Topics Knowledge

Question Has the Gettier Problem been given too much credit? Take the man looking out the window and sees a mechanical sheep 200 yards away and forms the proposition "There is a sheep out there"...and in reality there is a sheep under his window. Don't you think the man really said "There is a sheep 200 yards out there"? Take the same scenario but instead of the sheep being under the window the sheep is "out there" two counties away. Isn't this easy to see the misrepresentation of the "true proposition" the man really means to express? Please tell me where I am wrong with this critique, Thanks!

Accepted:
September 25, 2013

Comments

You take issue with the way the content of the man's belief is being described in this case: you suggest that the content of his belief is the more specific (1) 'There is a sheep 200 yards out there' rather than the less specific (2) 'There is a sheep out there'.

If we're worried about the actual content of the man's belief, then (1) strikes me as unrealistically specific: 200 yards rather than 201 yards? But never mind that. We can easily use (1) to generate a Gettier case: suppose that the man validly deduces that (2) from his belief that (1) and thereby comes to believe that (2). Valid deduction is one way in which we come to believe things. If he's justified in believing that (1) even though (1) is false, then presumably he's justified in believing that (2) by validly deducing (2) from (1). So he's justified in believing that (2), and (2) is true because of a sheep he can't see. So he has a justified, true belief that (2) yet doesn't know that (2).