In this episode, we talk about what seems to be a fairly simple question...but what, in fact, turns out to be a bit more complex.
Jamie: Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Dew.
Joe: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie: Welcome back again to our podcast, The Towel & Basin.
Joe: That's right. And so today I have a really basic question. I was reading some in epistemology and there's this talk. Epistemology is how we know, right? And so maybe this is kind of freshman, but here's my question. What does it mean when you say you know something or how do we know we know? That whole question of kind of a what is is kind of a question.
Jamie: Yeah. So how do we define knowledge? What does it mean to know something versus merely believe something or something of that nature?
Joe: Right.
Jamie: It's a great question that really is one of the root questions within the discipline of epistemology, and so much so that epistemology is often referred to as a theory of knowledge. So in other words, when you're doing epistemology, you're really trying to develop a theory of what exactly knowing is. So it's that fundamental to this entire enterprise called epistemology. And as basic as, I get why you're saying it may sound a little freshman, but look, I mean, this is kind of the big, big question that philosophers, not just recently, have tried to figure out. But man, this question goes all the way back, at least to Plato and Aristotle. In fact, it goes back to the pre-Socratics. The pre-Socratics are before the time of Socrates. With Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we call these the classical philosophers. And back even in the pre-Socratics, there are these major differences of opinion of about how we know, which is a little bit different question, but it's certainly related.
Some people thought we know through experience and observation and sight and sound and all that stuff. And some people thought, "No, we know primarily through reason and our cognitive faculties of just simply reflection and comparison and such like that." And frankly, those are still the main two views today. So this question is as old as philosophy itself. And so I put it this way. Let me start here by saying this: the debate here, to be clear, lest anybody get angry, the debate here is not whether or not we do know. Okay? I mean, yeah, sure. There are some people out there that are total skeptics. That's the debate over skepticism. And they're going to say, "We actually don't know." But generally speaking, with philosophers, when they're doing this, they're not debating whether or not we do know. They will take for granted that we do know certain things.
I know that I'm Jamie Dew. You know that you're Joe Fontenot. And I know lots and lots of other things. I know that today is, I think, Thursday. Well, maybe I should use that as an example, because [inaudible 00:02:54]. But I know that I'm in my office and I know lots of different things. So the debate here is not whether or not we do know. It is taken for granted that we do know, okay? The debate is but what is that thing called knowledge? In fact, Duncan Pritchard, the famous epistemologist, has the title of his intro to epistemology is what is this thing called knowledge? It's a peculiar thing. Everybody knows that we know things. We can point to lots of things that we do know. But when we try to unpack what that means to know something, man, that's where the wheels begin to fall off. And we encounter lots and lots of different kinds of puzzles. So let me see if I can try to give you a little bit of the history there on that question.
All right. So there have been lots of theories put forward. The standard position that has been popular throughout most of Western history is something called JTB. The JTB stands for justified true belief. And the idea here is that when you satisfy those three criteria, you have knowledge. So we start, even though we kind of call it JTB, I always like, when I unpack this, I like to do it in the order from the least weighty of those to the highest. First of all, you start off with the belief, right? And we'll just say this: knowing is not the same as believing something, right? I mean, if two people said or asked about a car accident and the first one says, "Well, I believe that the blue car hit the white car." And the second one says, "Oh, but I know the blue car hit the white car."
Well, clearly the one who said the second statement, "I know that the blue car hit the white car," is making a weightier statement than the first one. I think everybody intuitively recognizes that. Right? We would say, "I think that our..." If all we said was, "I believe X," probably we'd be willing to admit that we could be wrong about X. But if we said that we know X, we're probably not willing to admit that we could be wrong about X. It's just another way of getting at the fact that to say that you know something, knowing is a weightier thing, epistemologically speaking, than simply believing something. But notice that if you know X is true, then you certainly believe X is true. I mean, the guy who said, "No, I know that the blue car hit the white car." Well, he certainly believes it also.
Right? So believing is part of knowing, but it's not the sum total of knowing. Knowing seems to be something over and above simply believing. You believe it, but there's more to it going on when you say that you know it. Okay? So to know something means you start off, I would say, you believe something, okay? Now, in addition to that, you might also have what we call justification, okay? And the justification would be, "I believe X is true." And justification would mean, "I have reasons for believing that X is true." Right? So imagine someone says, "You know what? I believe that I'm going to win the lottery." Okay? And you go, "Oh, really? Okay." Or they may even say, "I know that I'm going to win the lottery." And you say, "Oh, okay. Whatever." And you ask them their reasons. And they say, "Because today, when I bought my lottery ticket, I was wearing my lucky shirt."
