very clear memory of something that we just think are good justificatory processes and some things like wishful thinking that we think are obviously bad. He doesn't see any need to get more fine grained than just to say, well, you kind of know what we

4:40 Wes: mean by well, you Mean fine grained like, you mean to justify the idea that perception that confers justification. Yeah, yes, yes.

4:50 Mark: Do we need to justify that some particular method is a good method of justification?

4:54 Wes: Well, he gets a little bit into that at the end. You know, you get a kind of regress with that.

5:00 Mark: Yeah, well, I mean, just the idea that we think wishful thinking is not a good justification. But what if we're in a possible world in which there's a pleasant demon that makes all the wishful thinking comes true? That world, would it be a good justification? So he does bring this kind of stuff up at the end. But that's only just.

5:17 Seth: That's all we needed was another evil demon argument.

5:20 Dylan: This was a good, good demon. It's a good demon.

5:22 Mark: Is he really good if he's deceiving us like that?

5:26 Wes: I'm going to power through, what does Seth's phrase, the Bataan death march through the. This is through the difficult article of this paper. It is. And I, you know, and I read it, I'm like, oh God, why did I recommend this? This is so boring. So, so boring. Putting myself to sleep at night with it and then dreading going back through it and taking notes and doing it today and think, okay, actually you know what? This isn't so bad the second time. It's just unfortunate because it's so technical and all the J's and P's and S's and all that crap, it makes it more difficult in my opinion. I'd rather see this written out in ordinary language.

6:02 Mark: Well, the Stanford described pretty well.

6:05 Seth: Stanford was great. I mean, because you're right, it's like that faux technical, like scientific approach where it's like, you know, it's going to be good if they use IFF somewhere in the end. But it's true at time T is because if you do that for the purposes of making things clear, that's fine. Yeah, but that's not always the case.

6:25 Mark: I don't think you should be able to say at time T unless there's going to be some other time involved.

6:30 Wes: I just took T out of my notes. I took. There's no time T in my notes

6:36 Mark: at a given moment.

6:37 Seth: Just say that. You're also not allowed to use Greek characters unless they're defined for a specific purpose.

6:43 Wes: Anyway, in section one, he just gives us some alternatives for the concept of justification that he's going to reject as inadequate. He talks about these base clause. We're going to need two clauses other than a closure clause, a base clause which gives us Criteria for justification for non inferential beliefs. Right. Like perceptual beliefs based on perceptual perception. And then a recursive clause for justified beliefs that we get from inference that would. That are entailed from other beliefs. We have to say something about what justification is in each of those cases.

But here he's looking at in section 1, bad base clause candidates. And one of those candidates is this idea that a belief is justified if it's indubitable for S at time T. And then so what is indubitable? You could say there's no grounds for doubting it. But on his terms. Right. That's not the reductionist approach he wants because we have introduced an epistemic term, this term of doubt.

7:54 Mark: Grounds. Yeah. I think doubt actually is okay. You could actually say somebody believes or doubts or whatever. Those are not epistemic terms, strangely enough. It's only the normative ones. To say it is to say there are grounds. Or it is.

8:09 Wes: Yeah, sorry. The grounds is. You're right. Yeah. See this use of the word grounds. Yep.

8:13 Mark: But this was confusing to me of like what is he trying to get out of? Because you can talk about truth and you can talk about belief and we usually think those are pretty epistemic terms. Like if you're doing epistemology, you're talking about true beliefs and things. But no, those are actually okay because those are descriptive. It falls in the category stuff.

8:31 Wes: Yeah.

8:31 Mark: Yes.

8:32 Wes: We're really trying to do a reduction of the normative to the non normative. So justified is a normative term. You know, belief is well formed or it isn't. And then. But we want to be able to appeal to the processes that are right. Just. Just to give a description of processes which are. Tend to lead to justified beliefs and those which don't. And we don't want to appeal. We don't want to say, oh, good processes are the ones that lead to good beliefs and are justified. Right. So we want to leave the normative out of our description.

9:06 Dylan: And this is where. At the beginning, where he brings up causal. Right. We want to have a belief without the restriction on why the belief is held. So the previous ones don't have this restriction on what causally indicates a belief or causally sustains it.

9:20 Wes: Yeah, we're looking at. That's the gap in the causality in general and not necessarily this internalist look at what someone's reasons for believing something are. So he's going to reject this idea. I don't know if we need to go into the details but they reject these alternative candidates which seem in all internalist I think about oh, it's justified if it's indubitable. It's justified if it's self evident. Right, so he gives a long rebuttal of that.

