Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Jul 26, 2017 2:13 pm
A woman sees a group of people and mistakes one of them, a stranger, for her friend. So she believes her friend is there. And as it happens, her friend really is there, but hidden. So what she believes is the case. But does she know her friend is there?
We find out later that she didn't know. The J, in this case, trust in her observation, was off than she realized or considered at that moment.
The point is, what happens in the story has nothing to do with propositions. The woman’s mistake does not come from a false premise. She just believes the stranger is her friend, which is not the case.
I agree that it wasn't a premise, but it seems like it could be represented as one.
And her belief that her friend is there is not propositional. Propositional belief is as muddled an idea as propositional knowledge. There are just beliefs and knowledge-claims expressed by means of propositions.
I think I agree.
, b
We want to say that what she believes is true, because her friend really is there.
What she believes is a couple of things. She saw her friend is in there also. She did not see her friend. or 'that is my friend'. Her friend was near to where she thought her friend was, but not 'there' where she thought she saw him. He was in the group. But that's not exactly what she believed.
But that is the myth of propositions at work. What she mistakenly believes to be the case is a feature of reality, which is not a proposition. When we believe or know a feature of reality is the case, we do not believe or know a proposition. So we do not believe or know something that is true or false.
What would you call it then? I do think animals know things and also mistakenly believe things (can on occasion). So, yes, I don't they need have formed propositions to know and humans can be without them.
The woman does not know her friend is there because she lacks objective knowledge of that feature of reality. And afterwards, apprised of the situation and her mistake, she would not say she knew her friend was there. That is not how we use the word 'know'. She would say she believed the stranger was her friend, but was mistaken.
We wouldn't use know that way. But we, generally, do think that some of our knowledge may be incorrect. I am not necessarily disagreeing, in fact I don't know if I am.
We say we know a feature of reality is the case only if it is, or we think it is, the case. And if it turns out not to be the case, we don’t say we have stopped knowing it. We just say we were mistaken. For example, we don’t say we stopped knowing the earth is flat.
So, in that future time, we realize that it wasn't knowledge, it was mere belief.
Gettier-cases recycle the JTB definition's concentration on: subjective knowledge - what an individual knows - effectively ignoring objective knowledge and its justification; propositional knowledge - S knows that p - as though what we know is propositions rather than features of reality; and the truth condition - S knows that p only if p is true - which gets things back to front. Our knowing that p doesn't come from the truth of p. It comes from our knowing the feature of reality that p asserts.
So, if we go back to the original scene with the two friends and the others. What is an example of objective knowledge?
There are features of reality; there is what we believe or know about them, such as that they are the case.
; and there is what we say about them, which may be true or false. To muddle these things up is a mistake.
so, the first sentence before the semicolon. We could add 'or such that they are not the case'. Or? Is believing something is not the case different from having a false belief about something. I assume the idea is that only propositions can be true or false, but I think false (and true) are more flexible than that. But is the big difference between your proposal and JTB that we consider beliefs, like hers, to not be the case or mistaken, rather than false?
But Gettier-cases also contain the solution to the Gettier problem. The protagonists believe things for reasons that don't objectively justify their beliefs, which is why their beliefs don't amount to knowledge. Objective knowledge of features of reality, which may be expressed by means of true factual assertions, frees us from subjective, epistemic isolation. It's the objective knowledge that we Gettier-spectators have.
We do because it is a story and one with a presumed omniscient narrator. It's a hidden assumption in the story. In actual fact an observer in that situation could also turn out to be mistaken later. They mixed up the stranger and the friend also.
I feel like I am missing something and even that it is obvious, but I am not quite sure what it is. Yes, our knowledge can be revised so some things that we were justified in saying we knew we now realize were false. I don't see any way to avoid this unless we never say we know something. Perhaps it'll all turn out to be a simulation or our brain is in a vat.