Right? I mean, they have reasons, right? Or it could be that they have stronger reasons than that. Maybe only 10 tickets were sold and they bought nine of them. Right? Now, that's a weightier justification than simply, "I was wearing my lucky shirt." Right? You got a 90% odd in your favorite at that point. Or maybe something along those lines. I won't add anymore to them. All right. So to believe something and then to have justification. But now wait a minute, go back to the lottery one. You could believe something satisfying the B and have justification for something satisfying the J, and it still not be the case that you're going to win the lottery. It could be that the 10% person wins. It could be that your lucky shirt bears no power in helping sway the lottery in your favor.
Right? So there has to be something even over and above justification. And so what would that be? Truth, the third criteria. So if you believe X and you have good reason for thinking X is right, and it turns out that X is actually true, then you've satisfied JTB. And as old is Plato himself, we have what we call knowledge, okay? Now, just real quick, asterisks here. It's not exactly clear Plato believes this. He actually seems to debate this and deny this in places. But this is a theory that's thrown out in the Theaetetus and it's as old as that at least. And this, what we call JTB, becomes the standard definition for what knowledge is really for a very, very, very long time in the Western world. So from the ancient world up through, this is kind of the view that's assumed by a lot of philosophers, okay? And really, all the way up until 1963, this is the view that most philosophers hold. And then the wheels fall off.
Joe: I was just going to say, I feel like you're leading up to a "but." The other shoe is going to drop. It seems pretty good. What's the catch?
Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. So here's what happens historically. There's this, at the time, unknown philosopher at Wayne State University, not that Wayne State's not a significant school. I'm sure it's a great school, but it wasn't like a Harvard. It wasn't a Yale. It wasn't an Oxford. It wasn't a Cambridge. So there's this sort of mid-level university out there in the United States, and there's this unknown philosopher that works there. He doesn't have tenure yet. His name's Edmond Gettier. We call this now the Gettier Problem. There's some debate as to whether or not it actually originates with him. Some people say it goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell, who's a British philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century and such. But this guy named Edmond Gettier, in 1963, he's under pressure to get tenure there at Wayne State. He's never really published.
He doesn't have the publication records to really justify tenure, and he's got to do something. And he's kind of getting the press from the university. He writes, I mean, just the gall of this and I mean, the audacity to attempt this, but he succeeded. This is what's funny about it. He wrote a three page article, a three page article in a famous journal. Now, just real quick. Normally, these articles are 25, 30 pages. I mean, they're thick, dense articles. He wrote a three page article that's published in one of the major journals in the United States. And it was an epistemological bombshell on really all epistemology in the Western world. And I think you could say, even in the Eastern world, because they kind of assumed similar things as this. He launches a set of problems for JTB. And essentially, from this point forward, everybody's kind of thrown their hands up in the air and says, "We don't really know what knowledge is anymore."
Okay? And there's lots of debates about how to solve these problems, but this is referred to as the Gettier Problem. Now, if I tried to explain the actual examples he gives you of these problems, it'd be very confusing. So he gives us these examples about Smith and Jones having coins in their pocket and knowing that one of them with a certain number of coins in their pocket is going to get a job. But as it turns out, the other one has that many coins in his pocket too and blah, blah, blah. Let me give you some clearer examples of the same kind of problem, okay?
Joe: All right.
Jamie: Essentially, what his problems do is they try to show that no, wait, I can satisfy J, T and B, and I still have suspicions about whether or not I'm comfortable saying I know this. And the problems he raised have to do with the J, the justification. Okay? So imagine this situation. It's a silly situation. It doesn't even have to be a real situation, but it's possible. And under this situation, I will satisfy all three, J, T and B. And yet, at the same time, we're going to have deep suspicions about whether or not I actually know something in that moment, okay? All right. Now, imagine this one. Imagine that we're sitting here doing the podcast. It's 1:48 right now, okay? And I see a clock on the wall. And as we're talking, I'm doing this podcast and I'm not paying attention to the clock or anything. And you just stop me right in the middle of my talk. And you say, "Jamie, what time is it?" And I'm kind rattled by it, and I look up at the clock on the wall and it says 1:48. And I say, "It's 1:48."
