Refining Justified True Belief Through Wittgenstein

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Post 12

Another very important idea from Witt is family resemblance. We have to get away from the idea that a definition must identify something that all examples have in common. Witt asks us to examine the examples before assuming that we’ll find such a feature.

Consider games, for e.g., chess, solitaire, football, and hide-and-seek have similarities, but they also have differences. Some are based on teams, others aren’t. Some involve competition with another person, others don’t. The similarities overlap in the same way family resemblances overlap. Families may resemble one another in their faces, expressions, or ways of moving about without everyone sharing one particular feature.

How does this relate to JTB? I’m putting forth a general account of knowledge as belief. Whenever someone believes that something is true (that something is the case) and offers a justification, the account should be able to distinguish knowledge from a mistaken belief, an unsupported belief, or a lucky guess.

The requirements remain, but the justifications differ. We establish a mathematical result through the use of a proof. A medical diagnosis may depend on examination, tests, and testimony. Knowing where I parked may depend on memory and our surroundings; and we shouldn’t expect every claim to be justified in the same way.

Family resemblance helps us recognize the overlapping similarities and differences among these various practices. It doesn’t establish JTB, but it helps us avoid forcing justification into one model. Truth, belief, and sufficient, properly understood justification remain a requirements of my model of JTB.

Later, I’ll compare how different accounts of epistemology handle the same examples, including difficult cases. The question is, which account best explains why someone knows or fails to know? And my account must face the same question. It’s a way of testing the models.

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Post 13

Earlier, I questioned whether the meaning of know could be explained by pointing inward to a feeling, intuition, or some other mental event. Witt’s beetle example helps explain the problem of pointing inward.

Imagine that everyone has a box containing what they call a beetle. Each person is able to look only inside their particular box. No one is able to compare their contents with anyone else’s contents. The contents could be the same in each box, or the contents might be different. The contents could also change, and the contents of some boxes might be empty.

Let’s suppose that everyone uses the word beetle, but each person explains its meaning only by pointing into the hidden contents of their own box. That gives the others no way to verify whether they mean the same thing or are using the word correctly. Even if the contents are identical, no one can establish that by comparing what’s inside each box. If the word has an agreed use, how would we explain what counts as using it correctly within that practice. The hidden contents alone can’t explain this.

The experience may be private, but the word’s meaning can’t rest entirely on something hidden. The meaning must be shown by how we use it, including how we learn it, respond to it, and make distinctions between correct and incorrect use. This doesn’t deny the inner experience. It explains why having an inner experience isn’t enough to establish the meaning of a word.

This matters for knowledge and justification. If my only standard for being justified were that I felt justified, whatever seemed right to me would be right.

However, we can misread a document, not recognize a contradiction, or misunderstand someone. Recognizing these mistakes involves standards beyond just confidence. We can also apply these standards when working alone; someone else doesn’t have to check every judgment we make. Having a sufficient justification can give us confidence in a belief, but confidence by itself doesn’t demonstrate that our justification is sufficient.

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Post 14

Sometimes information is already in front of us, but we we’re unable to see a connection or understood what it’s showing us. Witt’s discussion of aspect-seeing (PI third edition section 2 p. 194) gives us an example of how aspect seeing can change.

The picture Witt uses can be seen as a duck facing left or a rabbit facing right. What we first recognize as the duck’s bill can be seen as the rabbit’s ears. Nothing in the drawing changes, but we recognize something we hadn’t seen before by shifting our focus.

This has a direct connection with my account of understanding, viz., having the information in front of us doesn’t mean we recognized its significance.

For e.g., someone may recognize a square but fail to understand that it also meets the definition of a parallelogram. So someone points out that both pairs of opposite sides are parallel, and the person makes the connection. The figure hasn’t changed, but the person now understands how another concept applies.

This can happen when assessing an argument. We may have read every premise without understanding how they support the conclusion, or without noticing that two of them are in conflict. Reading the statements again with that connection changes our understanding of the argument.

Of course, just because we see something differently doesn’t mean we’ve understood it. We still need to demonstrate why the concept is applicable or why the conclusion follows. The point is that understanding involves recognizing connections and distinctions within the information before us.

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This discussion is full of AI-generated text so I’m closing it.