9:45 Mark: But yeah, Seth, you mentioned the iff if and only if these ones are not that. It's not like I'm going to give you a theory of what it is for something to be justified. I'm just trying to give you something that would be sufficient for being justified. If it's indubitable, it's justified. There might be many other things that are justified that are not indubitable, but let's just see is this one sufficient? Because that is what we are concerned with. I think this does make this a response to the Gettier paper because Gettier is like justified. True belief is sufficient for knowledge and the Gettier examples are trying to say no, actually you need something else. So just getting sufficiency. We're not even trying to get a whole theory here, we're just trying to

10:24 Seth: get sufficiency A equals a self presenting to me at time T. Look, we can get.

10:30 Wes: If you're Fichte, you can get the whole world from a derive the whole world. But yeah, section two in the beginning is where we kind of get an illusion the fact that this is really about the Gettier requirement. So because there could be beliefs that are caused in quote unquote, some strange or unacceptable way and what it turns out is that as Dylan was saying, it's the absence of causal requirements that's the problem. We need to know what caused the belief, what process caused it and what process is sustaining it. If we can't get down to that level, we're going to run into those Gettier type problems and we get

11:08 Dylan: to his definition effectively. Right. My positive proposal then, is this the justification or status of a belief as a function of the reliability of the process or processes that cause it? Where as a first approximation, reliability consists in the tendency of a process to produce beliefs that are true rather than false.

11:31 Mark: Yeah, so that is hard to see how that's not normative because like it tends to produce true beliefs. Well, okay, I guess we were saying that true is not normative.

11:42 Seth: Right.

11:42 Mark: It's just a category and something that has a tendency property as opposed to justify.

11:49 Wes: It's reliant on what is the fact. Right. It's reliant on what is descriptively the case. So it's not like when you say something is true. You're not just saying, oh, that's a good belief to have. You're saying something about the belief which is descriptive and corresponds to some descriptive thing about the world.

12:07 Dylan: And this isn't his definition. Isn't. Doesn't violate his rule about not using epistemic terminology like justified, because he's basically defining what he means by justified in terms of having a reliable process.

12:22 Mark: So does this work for. I mean, obviously this is supposed to be the, the Getty cases that we've given, because in neither of those things did the person use a reliable process. Like, in other words, a disjunction happened to be true where the thing I actually believe I'm wrong about, but it has to be. It's put in an or statement with something that, unbeknownst to me, actually is true. Well, that's not, in general a good way to figure out true things, right?

12:49 Wes: Yeah. I mean, part of it, like, you know, the testimonial knowledge is, I think, as Seth was kind of hinting at, is suspect. And so we, we really want to think about our evidence gathering procedures. So at the base clause, what he's calling the base clause level, we're thinking about. And this is comparative, right? So we can think about the comparative reliability of processes that lead to beliefs. And we're talking about perception, we're talking about memory, we're talking about inferences or, you know, induction in some cases. And these are comparative notions.

Right. Because we could be perceiving things at a greater or lesser distance. Perception is more or less reliable under certain conditions, and so is memory. And some memories are more distinct, and some inductive inferences are based on smaller rather than larger samples and all of that. So it's not all or nothing necessarily, but these are processes upon which justification depends. And, you know, the hope is that by referring to them we'll get out of the Gettier problem. I think Zagzebski will show us that we don't.

13:56 Seth: I'm kind of surprised Dylan hasn't mentioned this yet, but there's a pragmatic concern about that too, is that it's not just about the reliability of the process associated with a specific belief. I mean, to a certain extent, it's the process associated with making that, seeing if that belief accords with your other beliefs. Like, you know, if I had a perfectly reliable, or what I perceived to be a perfectly reliable experience of something, that would be miraculous, and I mean literally miraculous, like a supernatural miracle kind of a thing. And then I was like, okay, the lighting was right. I was close enough to it. I was physically well positioned. There was no curtain where somebody could have done sleight of hand, whatever, you

14:41 Mark: know, you didn't just take lsd.

14:42 Seth: I didn't just take lsd. I know that's really unusual for me. But that it's not just about that process. I guess I think you would have a harder time holding onto that belief if it was somehow completely at odds with the rest of your belief system versus if it's something that is very much in accordance with your belief system. So I think there's a sense in which it's not just the process that generates it, but it's the actual belief itself is going to somehow be impacted.

15:11 Wes: You would have to build up a protective belt of ad hoc hypotheses or theorems as per Lakatos. Right. So yeah, falsifiability doesn't necessarily work. I might just kind of refine my theory a bit and you could say, yeah, given everything else I know I'm going to have to question this particular piece of evidence and not let it falsify everything. Oh yeah, I guess I do believe in miracles now. So, yeah, so we have a whole network of beliefs that are relevant to evaluating any particular piece of evidence that we are gathering. So he'll go on to say, you know, that some will tell us what Gettier told us, which is that some justified beliefs can be false.

