Readers of this blog might be interested in a new paper by me and Ori Friedman looking at people's everyday concept of knowledge. Here is the abstract:
How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed “Gettier cases”) in which a person’s justified belief is true, but only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and “Gettiering” on people’s knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: 1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; 2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and 3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent’s belief is based on “apparent” evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers.
If you don't have institutional access to the paper, please feel free to email me for a copy at christina dot starmans at yale dot edu.
Great paper!
Posted by: John Turri | 06/30/2012 at 01:06 AM
If I may comment without reading the paper through, it seems accepted that belief is a base from which we aim at knowledge, and reasoning is a process towards refinement of knowledge, which is never perfect but is always open to better explanation.
One might argue reasonably in many ways about justifications for beliefs to be true, and to thus constitute knowledge. But they would only be arguments towards proof, as in Gettier cases, and as noted above it is a process not a destination. The law will have its levels of satisfaction to practically resolve disputes, but philosopher's should keep an open mind.
If you would like to send me a copy of the paper, I would be happy to read and comment further. I'm not an academic by profession.
Posted by: Marcus Morgan | 07/02/2012 at 03:22 AM
This is a really fascinating paper and set of findings (congrats to two psychologists for writing such a philosophically interesting piece!). I would be very interested to hear what people have to say about it, especially the explanations the authors float about why philosophers and the folk appear to have such different intuitions about Gettier cases. I'd really like to hear what epistemologists have to say, so Josh or Jonathan, if you are reading, can you post this paper to Certain Doubts (and if not, Christina, why don't you ask Josh to do that--those readers should be interested).
Posted by: Eddy Nahmias | 07/03/2012 at 03:27 PM
"These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, ***and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers***."
Did you test philosophers (or epistemologist in particular) on these cases? I would venture to bet that the intuitions of philosophers would closely resemble the intuitions of your participants on these particular cases. In order to build a stronger cases for the claim(s) you make in the paper, it would be nice to use cases in which there was ***data*** from philosophers (epistemologists) that show a strong "no knowledge" response in spite of the presence of JTB, and then use these same cases when testing "the folk."
Posted by: Jason S | 07/03/2012 at 05:04 PM
Jason, that would be a nice next move. But why do you predict that epistemologists would respond similarly to the folk on these Gettier-style cases? And if they did (and assuming you think they would be offering justified intuitions), what would explain why these cases are different from the Gettier cases that have led most epistemologists to reject JTB?
Posted by: Eddy Nahmias | 07/03/2012 at 05:59 PM
Thanks for your paper. As a lawyer familiar with witnesses' foibles in the box, I would say this kind of experimental psychology is useful to expose common fallacies and determine their regularity. There is no doubt we can all benefit from those findings, whatever the neurological processes may be for reasoning and whether we have defined Free Will in the application of that reasoning.
Perhaps the 'hard problem' in reasoning, as it deals with absolutes and relative perspectives combined, is belief in spirituality. Experimentation might reveal all kinds of fallacies of reasoning towards the continuation of such beliefs, but I would say belief is our driver refined by reasoning, and some retreat to the proposition that god is unknowable, so it reverts to being unproveable either way.
I would be interested to read research into folk ideas about the basis of belief outside the prescriptions of reasoning, as a driver that is so unshakeable that we revert to the untenable but unproveable to hold onto it. Perhaps such research exists, I will have a look, but in the current climate of rampant spirtuality driving negative actions, it would be worthwhile.
Posted by: Marcus Morgan | 07/04/2012 at 02:28 AM
Hi Eddy,
"But why do you predict that epistemologists would respond similarly to the folk on these Gettier-style cases?"
I could completely wrong in my prediction. My prediction here is simply based on my intuitive responses to the cases.
With classic Gettier cases (e.g., coins in the pocket guy gets the job), I have the fairly strong intuition "not knowledge," but in the Starman & Friedman cases I felt my intuitions going in the direction of the majority of the people they polled.
Additionally, I always kind of wonder how dominant-among-philosophers certain supposed dominant-among-philosophers intuitions really are. I imagine that the pattern of responses to the original Gettier cases are fairly consistent, but when it comes to e.g., fake barn examples in epistemology or lottery examples in epistemology, I imagine that there may be more variance in philosophers' intuitions than what one would expect if one was to take a cursory view of the literature.
"And if they did (and assuming you think they would be offering justified intuitions), what would explain why these cases are different from the Gettier cases that have led most epistemologists to reject JTB?"
Now this would be an interesting question to explore! (And I don't have the answer. Perhaps if enough of these Gettier-like cases were shown to not elicit the classical Gettier pattern of response, perhaps this might give us reason to suspect whether the intuitions to standard Gettier cases are justified intuitions?)
Posted by: Jason S | 07/04/2012 at 12:58 PM