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Authors: David Edmonds
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that there’s a man tied to the track ahead of me? Well, if there is a man tied to the track, and I look and see a man tied to the track, then surely I can be said to know there’s a man tied to the track.
But in 1963 an American philosopher, Edmund L. Gettier III, then at Wayne State University in Detroit, imagined some problematic cases. Gettier had not published before and was under intense pressure from the university bureaucrats to produce some scholarly work. He reluctantly wrote a three-page paper, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? He himself was lukewarmabout it. “Up to the last moment of decision, I would never have dreamed of submitting a philosophy paper that consisted of nothing but a counterexample.” And he has not published a word since, because “I have nothing more to say.” 5 But his short paper has become among the most influential in contemporary philosophy.
Here is a Gettier-type scenario. Suppose, in the example above, what I see on the track is actually a fallen tree trunk, which bears a close resemblance to a man and from a distance I mistake it for such. And suppose that, by pure coincidence, nestling just behind the tree trunk a man lies prostrate, tied to the track. I have fulfilled all three conditions. I believe there’s a man tied to the track, it is true that there’s a man tied to the track, and I have good reason for believing that there’s a man tied to the track (since I see a human-like object on the line). But can I be said to know that there’s a man tied to the track or, as Gettier claimed, that I merely believe it?
Philosophers in the West have assumed that Gettier was right about such cases. I can only be said to believe that there’s a man on the track, but it would be wrong to say I know it. Recently the x-phi crew has rolled up, armed with their pencils and clipboards. Instead of taking Gettier’s intuition for granted, they posed the question to ordinary people, both in the East and the West—with unexpected results. It turns out that, while respondents in the West concurred with Gettier (that I only believed there was a man on the track), the majority of East Asian participants said that I knew there was a man on the track. 6
Equally fascinating results were uncovered when people were questioned about other perennial philosophical problems, such as free will. Assuming the universe to be entirely deterministic, entirely governed by causal laws (a contentious premise), can a person be said to have free will, and is free willcompatible with moral responsibility? Should I be praised or blamed if my actions were somehow the inevitable product of a causal chain?
Here it turns out that the more nitty-gritty details subjects were given about a situation, the more likely they were to be “compatibilists,” to hold that even though a man or woman was caused to act, he or she could still be held to act freely and to be morally responsible. By contrast, the more abstract the example, the less likely subjects were to use concepts like “praise” and “blame.” Thus, offered a richly textured story about a deterministic universe in which there was an embittered forty-five-year-old woman named Mary, who worked as a bank teller and was desperate for promotion, but who had a rival for the job, a genial, somewhat overweight thirty-five-year-old man named Mike, who had asthma and happened to pause for breath while on a walk, and was leaning over a railway footbridge when Mary chanced upon him, giving him a sharp shove in the back … etc., subjects would be far more likely to hold Mary morally responsible for the killing than if the scenario were presented shorn of all its evocative details, and all that was revealed was that in this deterministic universe a person was pushed to his death. 7
Almost every philosophical question of interest rests ultimately on intuitions of one kind or another. For a further example there’s the notorious problem of reference. When we use
But in 1963 an American philosopher, Edmund L. Gettier III, then at Wayne State University in Detroit, imagined some problematic cases. Gettier had not published before and was under intense pressure from the university bureaucrats to produce some scholarly work. He reluctantly wrote a three-page paper, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? He himself was lukewarmabout it. “Up to the last moment of decision, I would never have dreamed of submitting a philosophy paper that consisted of nothing but a counterexample.” And he has not published a word since, because “I have nothing more to say.” 5 But his short paper has become among the most influential in contemporary philosophy.
Here is a Gettier-type scenario. Suppose, in the example above, what I see on the track is actually a fallen tree trunk, which bears a close resemblance to a man and from a distance I mistake it for such. And suppose that, by pure coincidence, nestling just behind the tree trunk a man lies prostrate, tied to the track. I have fulfilled all three conditions. I believe there’s a man tied to the track, it is true that there’s a man tied to the track, and I have good reason for believing that there’s a man tied to the track (since I see a human-like object on the line). But can I be said to know that there’s a man tied to the track or, as Gettier claimed, that I merely believe it?
Philosophers in the West have assumed that Gettier was right about such cases. I can only be said to believe that there’s a man on the track, but it would be wrong to say I know it. Recently the x-phi crew has rolled up, armed with their pencils and clipboards. Instead of taking Gettier’s intuition for granted, they posed the question to ordinary people, both in the East and the West—with unexpected results. It turns out that, while respondents in the West concurred with Gettier (that I only believed there was a man on the track), the majority of East Asian participants said that I knew there was a man on the track. 6
Equally fascinating results were uncovered when people were questioned about other perennial philosophical problems, such as free will. Assuming the universe to be entirely deterministic, entirely governed by causal laws (a contentious premise), can a person be said to have free will, and is free willcompatible with moral responsibility? Should I be praised or blamed if my actions were somehow the inevitable product of a causal chain?
Here it turns out that the more nitty-gritty details subjects were given about a situation, the more likely they were to be “compatibilists,” to hold that even though a man or woman was caused to act, he or she could still be held to act freely and to be morally responsible. By contrast, the more abstract the example, the less likely subjects were to use concepts like “praise” and “blame.” Thus, offered a richly textured story about a deterministic universe in which there was an embittered forty-five-year-old woman named Mary, who worked as a bank teller and was desperate for promotion, but who had a rival for the job, a genial, somewhat overweight thirty-five-year-old man named Mike, who had asthma and happened to pause for breath while on a walk, and was leaning over a railway footbridge when Mary chanced upon him, giving him a sharp shove in the back … etc., subjects would be far more likely to hold Mary morally responsible for the killing than if the scenario were presented shorn of all its evocative details, and all that was revealed was that in this deterministic universe a person was pushed to his death. 7
Almost every philosophical question of interest rests ultimately on intuitions of one kind or another. For a further example there’s the notorious problem of reference. When we use
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