Day 3601, A Priori Justification and Knowledge.

At first, this problem was somewhat hard to pinpoint, but after reading the following example on Gettier’s own Wikipage I get it (not proven).

I am watching the men’s Wimbledon Final, and John McEnroe is playing Jimmy Connors, it is match point, and McEnroe wins. I say to myself: “John McEnroe is this year’s men’s champion at Wimbledon”. Unbeknownst to me, however, the BBC were experiencing a broadcasting fault and so had broadcast a tape of last year’s final, when McEnroe also beat Connors. I had been watching last year’s Wimbledon final, so I believed that McEnroe had bested Connors. But at that same time, in real life, McEnroe was repeating last year’s victory and besting Connors! So my belief that McEnroe bested Connors to become this year’s Wimbledon champion is true, and I had good reason to believe so (my belief was justified) — and yet, there is a sense in which I could not really have claimed to “know” that McEnroe had bested Connors because I was only accidentally right that McEnroe beat Connors — my belief was not based on the right kind of justification.

A Priori Justification and Knowledge (SEP)

A priori justification is a type of epistemic justification that is, in some sense, independent of experience. Gettier examples have led most philosophers to think that having a justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge and the examples there), but many still believe that it is necessary. In this entry, it will be assumed, for the most part, that even though justification is not sufficient for knowledge it is necessary and that a priori knowledge is knowledge based on a priori justification. So much of the discussion will focus on a priori justification.

There are a variety of views about whether a priori justification requires some sort of evidence or whether, instead, some propositions can be “default reasonable”, or that a person can be entitled to accept certain propositions independent of any evidence, perhaps because they are reasonable presuppositions of some area of inquiry. Philosophers who think that a priori justification requires evidence differ about the details. Some think that a priori evidence can be defeated (overridden or undercut) by other evidence, including evidence from sensory observations. There are a variety of views about whether a priori justification, and knowledge, must be only of propositions about what is possible or necessary, and if necessary, only of analytic propositions, that is, propositions that are in some sense “true in virtue of their meaning”. Those who think that a priori justification requires evidence often think that the evidence is provided by rational intuitions or insights, but there is disagreement about the nature of those intuitions or insights, and critics deny that they really do constitute evidence.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/apriori/

Chatbot

A priori justification concerns how a belief can be justified independently of empirical experience. The key idea is not that experience plays no role at all in a person’s mental life, but that experience does not contribute to the justification of the belief. Understanding, reasoning, or derivation does the justificatory work instead of observation or experiment.

A priori knowledge is best understood as knowledge that is based on a priori justification. This shift matters because, since Gettier, justification is widely taken to be necessary but not sufficient for knowledge. Knowledge is a success notion: it requires truth and justification, but also the absence of epistemic luck. As a result, “a priori” no longer names a special kind of knowledge directly; it names a kind of justification that can, under suitable conditions, yield knowledge.

Paradigm cases are logic and mathematics. The claim that 2+2=4 is not justified by counting objects in the world but by grasping the meanings and rules of arithmetic or by deriving the statement within a formal system. Empirical examples can illustrate such truths, but they do not justify them. If the world behaved strangely tomorrow, arithmetic would not change, which shows that its justification is non-empirical.

A priori justification does not rely on evidence in the ordinary empirical sense. It rests on conceptual understanding, inferential rules, or accepted axioms. Formal proofs can establish results relative to a system, but they do not justify the axioms themselves; justification stops there. Demanding further evidence at that point misunderstands the kind of justification involved.

It is therefore a mistake to say that a belief is justified “because it is a priori.” Being a priori describes how justification works, not what does the justifying. A belief like 2+2=4 is justified because of conceptual grasp or derivability, and it is a priori because that justification does not depend on experience. In clear cases like mathematics, this a priori justification straightforwardly supports knowledge, even though justification in general is not sufficient for knowledge in every domain.

Wikipedia, Gettier problem

The Gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem concerning the understanding of descriptive knowledge. Attributed to American philosopher Edmund Gettier, Gettier-type counterexamples (called “Gettier-cases”) challenge the long-held justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge. The JTB account holds that knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief; if all three conditions (justification, truth, and belief) are met of a given claim, then there is knowledge of that claim. In his 1963 three-page paper titled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Gettier attempts to illustrate by means of two counterexamples that there are cases where individuals can have a justified true belief regarding a claim but still fail to know it because the reasons for the belief, while justified, turn out to be false. Thus, Gettier claims to have shown that the JTB account is inadequate because it does not account for all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.

The terms “Gettier problem”, “Gettier case”, or even the adjective “Gettiered”, are sometimes used to describe any case in the field of epistemology that purports to repudiate the JTB account of knowledge.

Responses to Gettier’s paper have been numerous. Some reject Gettier’s examples as inadequate justification, while others seek to adjust the JTB account of knowledge and blunt the force of these counterexamples. Gettier problems have even found their way into sociological experiments in which researchers have studied intuitive responses to Gettier cases from people of varying demographics.

The rest you can read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem