Why Gettier Cases are misleading

 

 

I think that some readers of Experimental Philosophy, especially those who work on Gettier cases, might be interested in this paper (even though it is not an experimental paper).

 

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that, as far as Gettier cases are concerned, appearances are deceiving. That is, Gettier cases merely appear to be cases of epistemic failure (i.e., failing to know that p) but are in fact cases of semantic failure (i.e., failing to refer to x). Gettier cases are cases of reference failure because the candidates for knowledge in these cases contain ambiguous designators. If this is correct, then we may simply be mistaking semantic facts for epistemic facts when we consider Gettier cases. This, in turn, is a good reason not to assign much, if any, evidential weight to Gettier intuitions (i.e., that S doesn’t know that p in a Gettier case).

 

Comments are most welcome and much appreciated!

Comments

[Angra Mainyu]

Hi, Moti (if I may).

It's a very interesting paper. I'll need to think more about it, but I'd like to ask you about the following alternative scenario:

Smith has known Jones since childhood, and knows that Jones has a coin he calls "Lucky", which is a coin he found when he was 10, and he believes that the coin in question brings him good luck. Based on that and his knowledge of Jones, Smith has the justified belief that Jones has the coin named "Lucky" in her pocket.
From that, as in the original example, Smith concludes:

(I') The man who will get the job has the coin named "Lucky" in his pocket.

Smith gets the job, and as it turns out, right before the interview, Perez - as part of a prank - took Lucky from Jones's pocket, and placed it in Smith's, without either of them noticing.
It seems to me that Smith does not know (I'), even though there is no failure of reference with respect to the coin in question.
Do you think there is, perhaps, at least one more failure of reference involved in the example? (and also in the original Gettier case)
Perhaps, "the man who will get the job" is also an ambiguous designator.
Or do you think there is a different solution?