Re: Gettier Problems

From: George Greene (greeneg_at_cs.unc.edu)
Date: 10/30/04 

Date: 30 Oct 2004 01:14:00 -0700

"Daniel T." <postmaster@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<postmaster-BC3C0A.22441425102004@news1.east.earthlink.net>...
> greeneg@cs.unc.edu (George Greene) wrote:
>
> > > I see a barn, I say its a barn.
> >
> > If that's all you say then you never KNOW
> > whether you are saying it CORRECTLY. The issue is not
> > what happens when you see a barn. It's what happens when
> > you see something that looks like a barn but isn't one.
>
> But first it has to be established that it isn't a barn.

NO, IT DOESN'T, DUMBASS.
If you see something that is not a barn, then
what has or hasn't been "established" IS COMPLETELY
IRRELEVANT. THe FACT of the matter is and remains that
IT IS NOT A BARN, COMPLETELY IRRESPECTIVE of whether
ANYTHING EVER gets established, or even if the denial
(that it is a barn) DOES get established.

> If you can't do
> that, then

Then NOTHING, dumbass: it's STILL NOT a barn.

> "what happens when you see something that looks like a barn
> but isn't one" is pointless to discuss.

Of course, but the fact that it is pointless to discuss it
STILL DOESN'T CHANGE the FACT that what you are looking at
IS NOT a barn! FACTS are NOT dependent on what you can or
can't establish (unless they are facts about establishment
as opposed to about barn-images).

> So what is the relationship between the question of whether or not I'm
> wearing underwear, and the question about how many dolphins are
> currently in the south china sea? Quit being stupid about this please...

You first, dumbass. We weren't talking, in the original,
about facts (like your wearing underwear or dolphins being
in the sea). We were talking about perceptions,like your being
able to TELL whether you were wearing underwear or whether there
were dolphins undersea.

>
> If I say, "this barn is a real barn." What you have to say about that
> barn says nothing about my assertion one way or another.

That is not the issue. The issue IS, do you know, or not?
Are you right or wrong?

> > ALL generalizations from empirical facts are inappropriate,
> > if by inappropriate you mean "at least potentially conceivably
> > liable to be refuted by a future counterexample". If we disallowed
> > all the inappropriate ones then we'd be disallowing all of them,
> > and there wouldn't be any knowledge OR any (appropriate) generalizations.
>
> That isn't what I mean. I'm talking about when someone takes a
> particular piece of evidence, such as "Joe owns a car", then generalizes
> it to "someone owns a car" then when that person is told that Joe does
> not own a car, but Harold does, they say "you see, I was right!" No,
> they aren't right, they cannot take the fact that Harold owns a car as
> proof that their evidence that Joe owns a car was correct.

The possibility of "incorrect evidence" is just incoherent.

> Two of the
> original problems suffered from this very fallacy (the ones about the
> car and the sheep.)

It is only one fallacy, if there is a finite number of car-owners.
Existential generalizations are equivalent to disjunctions, if the
domain being generalized over is finite. You shouldn't be talking
about generalizations. You should be talking about disjunctions.
You are talking about believing, P, believing PvQ because it is a
consequence of P, and then learning that ~P&Q, and then saying
"I was right". This is not 5 different fallacies. This HAS been
explained to you BEFORE.

> > > If we don't allow such fallacies, all the confusion about
> > > these so called problems goes away.

The problem is how exactly to disallow this.
You would basically have to say that nobody ever
knows a disjunction. THis is obviously not tenable either.
If you see a face of a (normal 6-sided) die with the middle dot showing,
then you know the face you are seeing has an odd number of dots.
You know that the face is showing 1,3, or 5. So sometimes,
disjunctions ARE knowable. If you want to defend your line
then you are going to have to articulate some sort of criteria
for differentiating between disjunctions that ARE knowable
(like this one) and ones that are not (like PvQ when you know P).
Most of the time it would have to go without saying that believing
anything entails believing everything else that is a SHORT EASY logical
consequence of what you already know. Given that P->(PvQ) quickly
and easily, how can I possibly have a justified belief of P yet
not have a justified belief of PvQ? This has to be EXPLAINED AND
JUSTIFIED, not just asserted.

> >
> > And all knowledge along with it.
>
> These problems provide no knowledge, they only serve to confuse people.
> Understanding why/how they are confused is the only knowledge to be
> gained from them.

RIght, but we have not yet fully achieved that understanding,
or even properly articulated it, in THIS thread.

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