simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] simont at 12:46pm on 20/04/2012
It seems to me that when we combine your hypothetical here, my one (and the one in the comments) in the old LJ post I linked to, and Gettier's ones in the Wikipedia page you link to, the common thread is that all of them have a true belief of the form "One of the following set of possibilities is true", with a justification "Specifically, I have reason to believe it's this one". In fact it then turns out that the thing asserted in the justification is false in spite of looking plausible, but fortunately one of the other possibilities in the set is true, and thus the originally stated belief manages to be true despite the justification being wonky.

Are there any examples of this phenomenon which don't have that form?
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ptc24: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] ptc24 at 01:12pm on 20/04/2012
In a comment above I had something from an RPG which doesn't obviously fit that form, although maybe it could be argued to have it. It's also complicated by questions of personal identity which are a whole different philosophical can of worms.
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simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] simont at 04:12pm on 20/04/2012
Hmmm. So in that situation, the Assassin has the belief "The Scum is an unsanctioned psyker", justified by the observations that (a) the Scum is not a sanctioned psyker, and (b) the Scum just used a psi ability. But in a world where mind-swapping is actually possible (and moreover can happen unexpectedly and without obvious external signs), we have to expand that reasoning a bit and expose the implied assumption, so that it goes more like: (a) the Scum's mind is not a sanctioned psyker, (b) the Scum's body just used a psi ability, (c) we presume that the Scum's body is currently occupied by the Scum's mind. Of course the error in the reasoning is (c), and for all that it's an understandable assumption if mindswaps are possible but very rare, it's still inaccurate.

(Also, the above reasoning only yields the belief that the Scum's mind is an unsanctioned psyker; that must be combined with point (c) a second time to reach the conclusion that it's legitimate to gun down the Scum's body right now. That latter conclusion is certainly not knowledge, since it's not even true. Only the intermediate conclusion about the Scum's mind constitutes the sort of quasi-knowledge we're discussing here.)

I think I'd agree that it's not clear that this fits into my suggested unifying pattern.
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