Preview

What Is Gettier's Argument Against The Value Of Knowledge?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
574 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is Gettier's Argument Against The Value Of Knowledge?
Edmond Gettier is considered to be one of, if not the most important philosopher of 20th Century philosophy. Gettier's argument against the traditional account of knowledge, aka "The Gettier Problem", is knowledge defined as justified true belief. The idea of justified true belief declares that in order for a given proposition to be true, one must believe more than the relevant true proposition, but also to have justification for doing so. Gettier argues that the traditional conditions for knowledge in the JTB (justified true belief) model are not sufficient. In other words, in some cases, meeting the 3 conditions, which are truth, belief and justification, are not enough to count something as knowledge. Gettier cases are counter-examples to the JTB model and they work against the account of knowledge. In order to validate his argument and challenge, Gettier refuted the original definition of knowledge while also sparking pronounced epistemological energy and innovation. …show more content…
Since Gettier cases are based on situations in which a false belief is considered true by luck, all such cases would be excluded from the class of justified beliefs. One could make the justification and truth condition almost completely independent and hold that having a justified belief puts us in the best position available for getting the truth, but that this position isn’t very good and so most justified beliefs will be false. Gettier cases are meant to challenge our understanding of propositional knowledge.
An example of a Gettier case would be:
John and Bob have applied for a certain job. And John has strong evidence for the following:
1. Bob is the man who will get the job, and Bob has ten coins in his pocket.
John's evidence for premise (1) might be that the owner of the company assured him that Bob would be selected over him, and that John, had counted the coins in Bob's pocket ten minutes

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Hrm/531 Week 6 Assignment

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Question 4: If the only option available was an annuity payment plan, what could Larry do to maximize the value of his winning assuming that the risk-free rate of interest is 5%.…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Nt1310 Unit 1 Assignment

    • 361 Words
    • 2 Pages

    2) What is Gettier’s job seekers thought experiment? What does it reveal about the standard account of knowledge?…

    • 361 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    You are the manager of the Gander Mountain store in Frogtown, IL. Recently, a customer mentioned that they believed your prices for ammunition were lower than the prices of Gander Mountain’s primary competitor in the hunting equipment store Cabela’s. You would like to be able to include that statement in a forthcoming print advertisement, so you need statistical evidence to support the assertion.…

    • 1320 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    1. How could it be mutually beneficial to both an employer and a prospective employee when one approaches a job search in the same way as Bob?…

    • 465 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    With this lesson, we begin a new unit on epistemology, which is the philosophical study of knowledge claims. In this first lesson on epistemology, Dew and Foreman discuss some of the basic issues raised in the study of epistemology and then discuss the nature of knowledge itself. They consider questions such as, “What do we mean when we say we know something?” “What exactly is knowledge?…

    • 731 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    An argument could be said stating that John could be the one who is the one that started the trials. The only argument that could be said about John being the one who starts the trails is that he…

    • 565 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Time and Ice Cream Melts

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages

    f) Bob bought a new blue shirt with a golf club on the back for twenty dollars.…

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Job A: This is the job Dave really wants, since it has the most upside potential but it has chances of not working out at all. Also, this job requires a large investment from Dave which would mean digging into his savings. In addition to profit sharing, Dave would also be given salary and bonus to start up and run the facility. His wife wouldn’t prefer him to join this as it involves significant risk of losing all the money put in by Dave.…

    • 660 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    G) Bob bought a new blue shirt with a golf club on the back for twenty dollars.…

    • 343 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Theory of knowledge; often provokes big questions on the meaning and justifications of conventional knowledge.…

    • 1168 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The point of this paper is to show what the Knowledge Argument is, the two premises it contains, and its conclusion. Also I will explain one objection it holds. Lastly, I will explain how the objection fails to succeed its point in contradicting the Knowledge Argument. The Knowledge Argument proposed by Frank Jackson is about Mary, a scientist that is brilliant and understands and knows everything about neural science and physics. This takes place in the future where she is held in a black and white room where all she ever sees is black and white.…

    • 984 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    What can be determined from the facts as presented about whether Alice intended to make Bob a gift of $1,000,000?…

    • 453 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Rights of Juveniles

    • 1280 Words
    • 6 Pages

    B) In re Winship - This was the case of a 12 year old boy named Samuel Winship, who was believed to have entered a locker and stole $112. Even though there was not enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, Winship was believed to be guilty and sent to a training school for 18 months with the…

    • 1280 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Piaget’s theory develops different ideas of how children attain knowledge. He sees children as active thinking people. Therefore, children are usually pursuing knowledge. This is considered as a natural characteristic that defines the child. The theory leads to Piaget’s concerned with the growth of intelligence of a child. For Piaget, children build knowledge based on their personal interpretation of the world at the different stages of their life that range from infancy, childhood and adolescence.…

    • 388 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    So to answer the question at hand, I believe the arguments presented concludes that the knower’s perspective is essential in pursuit of knowledge, to a certain extent. It is observed that the perspective of the knower is not essential in all areas of knowing, history is an example. But in areas of knowing like natural sciences the perspective of the knower is essential. So to generalize, we could state that the perspective of the knower is essential if the area of knowing is not governed by static rules unlike history or mathematics where the facts are static and…

    • 1554 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays