Many acknowledge this, but then when pushed will only rely on science as if it's really the only method/s that counts. This is a confusion even among scientists. The problem is that most people (including scientists) don't have a good epistemology.

From my paper:

Much of the contemporary discussion treats Gettier’s paper as showing that JTB is insufficient. I do not think this is the right lesson. The examples do not undermine the model itself. They depend on a confusion between what looks justified on the surface and what is genuinely justified within a practice. Once we attend to the structure of justification, including its graded and fallible character, it becomes clear that these cases fail to satisfy the justification condition in the first place. They rest on false grounds or on a lack of the relevant conceptual competence, and so they fall outside the classical model rather than threatening it. Seen in this way, Gettier does not overturn JTB; it signals the need to make explicit features of justification that the classical formulation left implicit. That is the task taken up by JTB+U in the sections that follow.

Worked Gettier example (diagnostic use). Consider the familiar “ten coins” case. Smith has strong evidence that Jones will get the job, and Smith has counted ten coins in Jones’s pocket. Smith forms the belief, “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” by straightforward logical inference from what he takes himself to know. Unknown to Smith, Jones will not get the job. Smith will get the job, and Smith also happens to have ten coins in his own pocket. The belief is true, and it can look well supported, but it does not have the standing required for knowledge.

What fails is not truth, and not belief, but justification. The support Smith relies on depends on what is not the case, namely that Jones will get the job, and this triggers No False Grounds. One can say that Smith’s inference is valid, but validity is not enough, because justification is not merely a logical relation among propositions. It is a standing within a practice, fixed by public criteria that settle what counts as competent support in the context. The same case also brings Practice Safety into view. Smith stumbles into the truth by luck. In ordinary situations where the evidence is similar, he would draw the same conclusion, yet it would be false, so the belief is not practice safe. Defeater screening makes the point plain: once it is determined that Jones may not get the job, the belief loses its standing, and the only repair is to replace the faulty ground. Gettier does not refute JTB, it corrects a picture of justification as a private sense of assurance or a merely formal inference, rather than a public standing fixed by our epistemic practice.

I'm currently writing a book Why Christianity Fails using this epistemic model. Specifically, I analyze the testimonial evidence for the resurrection and demonstrate the weakness of the evidence.

Science is distinctive because it tends to force convergence by building systematic error detection into the practice. But the justificatory work still flows through the same routes. That is why it is a mistake to treat “science” as the only path to knowledge, and also a mistake to treat testimony as automatically inferior. The real question is the quality of the route in the case at hand, and whether the guardrails hold. — Sam26

You mean to elucidate for this audience that your project is a taxonomy of scientific method.

You mean to elucidate for this audience that your project is a taxonomy of scientific method. — Alexander Hine

Not quite. What I am offering is a taxonomy of routes of justification that operate across many practices: testimony, logic, sensory experience, linguistic training, and pure logic in a boundary-setting role. Science is one prominent domain where these routes are integrated and disciplined by unusually strong correction mechanisms, but the taxonomy is not confined to science, and it is not meant to reduce every kind of knowing to scientific procedure.

The purpose is practical: when someone claims knowledge, I want to be able to ask, which route is doing the work here, what standards govern it in that domain, what would count as a mistake or defeater, and do the guardrails hold. That applies to science, but it also applies to ordinary life, history, law, engineering, and philosophy when philosophy is making knowledge claims rather than offering a mere stance.

If you want a quick check, a lot of what I call “knowledge” is acquired by testimony and linguistic training long before anyone does anything recognizably scientific.

The purpose is practical: when someone claims knowledge, I want to be able to ask, which route is doing the work here, what standards govern it in that domain, what would count as a mistake or defeater, and do the guardrails hold. — Sam26

Isn't the annunciation of knowledge itself bound to the character of a localised hermeneutic. Do you give the least weight to individual or subjective testimony? Where is the rationale for weighted significance in your system for each or a combination of what you term, 'routes'?

Isn't the annunciation of knowledge itself bound to the character of a localised hermeneutic. Do you give the least weight to individual or subjective testimony? Where is the rationale for weighted significance in your system for each or a combination of what you term, 'routes'? — Alexander Hine

Yes, the annunciation of knowledge is always situated in a local hermeneutic, a language, a practice, a way of drawing distinctions. I'm not trying to deny that. My point is that this doesn't reduce justification to “mere interpretation,” because within a practice there are criteria for correct and incorrect application, there are recognized mistake-conditions, and there are ways of correcting ourselves when the practice throws up error. The hermeneutic is real, but it isn't the whole story.

