Gettier Cases [repost]
post by Antigone (luke-st-clair) · 2025-02-03T18:12:22.253Z · LW · GW · 1 commentsContents
Instead -- the constraint to possible referents of an agent’s truth statement is linguistically flexible enough to retroactively validate accidental truths. Whether these manipulations of language are actually valid or not remains underexplored. I attempt to explore them in my post. [I tackle this in the original post, but I would like to expand on it further]. None 1 comment
"The claim that Gettier cases don’t accurately describe the world because they are referentially opaque cuts to the heart of how language smuggles ambiguity into epistemology.
When we say “the person who gets the job has ten coins,” the proposition refers to one thing (e.g., Jones) but mediates that reference through an appeal to the set of all possible things with that quality (e.g., “people with ten coins”).
This creates a sleight of hand: the belief’s justification is anchored to a specific referent (Jones), while its truth depends on a different member of the set (Smith).
The problem isn’t just luck (as others have claimed) [I hope to refute this one day, but I just don't have enough time on my hands at the moment to do so]
Instead -- the constraint to possible referents of an agent’s truth statement is linguistically flexible enough to retroactively validate accidental truths.
Whether these manipulations of language are actually valid or not remains underexplored. I attempt to explore them in my post.
[I tackle this in the original post, but I would like to expand on it further].
If propositions like “the person who…” are inherently semantically unstable—their referents shifting with context—then Gettier cases must be artifacts of linguistic looseness, not genuine paradoxes of truth.
[It is likely someone has come close to this perspective at some point. I think if Wittgenstein were around he would have demolished Gettier cases.]
The question is: are we allowed to “edit” the referent post hoc when evaluating truth, or must propositions rigidly designate their objects?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tLrwLHu2vwMsirzMe/gettier-cases-rigid-designators-and-referential-opacity
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comment by JBlack · 2025-02-04T03:21:37.462Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No, there is nothing wrong with the referents in the Gettier examples.
The problem is not that the proposition refers to Jones. Within the universe of the scenario, it in fact did not. Smith's mental model implied that the proposition referred to Jones, but Smith's mental model was incorrect in this important respect. Due to this, the fact that the model correctly predicted the truth of the proposition was an accident.