The purpose of this post will be primarily expositive in nature. It will be concerned with describing the Standard Model of knowledge (SM) as well as the primary criticism brought against it by Gettier. Having done that, it will then turn to the task of describing two of the attempts which have been made to salvage this standard model in the modified forms of the No Defeaters Theory (NDT) and the No False Grounds Theory (NFG). Finally, we will conclude with an illustration of how these two models differ in what does and does not constitute knowledge as well as the underlying reason for these differences.
According to the SM, knowledge is defined by the necessary and sufficient conditions of justification, truth and belief. If X is true, and if Henry believes X, and if Henry is justified in believing X, then Henry necessarily knows X. In the 1960’s Edmund Gettier called this model into question by arguing that these three conditions (belief, truth and justification) were not sufficient to guarantee knowledge. As an illustration, suppose we have Henry driving along a road which has numerous “barns” lining both sides of it. Suppose further that Henry points to one of the “barns” and claims to know that it is a barn. Well, as it turns out, almost all of the “barns” which Henry sees are in fact decorations set up by the locals in order to look like barns; all of them, in fact, with the sole exception of the one “barn” which Henry happens to point at. (Hence the distinction between barns and mere “barns.”) Coincidentally, the “barn” to which Henry pointed turned out to be the only real barn out of the hundreds which lined the road. Did Henry really know that the “barn” which he pointed at was really a barn?
The SM in its unmodified form would suggest that he did, since he believed the object to be a barn, he had good reason to believe it was a barn and it was in fact a barn. Nevertheless our intuitions rebel at such a prospect due to the coincidental nature of that “barn” actually being a veritable barn. Something has gone wrong either with our intuitions or with the SM of knowledge.
One possible response is to deny that Henry’s belief amounted to knowledge because he was not absolutely certain in it; he could have been wrong as can be seen in the likely case of him pointing to one of the other “barns” along the road. This, however, seems a little extreme to the defender of the SM. The problem, while indeed lying with Henry’s justification, is not that it did not amount to absolute certainty, but rather that given the context (his being surrounded by objects which looked like barns) his justification (that the barn simply looked like one) was not enough to pick the one true barn from the myriad of “barns” which surrounded him. In such Gettier cases, true belief is reached, but by the wrong path. Knowledge, in such cases, is the result of luck, and intuition rebels at the idea that knowledge can simply be the result of luck. Thus, the defender of the SM sets about to qualify the way in which truth is reached rather than holding out for absolute certainty.
Enter the No Defeaters Theory. According to NDT, Henry knows X under conditions of justified, true belief and the additional fourth condition that “there is no true proposition t such that, if [Henry] were justified in believing t, then S would not be justified in believing [X.]” (Feldman, 34) In other words, Henry knows X when there is no defeater t such that if he knew t (in terms of justified, true belief) it would undermine his justification for his belief X. Thus, in our example, the defeater that, if Henry had believed it and justifiably so, would have undermined his claim to knowledge was that almost all of the “barns” along the road were fake.
There are problems which arise in this model however, some more pressing than others. The first objection is that of the internalist who holds that whether a belief amounts to knowledge or not must be fully determined by factors internal to Henry. According to the internalist, truth, which is external to Henry, cannot play any determining role in any account of knowledge, contrary to the SM. The internalist simply sees the NDT as making a bad theory worse by appealing to factors which are more and more external to the individual in their appeal to the possible existence of some proposition t out in the external world which could be hypothetically known by Henry. To treat such an objection, however, would take us beyond the scope of this post.
A second objection to the NDT is that its formulation of what constitutes a defeater may actually defeat many cases which we intuitively accept as knowledge. There are possible cases in which we accept that Henry knows X, even though there does exist a true proposition t, such that were Henry to justifiably believe t, his knowing X would be undermined. As an illustration of such, Henry knows that his wife is not in the car with him. However, it is true that his wife at the moment is sleeping, and (for the sake of argument) let us suppose that the only way which Henry could justifiably believe this is if she were with him in the car or he were himself not in the car. Thus, there is a true proposition, t, such that if Henry justifiably believed t, then X could not be known by Henry since X would no longer be true.
A third objection is that there is an ambiguity in the nature of the defeater. Must a defeater include the full context of the proposition t? What about the possible presence of defeater-defeaters, propositions which defeat the justification for the defeaters? In other words, if justified, true belief is not a sufficient set of conditions for knowledge, should it be considered a sufficient set of conditions for a defeater? Perhaps the NDT theory can be modified so as to avoid these criticisms without some appeal to circularity, but no straight forward way of doing so comes to mind.
An alternative path toward salvaging the SM is that of the No False Grounds Theory (NFG). According to NFG, Henry believes X under the set of sufficient conditions of justified, true belief and the fourth condition that all of his grounds for believing X are all true, where a ground is, following Michael Clark, simply any belief or reason which plays a role in the formulation of X. It is important to understand that NFG is not aimed validating the justifications which Henry has for his belief X, but rather is aimed at qualifying or disqualifying the belief X as knowledge. Thus, in Henry’s case his grounds for believing his particular “barn” to be a barn can be described as follows: if an object looks like “that”, it is a barn. This ground is false, since all the other “barns” look just like that object without actually being barns, and accordingly Henry’s does not actually know that his “barn” is a barn.
A number of objections can also be brought against the NFG. First, the objections from the internalist still hold, though we have already considered this in the case of NDT. A second objection is that the requirement that each and every ground for a belief must be true seems overly strict. Suppose that Henry has ten true grounds for believing a true proposition, X, and one false ground for believing it. To claim that Henry does not know X based on that one false ground seems a bit extreme. In considering this objection it is important to remember that how the grounds function in terms of justification is not relevant. Whether a belief, X, is knowledge or not depends upon the truth of the grounds, not the strength of the justification.
It is the extreme requirements of NFG combined with its lack of concern for the strength of justification for a belief which allows for the possibility that one can have knowledge of some proposition, X, under NDT and lack knowledge of the same proposition X under NFG. For instance, suppose I want to know what the final score of last night’s football game was, so I ask ten of my friends who did watch the game last night. All ten friends verbally concur that the final score was 21 to 3. Unbeknownst to me, however, my rather bashful friend, Micah, remembered the score being different, but did not have the nerve to disagree with the other nine people in the room. Thus my grounds for believing that the final score was 21 to 3 is based in a number of grounds, including: each friend saw that final score, that each friend remembered the final score, that each friend is actually saying what they remember to score to have been, etc. In the case of Micah, however, two of my grounds are false (that he remembered the score correctly and that he is telling me what he remembers the score to have been), and thus I cannot know what the final score was last night under NFG. Under NDT, however, even if I come to know about either of these two true propositions (the two false grounds), or some variant on them, I am still justified in believing that the score was 21 to 3 due to the overwhelming number of alternative reasons for my belief. This difference in results is a direct consequence of one theory (NDT) focusing upon the justification for knowledge while the other (NFG) focuses upon knowledge itself.