On individual or subjective testimony, I do give it weight. Testimony is one of the primary routes by which we acquire knowledge, and that includes first-person reports. The question isn't whether the report is subjective, it's how it stands within the standards that govern testimonial support: provenance, competence, independence, convergence, and defeater sensitivity. A single report is rarely self-authenticating, but it can still carry justificatory standing, especially when it's consistent, detailed, and later supported by independent lines of check.

As for weighting the routes, I'm not assigning a fixed hierarchy. I'm saying that the weight is determined by the case. In a given context we ask: which route is actually doing the work, what would count as a mistake in this domain, what would count as a defeater, and how strong are the correction mechanisms that are available. Then we look for convergence across routes, because that's often what turns a fragile support into stable standing. So the rationale for weight isn't that one route always dominates, but that different practices and different questions demand different standards, and the guardrails, No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening, discipline whatever routes are in play.

I'm currently writing a book Why Christianity Fails using this epistemic model. Specifically, I analyze the testimonial evidence for the resurrection and demonstrate the weakness of the evidence. — Sam26

A digression, perhaps and forgive my tone which is not intended to be strident. Are there not innumerable contributions on variations of this matter already, from Bart Ehrman to Richard Carrier?

Does Christianity fail if the Jesus story can’t be demonstrated? And what does “fail” mean here?

We already know that there’s no eyewitness testimony from the time of Jesus, let alone for a resurrection. The Gospels were written years later by anonymous authors and survive only as copies of translations of earlier copies. We also know that Jews didn’t think much of the preacher's claims. Do we need more on this? I sometimes wonder if debunking the evidence in detail just makes some people take the story more seriously.

I'll probably start a separate thread on that subject Tom. I'm not going to get into this subject here, but later in another thread. I'll just say this, most of the testimonial evidence is secondhand (hearsay), so by definition it's weak.

:up: :up:

Three guardrails that discipline justification

If justification is a standing within a practice, it still needs discipline. Not every chain of support confers standing, and not every true belief that happens to be well supported counts as knowledge. In the paper I use three guardrails to mark common ways justification fails, even when a belief looks respectable.

No False Grounds (NFG)....

Practice Safety...

Defeater Screening... — Sam26

I'm trying to think of how I would translate this into a way to approach this issue from an engineering, or at least pragmatic, perspective. I guess I would call your No False Grounds guardrail "quality control and assurance." These are the procedures you follow and standards you apply to assure the quality of the data you use as input. For engineering or scientific activities, these procedures and standards will generally be formal, concrete, and mandatory. For less critical activities, they will be applied less formally, although the general principles are similar. This is a complex issue and is at the heart of my understanding of "truth." Here's something I wrote years ago that might shed some light, keeping in mind this is just a small part of the issues to be addressed by an overall quality control program.

Say I have data--chemical laboratory analysis and data measurements for 100 water samples for 10 chemical constituents. So I have a 10 x 100 table of data. Is it true? What does that even mean? What can possibly go wrong?

• It's the wrong data.
• The data was tabulated incorrectly.
• Samples were collected incorrectly in the field.
• Samples were not packaged correctly - refrigeration.
• The wrong analytical methods or detection limits were specified.
• Samples were not analyzed within holding times.
• The analysis was not performed in accordance with standard operating procedures.
• The appropriate quality assurance procedures were not followed.
• The analyses did not meet the laboratory's quality assurance standards.
• And lots more.

These issues would be addressed by use of what are called standard operating procedures (SOPs) during data collection. Data validation would then be performed after data collection and reduction to verify procedures have been met. To put this is more general terms for situations where this level of formality is not required--for all the "grounds" you use to establish truth, you must know where it came from, how you know it, and what the uncertainties are,

I guess your Practice Safety guardrail could be comparable to an engineering standard of practice. These are formal requirements established by regulations, codes, technical standards, and administrative standards created by governments, industry groups, engineering societies, and other organizations.

I'm not sure how I would fit your "defeator screening" procedure into the system I'm describing.

I'm no engineer, but it might look something like the following:

No False Grounds (NFG) = “Are we building on bad inputs?”
This is your QA/QC point. It asks whether the data or the key assumptions are incorrect in a way that would make the conclusion questionable.

Examples: wrong sample, mishandled sample, wrong method, transcription error, the lab did not follow procedures, etc.

Practice Safety = “Is the method we used a safe, normal way to reach this kind of conclusion?”
This is closer to standard of practice. It is not perfection, it is “we used a route that usually catches mistakes.”

Examples: proper calibration, chain of custody, replication, using accepted modeling procedures, etc.

Defeater Screening = “Even if the data are good, is there something that would overturn the conclusion?”

