The Philosophical Method of Exception

Peter Keeble spotlights and critiques a common philosophical technique.

- Peter Keeble

One of the ways philosophy works is this. You define some useful concept, such as knowledge, or morality, or inductive reasoning. Then someone comes along with an example of knowledge, or a moral act, or a property concerning inductive prediction that seems to lie beyond those defining characteristics. This happened not so long ago in all these cases. Knowledge was well established as ‘justified true belief until Edmund Gettier’s brief 1963 article ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ gave apparent counterexamples. Immoral acts, we would always have previously assumed, must involve some harm to someone until Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons in 1984. Inductive reasoning, though always held in suspicion by philosophers, became doubly so with Nelson Goodman’s Fact, Fiction and Forecast (1955). We want to be sure about what constitutes knowledge, morality, and inductive reasoning, since we use these concepts every day. We think we understand them, but , do we really?

Gettier on Knowledge

Here’s one of Gettier’s counterexamples to knowledge being justified true belief. Smith and his friend Jones apply for a job. At his interview, the CEO strongly suggests to Smith that Jones will be the successful candidate. For some bizarre reason, while Jones is interviewed, Smith counts the coins in his friend’s pocket: there are ten. Smith therefore feels he knows that the successful candidate will have ten coins in his pocket. But it turns out he, not his friend, gets the job. And it just so happens that he also has ten coins in his pocket. It seems therefore that he had a justified true belief that the successful candidate would have ten coins in his pocket. Yet we do not feel it right to say he knew this.