So you don't get perfect reliability. And that's not the point is not to specify processes that lead to perfect reliability. We're talking about either processes that have the tendency to produce true beliefs. So we could look at it in terms of dispositions reminded me of our recent Ellis episode. Or we could think about it in terms of long run frequency. So you know, what percentage of the time does this process actually work? Those are two different ways of looking at the same thing. And he doesn't go into detail, he kind of waves that off as a side issue and says, unfortunately our conceptions here are vague, but we're going to have to move on.

And at the point where I am, he's then he's getting into this idea of belief forming processes as a functional operations, mapping inputs and outputs. And that's on page 97 on the right middle.

16:48 Mark: Yeah, I feel like the actual content to this, I mean of course the ins and outs and I'm going to try different theories and reject them and come up with different philosophical issues like that's, that's all interesting but the general Structuring thing about this is of, I'm going to come up with a, a base theory and then a recursive theory, which I think you described. All right, Wes. Oh, epistemic closure. That's the third part. Just to say. And there are no others. That's the, you have to add that one. It just, it's introducing this and then here, this, this function talk. I mean it makes sense, but like it sort of seems like a gratuitous introduction of analytic jargon. Talking about.

17:30 Wes: Yeah, I mean he'll say, you know, with reasoning your inputs are beliefs or with memory your inputs are earlier experiences. Yeah, he's trying to be, reach a level of precision that maybe we don't need. And you know, he brings up a little puzzle with puzzles about how if we're describing processes, how general do we want to be and what are the extent of belief forming processes. I mean, we don't need to necessarily go over that. We could jump straight to his positive account of what the base clause principle is. And then.

18:00 Dylan: Yeah, I mean a good, a good one to point out, which he just speculates about or sort of just mentions it is processes that are content neutral as a characteristic of a good process. So that, you know, he gives the example of, well, a process of inferring P whenever the Pope asserts P could be considered an unreliable process. And he doesn't talk a lot more about this, but it does seem to. I mean, it strikes me as the kind of thing that does lead to more reliable processes. It made me think a lot of Rawls actually in terms of having a just society, of coming up with a content neutral process.

18:42 Wes: Yeah. You know, at that point he's, he's trying to think about how general or specific should we be in describing our processes, which is a real problem because I can't say, oh, you know, what a reliable belief forming process is. Whatever I did yesterday when I formed the belief that there was a Diet Coke in my fridge and there was and said that we can't, we don't want to be that specific. We need some, we generally characterize the processes, but we also, we can't be too general. But anyway, he throws out a good example of a. Something that's too specific is if it involves a specific propositional content like the Pope asserting something. It's not a good process and it's not just because we don't like the Pope, but because we don't like propositional content in our processes. Let's keep them separate.

19:30 Mark: My comparison, I like the one With Rawls there, but was with our criticisms of Kant's categorical imperative of that. If I'm going to say, you know, the action I'm about to do is, okay, well, how do I describe that action? Again, it's sort of like these descriptions by my Fregean concern with how do we describe the belief that we're having, you know, how do I describe is this action? You know, I'm about to get in my car? We were saying, well, is. I could say, you know, if everybody got in their car, then there'd be pollution everywhere. Or, well, no, it's.

What if everybody got in my car, then we wouldn't even fit in my car. Like, there are clearly many ways to describe specifically what is being done here. So in the same way, if I'm describing how these inputs are being transformed by the function into outputs, how am I actually describing that function? I mean, it almost. We want to describe it as a black box. Like, the perception is, well, whatever happens when I get these inputs and I produce these outputs, like, do we, even for epistemic purposes, need to know? You know, do, like, the physiology or.

I mean, we probably do because that's how we figure out, like, when people are, you know, seeing mirages or they're having jaundice or whatever like that.

20:46 Wes: Yeah. The more. The more we know about the science of perception, the more we know about what processes confer justification and where they go wrong.

20:55 Seth: Well, the more the scientists know about it.

20:58 Dylan: Well, it's not just. It's not just the scientists.

21:00 Seth: I don't know how my visual processes contribute to the formation of the beliefs,

21:07 Dylan: but, you know, a lot of it might not be that you. You have the detailed scientific one, but like the whole bent stick in the river, you know, you don't have to have it. You have a theory of refraction in order to have the perceptual experience of having figured out totally kind of a kind of normal scientific way that stick gets bent in appearance and it's not actually bent.

21:28 Seth: No, no, of course not. And I would never suggest that I do. But if you were to ask me, why is it, Seth, you're claiming to have a justified belief that the stick is bent.

21:40 Dylan: Mm.