This is the part that is easiest to miss, because it happens after you think you are done.
It is the deliberate search for “what would make this conclusion fail.”

Examples in your setting:

A different source could explain the same contaminant pattern.

A missing geological feature changes the direction of some flow.

Seasonal changes that would modify an important consideration.

Another dataset (borings, field observations, historical site use) conflicts with the story you are telling.

So in one line:

NFG: inputs are not false.

Practice Safety: the route to the conclusion is not fragile.

Defeater Screening: no overlooked “gotcha” would overturn the conclusion.

That is how your quality program maps into my epistemology. That's the best I can do not being an engineer. It's just a matter of getting use to the procedure. Engineering has these procedures built into their conclusions.

Questions for critique:

Is this notion of understanding genuinely distinct from justification, or does it collapse into it.

Does tying understanding to error signals, defeaters, and correction make the account clearer, or does it over intellectualize ordinary knowing.

Can you think of a counterexample, a case where someone lacks this competence but still seems to have genuine justificatory standing. — Sam26

I wonder if this suggestion is Wittgensteinian at heart or whether it just seeks an agreed upon justification methodology. That is, would it be incompatible for someone who held meaning is attached to private states to demand an agreed upon methodology as you have here. And contrawise, would it be non-Wittgensteinian to allow for subjectively based justifications? I would think not so long as the meaning was tied to use such that the community of speakers could follow how the term was used and engage in the practice.

So what this boils down to is how to avoid Gettier cases, which do seem to arise from reasonable evaluations based upon incomplete knowledge. Your idea seems straightforward: force a community based standard for what constitutes a justification to avoid poor reasoning and perhaps require deeper investigation before declaring "knowledge."

If you tell me you're coming to my house, I see a blue jeep coming toward my house, you own a blue jeep, I say I know you're on the way, and you then arrive moments later to my house, we can say that I had knowledge of your arrival of the JTB variety. But then we learn it wasn't your jeep I saw and you took the bus, now we have a broken J, and a Gettier problem.

If you mean to add to the J methodology a stricter confirmation of all facts to avoid sloppier individualized justifications, that could be a solution, but I ask why that invokes Wittgensteinian other than perhaps reference to community involvement, but, as noted, the community could still use the word justification to mean whatever it decided without concern for avoiding Gettier.

That is, Wittgenstein wouldn't care whether a term were more useful. He'd only insist it's meaning were derived from use.

I wonder if this suggestion is Wittgensteinian at heart or whether it just seeks an agreed upon justification methodology. That is, would it be incompatible for someone who held meaning is attached to private states to demand an agreed upon methodology as you have here. And contrawise, would it be non-Wittgensteinian to allow for subjectively based justifications? I would think not so long as the meaning was tied to use such that the community of speakers could follow how the term was used and engage in the practice.

So what this boils down to is how to avoid Gettier cases, which do seem to arise from reasonable evaluations based upon incomplete knowledge. Your idea seems straightforward: force a community based standard for what constitutes a justification to avoid poor reasoning and perhaps require deeper investigation before declaring "knowledge."

If you tell me you're coming to my house, I see a blue jeep coming toward my house, you own a blue jeep, I say I know you're on the way, and you then arrive moments later to my house, we can say that I had knowledge of your arrival of the JTB variety. But then we learn it wasn't your jeep I saw and you took the bus, now we have a broken J, and a Gettier problem.

If you mean to add to the J methodology a stricter confirmation of all facts to avoid sloppier individualized justifications, that could be a solution, but I ask why that invokes Wittgensteinian other than perhaps reference to community involvement, but, as noted, the community could still use the word justification to mean whatever it decided without concern for avoiding Gettier.

That is, Wittgenstein wouldn't care whether a term were more useful. He'd only insist it's meaning were derived from use. — Hanover

I do think the framing is Wittgensteinian, but not because it appeals to “community agreement” as if justification were whatever a group votes into existence. The Wittgensteinian point I'm borrowing is about grammar: what makes a claim of justification intelligible is that it's answerable to standards of correct and incorrect application, and those standards are exhibited in a practice, in how we check, correct, and withdraw claims when error signals appear.

On “private meaning,” I'd put it this way. A person can have private experiences, and can have subjective certainty (e.g., a conviction about a belief), but if the meaning of the terms involved were tied only to private states, then the distinction between correct and incorrect use would collapse. You could still demand an “agreed methodology,” but it would be unstable, because there would be no shared criteria to tell whether the methodology was actually being followed or merely seemed to be. That's why, in my framework, justification is not a private experience. It is practice-governed standing, and it is “objective” in the modest sense that the criteria for support, error, defeat, and correction can, in principle, be stated and applied within the practice. This is not consensus, not social permission, and not institutional authority, it is answerability to criteria.

