Knowledge and the Gettier Problem
Cambridge University Press, 9/1/2016
EAN 9781107149564, ISBN10: 1107149568
Hardcover, 254 pages, 23.6 x 16 x 2 cm
Language: English
Edmund Gettier's 1963 verdict about what knowledge is not has become an item of philosophical orthodoxy, accepted by philosophers as a genuine epistemological result. It assures us that - contrary to what Plato and later philosophers have thought - knowledge is not merely a true belief well supported by epistemic justification. But that orthodoxy has generated the Gettier problem - epistemology's continuing struggle to understand how to accommodate Gettier's apparent result within an improved conception of knowledge. In this book, Stephen Hetherington argues that none of epistemology's standard attempts to solve that problem have succeeded: he shows how subtle yet fundamental mistakes - regarding explication, methodology, properties, modality, and fallibility - have permeated those responses to Gettier's challenge. His fresh and original book outlines a new way of solving the problem, and an improved grasp of Gettier's challenge and its significance is the result. In a sense, Plato can now embrace Gettier.
Part I. Introducing Gettierism
1.1. The year of Gettier
1.2. Gettierism introduced
1.3. Gettier cases introduced
1.4. Gettierism refined
1.5. Gettierism finalised
individual-Gettierism versus property-Gettierism
1.6. Gettieristic responses to Gettier cases
1.7. Supporting Gettierism
Part II. Explicating Gettierism
A General Challenge
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The fallibilism underlying Gettierism
2.3. A general anti-Gettierism argument
2.3.1. The strategy
2.3.2. The argument
2.3.3. Objection
merely definitional?
Part III. Explicating Gettierism
A Case Study
3.1. Introduction
3.2 Veritic luck
3.3. The argument
3.4. The argument, more metaphysically
3.5. An alternative Gettieristic interpretation of safety?
3.6. Belief-forming methods
3.7. The backward clock
3.8. The anti-luck intuition supplanted
Part IV. Explicating Gettierism
Modality and Properties
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Objection
modal fallacy?
4.2.1. The objection
4.2.2. The property of being Gettiered
4.2.3. Property preclusion
4.2.4. Predicates for the property of being Gettiered
4.2.5. Property analysis
4.3. Objection
another modal fallacy?
4.3.1. The objection
4.3.2. The objection's failure
4.3.3. Individual-Gettierism versus property-Gettierism, again
Part V. Explicating Gettierism
Infallibility Presuppositions
5.1. A question
5.2. Some Gettieristic reasoning
5.3. Realistic possibilities?
5.4. A case study
virtue-theoretic manifestation
5.4.1. Sosa/Turri's Gettieristic proposal
5.4.2. Fallibilism within Gettier's challenge
5.4.3. Turri's unwitting infallibilism
5.4.4. A methodological moral
5.4.5. Manifestation clarified
5.5. Conclusion
Part VI. Gettierism and its Intuitions
6.1. Intuitive support?
6.2. Gettier's fallibilism, again
6.3. A methodological moral, again
6.4. A methodological question about Gettieristic assessments
6.5. A methodological problem for Gettieristic assessments
6.6. An objection and two replies
6.7. Conclusion
Part VII. Gettierism Improved
7.1. A compatibilist aim
7.2. An old-fashioned account of not being Gettiered
7.2.1. An internalist condition
7.2.2. A fallibilist condition
7.2.3. A non-reductive condition
7.3. A non-reductive justified-true-belief conception of knowledge.