Reply To: Philosophy Question

“Gettier has no issue with Chaim’s arrival to the conclusion that the winner will have ten coins in his pocket”

I have an issue with that. Chaim is not arriving at that conclusion; the conclusion which he is arriving at is that Yoely will be the winner and by definition he will have ten coins. It’s all based on the premise that Yoely will win whichwasn’t true, in which case one of the conditions of knowledge was lacking. We can really take this a step further: Chaim believes that Yoely will win and he is justified in this belief. So if Yoely wins, did Chaim KNOW that Yoely would win? According to the three conditions, Chaim knew. But I could apply Gettier’s argument here and say that Chaim didn’t know, because his knowledge was based on a premise which might have been false. In other words Chaim got lucky, the same way he got lucky in the case where he actually one. Being justified in a belief doesn’t make it true – if the requisite justification needs to be 100% then it would in fact be impossible for Yoely to lose if Chaim had been justified in believing that Yoely would win. So even when Yoely does win, you can’t really call it knowledge; it was a strong prediction. Now Gettier may have been alluding to this when he wrote: “First, in that sense of ‘justified’ in which S’s being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S’s knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false.”