Authentic Gettier cases: A reply to Starmans and Friedman

Abstract

Do laypeople and philosophers differ in their attributions of knowledge? Starmans and Friedman maintain that laypeople differ from philosophers in taking 'authentic evidence' Gettier cases to be cases of knowledge. Their reply helpfully clarifies the distinction between 'authentic evidence' and 'apparent evidence'. Using their sharpened presentation of this distinction, we contend that the argument of our original paper still stands.We would like to thank Starmans and Friedman (this issue) for their careful reading of our paper and for opening up a broader discussion regarding how some of the divergent findings that have emerged in this area might be reconciled. It is important to recognize that we all agree on a core point: both philosophers and laypeople take some Gettier cases to exemplify justified true belief without knowledge. Where we appear to differ is on the question of whether laypeople respond differently to a special subset of these cases. Starmans and Friedman maintain that 'authentic evidence' Gettier cases are seen as cases of knowledge by laypeople but not by philosophers, whereas our data do not support this assertion (Nagel, San Juan, & Mar, this issue). In their reply to our article, Starmans and Friedman raise three concerns: (1) we misconstrued their contrast between authentic and apparent evidence, (2) the authentic evidence cases we used were atypical of Gettier cases in general; and (3) our methods of questioning biased participants to deny knowledge. These three concerns are potentially quite damning and we are grateful for the opportunity to address them here. On the first point, we appreciate the clarification provided by

Gettier Across Cultures1

“…They also tentatively report being unable to find any difference between ethnic groups in their sample of participants (for additional discussion, see Starmans & Friedman and Nagel et al. ; for further evidence on epistemological thought experiments, see Turri, Buckwalter, & Blouw, ; Powell, Horne, & Pinillos, ; Powell, Horne, Pinillos, & Holyoak, ; for evidence of cross‐cultural variation in intuition in other areas of philosophy, see Abarbanell & Hauser, ; Haidt, Koller, & Dias, ; Machery, Mallon, Nichols, & Stich, ; Machery, Olivola, & De Blanc, ; Machery et al., ).…”

Folk Knowledge Attributions and the Protagonist Projection Hypothesis

“…(answer options: "yes" or "no"). 2 Nagel et al(2013b) argue that the distinction between Apparent and Authentic Evidence cases is far from being well-defined and clear-cut and that there are several possible understandings of it. For the sake of this paper, I propose to employ the understanding fleshed out at the beginning of this section.…”

Skepticism About Meta-Skepticism: Meditations on Experimental Philosophy

“… 6 The third premise is also dubious, however. In two recent studies involving skeptical hypotheses, Jennifer Nagel (2012) and her team (Nagel et al 2013) found no statistically significant correlations between ethnicity, philosophical training, and knowledge ascriptions. Moreover, the majority of respondents in Nagel's studies found it intuitive to deny knowledge when unrealized skeptical possibilities were mentioned.…”