21:41 Mark: Or that the stick is not bent.

21:43 Seth: Or that the stick is not bent.

21:45 Mark: Despite appearances.

21:46 Seth: Yeah, despite appearances. And I. And you say, well, why are you justified in holding that? And I say, well, because every time in the past when I saw what looked to be a bent stick in the water and I pulled it out, it was straight.

21:59 Dylan: Yes.

22:00 Seth: And that's my justification. Which is radically different than a justification based on a theory of refraction or anything like that. It's just. That's the Humean solution. So that's two different justifications for essentially the same belief, both of which seem perfectly reasonable.

22:17 Wes: This is an important point because. Right. Part of the point of this account by Goldman is that our criteria for justification are externalists now. And you don't need to know it's on a need to know basis. So.

22:30 Mark: But, but he was need to know.

22:32 Wes: You dubbed.

22:33 Mark: You can at least want to consider

22:35 Wes: and not know why these particular processes are belief or justification conferring. You don't need to know anything about that.

22:43 Mark: Does he bring up the psychic or is the psychic a different Laurence BonJour.

22:48 Wes: One of that's the same clairvoyance. Okay, he does bring up clairvoyance. Yeah.

22:52 Mark: So if we're, if we're saying like Seth was just saying, the reason that we believe this perceptual thing is because it works every time. Well, what if somebody is clairvoyant but they're accurate, they make these predictions and they're always accurate, does that then become a justified. In effect? I guess that would be like because the Pope says it is. Right. I'm referring to what the. My friend Popey, who's the clairvoyant. The clairvoyant Pope. That should not be a legitimate thing according to this. But if you're just looking at the outputs. If he's always right, then yeah. And so it should actually be something that is added to our. If this is actually what we found in the world. Clearly it's not. But like I guess I follow the Humean line here that like, well, if it gives you the eggs, I guess it's chicken, you know.

23:39 Seth: Yeah.

23:40 Wes: I mean if we have an oracle that we who's always accurate that we can consult, I think that would be a process that we could accept and we accept it based on experience. You know, when we get to his base clause principle which he defined. Right. The. So we're A belief is justified if it results from reliable cognitive belief forming processes. Belief forming, cognitive processes. And if we're defining that in terms, in non epistemic terms, ultimately it sounds like, you know, he uses this phrase statistical frequency. This is how we know that it's reliable. That's just exactly what Seth was saying. Like I have past experiences and I've made an induction from them that this process is reliable.

24:21 Seth: Let me ask you this. If we dial back then also to what Mark said at the very beginning of the podcast about just this great invention of Plato, right? About having reasons for things or like the difference between justification as a reason and justification as explanation. So believing that the stick is straight when it looks bent, I have a reason for that based on my experience, but I can't explain it. Whereas Dylan comes along and says, well, here. This is why it looks that way. There's this, you know, blah, blah, blah, that actually strengthens. This goes to your point about degree, Wes. You know, like my belief, which was almost prima facie, or in some respects, now I can say, oh, based on induction, right?

25:07 Wes: And it. Yeah, it's based on induction theory of why induction works there. Yeah.

25:11 Seth: I don't have a theory, but once I get a theoretical explanation, then it strengthens that particular belief, adds justification, which again now introduces yet another complication, Right? It's not just at time T and this and that, but it's like there was the example of you believed it here and you had good reasons. And then later on, it turns out X, Y, and Z is the case. Right? So. So there's, I guess, theoretically a kind of unlimited horizon for both strengthenings and potentially weakenings of your justification in any given belief based on new information, theoretical apparatus, experiences, and so on and so forth. Right.

25:52 Dylan: And also what you tend to give credence to, right? So in that example, you do something that I think is very sensible is you have a physical theory that is quantitative, that aligns with other verifications, that allows you to make extrapolations that also prove to be accurate and sort of predict the results that you get from sticking the stick in the water, seeing that it's bent and pulling the stick out. You can figure out how big the angle is, all that stuff. But there are also going to be cases when people start believing things that are not true because they're giving more weight to a different set of criteria.

Or in the case of clairvoyance, they're believing the clairvoyant because the clairvoyant ends up being true. But the robustness of the cause isn't that great because you don't have a causally justified model for how the clairvoyant knows about the future. If she was connected to a wormhole and traveled back and forth, then you'd be like, okay, I got that.

27:02 Mark: Okay, that makes sense.

27:05 Seth: Wormholes.

27:06 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if we're taking it, you know, if we take a naturalistic framework, which I think this. This is really all about a naturalistic framework, right? This is the reliabilism this form of externalism embraces that. Yeah. And if you can develop a scientific theory, you've bolstered things. So I think we have. What we could do now is if we wanted to do the defeasibilism, we could move right to section three and we could just say that, you know, for the rest of what, what he's doing in section three, he's going to say, you know, we're going to get a recursive clause that says you can make these inferences from reliable beliefs to other beliefs that, that are therefore reliable.

