I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability. What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns: a measure of how likely it […]
Category: epistemology
Getting Around Gettier
The Gettier argument (and its descendants) run thusly… Someone thinks they know x. However, due to factor y, they do not know x. These sorts of thought experiments are used regularly to undermine different accounts of knowledge. Generally I think they are effective but there is one gray area that is under-appreciated. When the thought experiment is introduced, it is generally assumed to be unproblematic: whoever is setting up the thought experiment is defining the […]
A Counterexample to Skepticism
The statement, “Either something happened or something didn’t happen,” is immune to skepticism. If a skeptic tries to doubt it, then something has happened, making the statement true. If no one doubts it and nothing happened, then the statement is again true. Therefore you may have absolute certainty that something has or has not happened. Moreover, this statement has it’s uses: I can imagine mothers all over the country trying to impress upon their teenagers […]
A note on epistemology
Justified true belief does not yield knowledge, and everyone should know this by now. Beyond Gettier’s argument, is this tack I heard given by Jaakko Hintikka: You may believe something, fine, and have whatever justifications you wish. But how do you know the thing is true? The point he was making was that far beyond the issue of problems in having the right sort of justifications is the problem of having truth as well. Whenever […]