You say, "Okay." And then I pick my talk back up and I keep going. And let's just say I go for at least 10 more minutes, 15 minutes, something like that. And then all of a sudden, you blurt out again and just stop me, "Jamie, what time is it right now?" And I'm a little niff that you keep interrupting all this stuff. And I look up at the clock and it still says 1:48, okay? Now, clearly, in this case, what we would say about the clock is that it was stopped, right? It stopped. Now, let's just imagine in that first case, when I said 1:48, and I claimed to know that it was 1:48. Why? Because I believe that it's 1:48. I have justification that it's 1:48 because the clock on the wall. I mean, that's a pretty good justification. The clock on the wall says 1:48.
And what if, when that very first moment, when you asked me, "What time is it?" it just so happened that the stars were rightly aligned by coincidence that it actually was 1:48. Okay? Under that circumstance, I have satisfied J, T and B. I've got a belief. It's got justification. And it turns out to be true that in fact it is 1:48 at that moment. But as we later learned, because when you asked me again, it stopped on the wall at the same spot. We later learned that ah, the clock on the wall, which was my justification for my knowledge claim the first time, that justification is suspicious. Why? Because we now know that it was just dumb luck coincidence that you happened to ask me what time it was at the exact moment it was actually 1:48. Here's the question we ask: are you comfortable saying that you know something when your justification was nothing but dumb luck coincidence?
You just have no confidence in that, right? And you can give lots and lots of other examples about this. I give a couple more in the book that I've done with Mark Foreman. But essentially, the upshot of that is, look, I can satisfy J, T and B, and I still am not confident that I actually have knowledge. Let me circle back where we started. The debate here is not whether or not we do have knowledge or we do know things. The debate is over exactly what is it to know something, because the standard definition seems to have just gone out the window. We can have J, T and B, and yet we're still struggling to make sense out of what knowledge is, because it doesn't seem to be in just those three. And so there's a couple other little neat odds and ends about that debate. And that article that Edmund Gettier, three page article, this guy writes a three page article and forever changes the landscape of epistemology. Of course, he's awarded tenure on this basis. And best I can tell, he never publishes again.
Joe: He didn't have to.
Jamie: Three page mic drop. Boom. There you go. That's how he got tenure. But since then, epistemologists have really waged a fairly lengthy, substantial debate over, "Well, then how do we solve this? What do we say knowledge is?" And there's a lot of different theories about, or there... I should say this. There's a lot of different additives that philosophers have come up with, meaning they have said, "Okay, JTB is a good start. It's at least that. It's a necessary condition, but it's not enough, meaning it's not a sufficient condition. And so what else do we need to add to JTB to claim that we have knowledge?" And so a lot of approaches to solving this problem seek to add some other thing. For example, a causal theory. In causal theory, it's JTB and as long as your belief in X was actually caused by X, meaning you believe a baseball hit you in the head.
Well, as long as that belief happened when in fact a baseball hit you in the head, you see the causal relationship there, maybe that works. Now, the question is, how do we know that it was actually caused by that? Another one's called reliabilism, which would say something like, "Well, as long as your cognitive..." It's JTB plus a reliable process. In this case, as long as you have JTB and the belief you formed and the justifications you have came about by your cognitive faculties functioning in the proper way, a reliable way, hence the name reliabilism, then in fact, you can claim to have knowledge. Question is how do you know exactly that your cognitive faculties who are functioning properly? What if somebody slipped me a mickey and I'm delusional over here? And I think that I'm actually in my office and I'm really in the matrix or something stupid like that. So bottom line is there's no consensus on how to solve that problem.
Joe: I didn't see that coming.
Jamie: Yeah. The debate goes on about [inaudible 00:16:21]. But nobody's debating whether or not... There are some, the skeptics. It's a rare breed, even historically. But yeah, we know things and we can give lots of examples of that. Nobody's really disputing that. It's just a interesting philosophical question of, it's hard to say exactly just what knowing is. It's clearly more than believing, and it's clearly more than believing and having a justification. It seems as though it's more than believing, justification, and having truth. We just don't know what else it would be.
Joe: Fascinating. Well, thanks for taking me through that. That was a very interesting. Look, I really had no idea that's where that was going to go.
Jamie: Well, most people don't, so that's [inaudible 00:17:06].
Joe: Yeah. All right. Thanks, Jamie.
Jamie: Hey, everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe: If you like this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcast. That helps other people find it.
Jamie: And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way. And we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.