And then he'll call his theory a kind of historical, or call it historical reliabilism. And basically the belief is justified when it has a certain kind of ancestry. This reliable ancestry, which is to say it's formed via reliable cognitive pedigree.

28:05 Mark: I like a pedigree.

28:06 Wes: So compares, you know, he contrasts that with Cartesian foundationalism, compares it to other philosophers who may have had genetic views of knowledge, like Locke and Plato and Hegel. But if we wanted to skip all of that, we could just get to section three because the defeasibilism is something also Zagzebski is going to bring up and it puts us into new terrain. We're trying to solve a new problem. And it was something that became popular in analytic philosophy and involves counterfactuals, which is always fun.

28:38 Mark: Should we give the barn example just to get another one of these fun ones on the table? Zagzebski brings it up. It's not her example. I don't have it noted. Who came up with this originally. But you're out driving and you see a whole bunch of barns and you look on one and say, well, this is a good looking barn. And it happens that that is a real barn and it is causing.

29:01 Wes: And it is good.

29:01 Mark: The lights are bouncing.

29:03 Wes: Absolutely, yes.

29:04 Mark: The light is bouncing off the barn to your eyes. So you're actually getting it in a complete, completely legitimate way. But all the other barns are fake. And if you knew that, that you were in fake barn country where just people put up fake facades of barns

29:19 Wes: all over the place, then you are fake.

29:22 Mark: Yeah, you would not, let's say 99, you just happen to be looking at the one real barn. So it's only luck that you are correct. If you knew the relevant background that you were in this, you would be justified in saying this is not a barn. You would be wrong. But still, in a sense you would be in a better epistemic position even though you got it wrong.

29:42 Wes: So yeah, this is her example against reliabilism, Right. She's trying to say. Yep, the Getty A problem just arises for reliabilism as well. It starts out with showing that you could have a justified true belief or

29:56 Mark: with that was gotten using a reliable system.

29:59 Wes: But that's counts as knowledge. But is also. Or that doesn't count as knowledge. Sorry. But it starts out with her formula. You start out showing that you could have a false belief. Well, how does she turn this into a Gettier counterexample?

30:12 Dylan: Well, it's just what Mark said. Right. You're correct that it's a beautiful barn, but.

30:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's it.

30:18 Mark: But you don't know it. But you don't know it so much.

30:20 Dylan: You don't know because your reliable process was not robust in this case.

30:25 Wes: And reliabilists would admit this, right. They're not saying that you're 100% time, you know, 100 of the time that the process is going to yield the right result. And it's because it's not 100 that you can produce a Gettier counterexample to it. Because you. Right, what you're doing is the Gettier counterexample production process is two step. You show that you could produce a false justified belief given a procedure and then you invent some circumstance where you get lucky and it's true. So you were justified. But it's true not for the reasons you thought. Happens with reliabilism just as much as with the more simple Gettier cases.

31:04 Mark: So the defeasibility response to this, is this supposed to be these defeasibility? Supposed to. Even though this was, you know, in Goldman's article before this barn example came up before Zagzebski is saying that this is an argument against reliabilism, still isn't the attempt to say, well, you know, it's justified true belief unless. And then they give some sort of.

31:31 Wes: Well, you got to give these counterfactual yes. Conditions. Right. So basically the idea is that if for you to know something right. Involves all those reliable, you know, the justified true belief plus the reliabilism clause plus must be the case that there's no evidence against that proposition that would have undermined your belief in that proposition if it had come to your attention, it's very strong, very, very ad hoc. Right. Attempt to patch things up. Well, if I had known, if I

32:01 Mark: would know I was in barn country, then I would not have claimed knowledge that this in particular was a beautiful barn.

32:08 Wes: So I need to. Yeah, so it can't be the case. So it's just ruling out, you know, just. It's just basically a way to rule it.

32:14 Dylan: But.

32:14 Wes: But then she'll show that it doesn't. It also doesn't work.

32:16 Dylan: What does doesn't work mean?

32:18 Wes: It means she can produce Gettier counterexamples even with the feasibility included.

32:24 Dylan: I'm going to resist bringing up my question about degrees of certainty, but okay, I won't resist it. It just seems like that's just like the answer. Right. The whole problem is you had a misplaced amount of certainty on it. In the case with the. You of course can get a gettier style problem because there are inferences made using reliable as process. Goldman would contend that's more robust and there might be discussions about all the arguments of which ones are more robust than others. Just like we were talking about, well, saying that if the Pope says it's true, it's true. Or the clairvoyant problem, you know, are there some characteristics of ways to choose robust processes, reliable processes, I should say.

