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The Significance of Fallibilism Within Gettier’s Challenge: A Case Study

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Abstract

Taking his conceptual cue from Ernest Sosa, John Turri has offered a putative conceptual solution to the Gettier problem: Knowledge is cognitively adept belief, and no Gettiered belief is cognitively adept. At the core of such adeptness is a relation of manifestation. Yet to require that relation within knowing is to reach for what amounts to an infallibilist conception of knowledge. And this clashes with the spirit behind the fallibilism articulated by Gettier when stating his challenge. So, Turri’s form of response is irrelevant to that challenge, which was intended to pose a conceptual problem within fallibilist conceptions of knowledge. (And that failure on Turri’s part needs to be highlighted to remind epistemologists of the need to assess Gettier cases by a fallibilist standard. Although that need was described earlier by Robert Almeder, apparently his advice is being overlooked. This paper develops it anew, in a more general form.)

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Notes

  1. For the original challenge, see Gettier (1963). On the subsequent history of responses to that challenge, see Shope (1983) and Hetherington (2011b).

  2. See, for instance, Williamson (2000: ch. 1) and Hetherington (2010, 2011a: ch. 3).

  3. See Hetherington (forthcoming a).

  4. This is due mainly to Fred Dretske (1970) and Robert Nozick (1981).

  5. On how Gettier cases can be used sceptically, see Hetherington (1996) and Reed (2009).

  6. I base this attribution on personal communication with Turri.

  7. For wider-ranging discussion of fallibilism, see Hetherington (2005) and Fantl and McGrath (2009: ch. 1). Gettier’s own formulation is what Fantl and McGrath call logical fallibilism. They favour instead what they call an epistemic form of fallibilism, mainly a pragmatically imbued one.

  8. For some steps towards a possible solution, see Hetherington (1999, 2011a: ch. 3) and Reed (2002).

  9. For a recent expression of his views on it, see Sosa (2007). For doubts regarding its epistemological power, see Hetherington (forthcoming b).

  10. For an infallibilist answer to the post-Gettier version, see Merricks (1995, 1997).

  11. This talk of non-entailment-of-the-truth-of-the-belief is shared by Almeder’s conception of knowing weakly (1992: 38–9). Beyond that, though, I am offering a more general formulation than he does. His distinction between knowing weakly and knowing strongly is couched in comparatively specific epistemic terms—of evidence being cited, of relevant accessible evidence, and of what other people can say. Now, maybe such ideas would be needed in a finished account; or maybe not. I am making my general points without relying on these particular epistemological commitments. This will help me to adapt my argument to Turri’s and Sosa’s particular form of analysis. They present their supposed solutions to the Gettier problem via a metaphysical picture quite different to the one undergirding the earlier epistemological accounts (e.g. Goldman 1979, 1986, 1988) with which Almeder’s formulation engaged directly.

  12. On whether Gettier’s challenge needs to be solved, see Kaplan (1985). On whether Gettier cases do prove enough to confront us with the Gettier problem, as it is usually interpreted, again see Hetherington (2010, 2011a: ch. 3, forthcoming a).

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  1. School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Stephen Hetherington

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Correspondence to Stephen Hetherington.

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Thanks to John Turri, and to referees for this journal, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Hetherington, S. The Significance of Fallibilism Within Gettier’s Challenge: A Case Study. Philosophia 40, 539–547 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9340-7

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