33:05 Wes: I think the thing is, right, it

33:07 Dylan: seems like you will still, you know, of course, always have gaps.

33:11 Wes: I think the idea is, you know, what you're pointing to again is the fact that knowledge is kind of an ideal limit.

33:16 Dylan: Yeah.

33:16 Wes: There are no degrees of knowing something. It's not like I 90% know it. You just know it or you don't. There are degrees to certainty, there are degrees to justifiableness of a belief, but there aren't degrees to knowledge. So it's this very, very all or nothing thing. And I mean, I think you're right to point to the fact that in daily life, I don't know that we would ever want to say that we know something with absolute certainty. Even very obvious things we could say. Well, under some, you know, it just depends on how open we are to skeptical circumstances.

And that depends on the urgency of the situation. Right. If I'm in philosophical mode, I might, you know, wonder if gravity operates 100% of the time. But if I'm on the edge of a cliff, of course I'm going to treat that as if that's 100%. So there are certain normative conditions that affect how willing we are to go with our skepticism. But the point is that, you know, I think this is the point you're making, Dylan, is that, yeah, in daily life we are just going to admit to these defeasibility conditions. There could be something that we don't.

It could be some piece of evidence that we're not aware of that would change what we think.

34:24 Mark: Yes, which it seems Zagzebski's alternative to this is to say knowledge is justified. True belief plus luck.

34:33 Wes: Well, she entertains that possibility. She doesn't endorse that. I mean, okay, saying these are your possibilities, but yeah, I mean that. Yeah, I, I don't necessarily dislike that idea. You bite the bullet.

34:44 Mark: Her take on the barn one specifically is the problem arises because of the combination of two accidental features of the cognitive situation. It is only an accident. The visual faculties, normally reliable in this sort of situation, are not reliable in this particular situation. In other words, that you were in barn country and you didn't know, or in fake barn county, and it is another accident that you happen to be looking at a real barn and hit on the truth. Anyway, the problem arises because an accident of bad luck is canceled out by an accident of good luck.

So I think one way of putting the feasibility thing is like, you know, if you have a reliable process and there's no bad luck, in other words, you're not in an atypical situation. Like, one of the things Goldman says specifically is someone is manipulating things. So if somebody, if there is an evil demon toying with things, then, yeah, we would want to say, even though this was justified true belief that used what we think is a reliable situation because you were in the matrix, no, it's still not knowledge. In fact, you're thinking you just ate a sandwich is not knowledge.

Is in fact false. And the justification is being undermined by the whole context in which the thing is happening.

35:53 Wes: It depends on what the definition of is is. Well, what does it mean to eat a sandwich? So I had tried to put us into the defeasibilism in Goldman's paper in section three, but that is in the weeds. I don't know. And I think that what we've just discussed in Zagzebski in a way is clear. I mean, we could give the counter example if we want, that leads us to defeasibilism that's in Goldman's paper.

36:19 Mark: Go ahead.

36:20 Wes: All right, so suppose we have a belief it's caused by a reliable process, but we have no reason to think it's caused by a reliable process. In fact, we may think it's caused by an unreliable process. So, for example, and this is a really weird example, and I know it's going to infuriate people, but Jones's parents have told him this false tale that all his memories are pseudo memories and that testimonial evidence is actually, on this account, good justification for believing that all his memories are pseudo memories. And yet he continues to believe them and trust them anyway.

36:59 Mark: His memories, not his parents.

37:00 Wes: Yes, he should have listened to his parents even though they were wrong. That's the lesson of this. But. So what's the upshot of this is that it's a counterexample against reliabilism. So there's a reliable process here. And yet he's still. He's got justified. What does he have? He's got justified false belief with a reliable process.

37:22 Dylan: It's one paragraph. Why don't we just read it?

37:24 Wes: He's got unjustified true belief. Sorry.

37:26 Dylan: Suppose that Jones is told on fully reliable authority that a certain class of his memory beliefs are almost all mistaken. His parents fabricate a wholly false story that Jones suffered from amnesia when he was 7 but later developed pseudo memories of that period. Though Jones listens to what his parents say and has excellent reason to trust them, he persists in believing the ostensible memories from his seven year old past. Are these memories beliefs justified? Intuitively, they are not justified. But since these beliefs result from genuine memory and original perceptions, which are adequately reliable processes, our theory says that these beliefs are justified.

38:02 Wes: Right. Okay, so that's the paradox.

38:05 Mark: It seems there's just two justification. There's two.

38:08 Dylan: Right.

38:08 Mark: We think testimony of the people you trust is a good reason to justify something, but also just remembering it yourself really clearly is a good reason for justifying. So we could say. What's wrong with saying. If we're going to say there are degrees of justification, can't we say that? Well, there are, there are things that are in one respect justified, but on another reliable ground, normally reliable grounds not justified the data's conflicts.

38:32 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think you could say childhood memories are fuzzy or something like that. But yeah, in this case you just, you have to take the stipulation. In reality, of course, it may be the case that his memories are. We ought to treat those as more reliable. In which case he would be justified in taking his memories over his parents.

38:49 Dylan: Word where Mark was going is kind of felt like, well, he picked one, he has to pick one and he picked one and he was justified in it. But he would have also been justified in the other one because the relative justification for the justifications were equal.

39:05 Wes: Yeah, I think the example just asks us to stipulate that one in fact is more.

39:11 Dylan: More justifiable than. More reliable than the other.

39:13 Wes: Yeah, I think so. He chooses one and we, you know,

39:17 Mark: since this is about knowledge. Is this the case though that if you have strong Reasons for option A and strong reasons for option B. You don't know either of them. That's the answer is you don't just pick one. You pick neither. You have, you suspend. I mean, again, you could act. I have to act. I have to choose whether believe my parents or not and act accordingly. So in that sense. But, you know, does that mean you believe it?

39:40 Seth: I don't know. I don't think so. And I think that's an important point, Mark, is every day we act on the basis of things that we believe or we act on the basis of knowledge. Like, I got a letter saying I owe the IRS X amount of dollars. I have to pay them. And it doesn't matter where my belief that I have to pay them comes from. And I don't even analyze it. We act as if, right? We act as if we have knowledge and we don't even think about it in terms of belief. Oftentimes I think.

40:15 Wes: But we're not surprised when it goes wrong, right? No, we might be surprised, but we're not. You know, we don't think, oh, that was impossible. I knew that.

40:23 Seth: No, exactly.

40:24 Wes: Possible that I was wrong.

40:26 Seth: Yeah, no, no, exactly. And, you know, so there's a sense in which that Mark's original claim that the condition for determining the validity of the knowledge claim might have to do with how it works pragmatically in being used, acted upon, deployed, and so on and so forth. And that might be more important. So the net. Net of this conversation, right, is nobody solved this problem. Nobody's come up with definitive set of conditions that will positively include all knowledge claims and exclude the counterfactuals and the weird side conditions. In fact, it's pretty convincing that you'll always be able to find some kind of a counter example that'll.

That'll falsify the claims. Okay, fine. So some of these are still really good and useful. If this is what you care about. If what you care about is trying to lay out the conditions for the reliability of a belief, a lot of these are pretty good. And you could do. But what do you do with that? How does this help philosophy much less people? What do we get out of it?

41:34 Mark: I think that that's the question that Dylan kept asking is sort of what is to know what would make a good answer to this, you have to know, what would the point be? What are you trying to. If it's just, I want a formula that I can apply to all circumstances and it'll come out with the right answer intuitively, I Want to figure out what do we mean by knowledge? And I want to be able to input even the wackiest circumstance and say, oh, it meets the criteria. Or, you know, I want there it rule out all exceptions like this so that if it meets the criteria according to the formula, then we would consider it knowledge. And if it doesn't, then it doesn't.

42:09 Wes: Yeah, it's not an algorithm for helping us. You know, the whole point is just to give a theory of knowledge. Right. And the counter examples help flesh out that theory. Did we say how this Jones case motivates the feasibilism? Because that's the whole point of it.

42:23 Dylan: Yeah, let's wrap that up.

42:25 Wes: I mean, why don't I just say that. Yeah, really quickly. Right. So he gives a few attempts to deal with the Jones case that don't really work and then it motivates the defeasibilism because basically there's evidence that he doesn't use from his parents, even though it's going to make his quote unquote doxastic states worse off, he should have used that evidence. So there's your counterfactual. He fails to use a reliable process that he should have used. If he had used it, he would have appropriately formed the justified false belief that he did not. So in other words, knowledge is not just the function of reliable processes that we did deploy, it's a function of those that we could have but didn't deploy.

43:08 Mark: And if you get nothing else from this, you can get the word doxastic, which means having to do with beliefs.

43:14 Wes: I just had to, I had to throw that in there.

43:16 Mark: It's such a cool word. Anything with an X in it.

43:19 Wes: You're so doxastic.

43:21 Mark: I have beliefs.

43:22 Seth: Yeah, yeah, I had to look that one up.

43:25 Mark: I didn't remember it. We definitely run into it sometime in the past, but had escaped me.

43:30 Wes: Yes, well, Dylan and I know the Greek word doxa. Ah, this comes up a million time, million times at St. John's yeah.

43:39 Mark: Is that when I, when I read your home address on the air, then I've. I, I've doxed you. I've.

43:44 Dylan: Where?

43:44 Wes: That's right. That's what. Yeah, that's the original meaning of.

43:52 Mark: So, any closings? How did you like this return to analytic epistemology? I don't know if we've really done. My son took a philosophy course in college and was like, oh yeah, it was an epistemology course and I'm looking at his syllabus and like I haven't read most of this stuff and I think this is opening up. I started then looking at other college syllabi for contemporary epistemology and there's a lot of stuff.

44:17 Wes: I would need a long break before we come back to this. I cannot just string together episodes on something like this. It's pretty hard going for me.

44:29 Dylan: It's an interesting wandering in an area of philosophy that I have very, very little background in. You know, every time we read something really analytical, it's just not part of my philosophical education very much so I find it a combination of interesting and frustrating and so forth. What I found most sort of confusing is there was no engagement of discussion about. I'll call it degrees of belief. And maybe I'm wrong about this, but the whole question of characterizing knowledge and its alignment with the truth is having important contributions of the degrees of belief you have of the different components.

And maybe that's infected by my, you know, own history with, you know, Bayesian probability and the way in which, you know, I have hard pragmatic leanings about the way in which you end up figuring things out and revising them and so forth. The reliabilism came close to it in the sense that you have a process, but in terms of what are the components and what counts as robustness and. And where were the sources of robustness would fail. I was just surprised that it wasn't part of the conversation at all. Probability.

45:42 Mark: Yep. Any final thoughts?

45:44 Seth: Seth and I feel the same way about, you know, future analytic enterprises. I don't mind doing it. I just, I gotta feel like it's got some meaning, utility, importance and otherwise I just feel like it's spinning wheels.

45:59 Mark: Well, yeah, I think the spinning is an interesting image here because there's so much in one of these papers like this or the grice. There's so many like sort of back and forths even within a paper of like here are possible objections and now I'm going to respond to it. Here's another case and, and some of it is kind of fun when it's yet another like wacky counter example that you just never would have thought of this silly thing about fake barn country or whatever. So I enjoy these, but it's exhausting. And especially, I mean this was an exception because the Stanford article was written by one of our authors or co written by.

But in general, like using a Stanford article as our primary source, I find a big bummer because it's just so rapidly like, and here's a thing that somebody said and here's how they responded to it. And like, if I really wanted to get into it, I would want to read those original papers or something. But at the same time, like, we're not going to go. We're not going to have seven episodes on this to read all the back and forth.

46:57 Wes: This Stanford article was a bit unusual, that sense. I didn't like it. Yeah, it would just throw out. Do what exactly what you were saying, throw something out, not explain it. But that's not, not always the case.

47:08 Dylan: It's very analytical.

47:12 Mark: It had enough formula. Yes.

47:15 Wes: I mean, I think analytic philosophy is, is useful. It's just very boring often. And when you get into the weeds with all the counterexamples and all the different branching possibilities, it's almost insanity producing, at least for me. It's just, it gets to a point where it's so devoid of emotional connection, you know, I don't need to be practical like, you know, in some real world sense, but it just gets too far away from the, the human, I guess, or from the humanities for me. But I don't want to jettison it all altogether. I just need it in small doses.

47:54 Mark: All right, well, a few folks listening have taken a class in this area. If you know more about this than we do and we're raging and oh, there's absolutely this paper you have to read, please let us know and we'll deal with it on this show or close reads or just have it on our list for years and years as.

48:09 Wes: 10 years. Yeah, we'll deal with it in about 10 years.

48:13 Mark: Next time we're actually going to move sort of inspired by our the Plotinus episode to talk about the varieties of religious experience, the book by William James, which should be very breezy compared to this, so a nice jump in style. We like you. Comment on this@marshallexaminedlife.com on Facebook, on Twitter. You can reach out to us pel@PartiallyExaminedLife.com or at any of those other places.

48:39 Wes: Also rate us. Rate the podcast.

48:41 Dylan: Yes.

48:42 Mark: Give us a nice rating and review. We buy the book.

48:44 Wes: That helps us a lot.

48:46 Mark: Thank you. Yes.

48:48 Wes: Oh, and the book we did.

48:49 Mark: What was I supposed to plug? Parselexaminedlife.com book. You can find more about this wonderful thing that we have produced. Excellent for introducing your friends that don't know about this podcast or just revisiting. Just, just. It's a great souvenir. It's well crafted. Good night, everybody.

49:04 Seth: Good night.

49:04 Dylan: Good night.

49:04 Wes: Good night.