That doesn't make subjectively based justification illegitimate. It means that subjective support has to be connected to use and to criteria that others can follow. If I say “I see blue,” or “I remember,” those are first-person claims, but they still live inside practices with mistake-conditions and correction, misperception, lighting, memory distortion, and so on. I'm not excluding subjective sources. I'm saying that their justificatory standing depends on how they are embedded in standards of assessment.

Now to Gettier. I'm not trying to avoid Gettier by requiring stricter confirmation of all facts. That would be impossible and it would smuggle in an infallibilist demand. The point is different: Gettier cases arise because we treat “seems justified” as if it were the same as having justificatory standing. In your blue-jeep example, what fails is not simply that you lacked a further fact, it is that the apparent support was not connected in the right way to the truth-maker, and the route is lucky. The practice would normally treat that as a fragile inference, and it would tighten the standards when the stakes are higher.

My proposal is not “let the community define justification however it likes.” It's: if we are using the word “justification” at all, we are already committed to certain constraints, no false grounds, practice safety, and defeater sensitivity, because those constraints are built into how justificatory talk functions in our life. Wittgenstein would not tell us to adopt a more useful vocabulary, but he would help us see what our vocabulary already commits us to when we use it.

If you want a one sentence summary: the Wittgensteinian element is not communal voting, it is the insistence that justification has a grammar of correct use and correction, and once we make that explicit, many Gettier intuitions are revealed as cases where the support was only apparent.

I don't disagree with your Wittgensteinian analysis as to what forms meaning. I just don't see Wittgenstein as offering a methodology for creating definitions. He tells us what meaning is.

If you want a one sentence summary: the Wittgensteinian element is not communal voting, it is the insistence that justification has a grammar of correct use and correction, and once we make that explicit, many Gettier intuitions are revealed as cases where the support was only apparent. — Sam26

This suggests a Wittgensteinian impossibility, which is that "justification" currently fails to adhere to usage derived meaning , so we need to regulate this rogue term by insisting it follow Wittgensteinian protocol so we can dissolve Gettier issues.

Meaning is use even for terms we wish had better usages.

That is, per Wittgenstein, justification has a grammar whether we insist upon it or not. He's describing the way words obtain meaning. If "justification" has a fragile use where its meaning fluctuates, then that is what it means. We can't "insist" the word have a better meaning to avoid Gettier cases and that then become its meaning unless our insistence changes its community use. But that's not a Wittgenstein issue. That's just step 1, wanting a new definition, and Step 2, implementing that definition however it's done.

I don't disagree with your Wittgensteinian analysis as to what forms meaning. I just don't see Wittgenstein as offering a methodology for creating definitions. He tells us what meaning is.

If you want a one sentence summary: the Wittgensteinian element is not communal voting, it is the insistence that justification has a grammar of correct use and correction, and once we make that explicit, many Gettier intuitions are revealed as cases where the support was only apparent.
— Sam26

This suggests a Wittgensteinian impossibility, which is that "justification" currently fails to adhere to usage derived meaning , so we need to regulate this rogue term by insisting it follow Wittgensteinian protocol so we can dissolve Gettier issues.

Meaning is use even for terms we wish had better usages.

That is, per Wittgenstein, justification has a grammar whether we insist upon it or not. He's describing the way words obtain meaning. If "justification" has a fragile use where its meaning fluctuates, then that is what it means. We can't "insist" the word have a better meaning to avoid Gettier cases and that then become its meaning unless our insistence changes its community use. But that's not a Wittgenstein issue. That's just step 1, wanting a new definition, and Step 2, implementing that definition however it's done. — Hanover

I think your Wittgenstein point is right, and it helps me say what I am, and am not, claiming.

I'm not treating Wittgenstein as offering a methodology for manufacturing definitions, and I'm not proposing that “justification” is a rogue term that fails to have a grammar until we regulate it. Meaning is use, and “justification” already has a grammar whether we legislate it or not.

What I'm doing is different. I am trying to make explicit features of the existing use that are often left implicit, and then to use that clarified grammar to diagnose why Gettier cases feel forceful. In other words, I'm not saying, “we should insist on a better meaning.” I'm saying, “look at what we already do when we call something justified, and notice the constraints that are already operating.”

In ordinary practice, we already distinguish between a person who can recite supporting considerations and a person who can track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. We already withdraw claims when new defeating information comes in. We already treat certain routes as too fragile for knowledge, and we tighten standards when stakes rise. Those are not reform proposals. They're part of the lived grammar of justificatory talk.

So where does Gettier fit. The Gettier phenomenon arises when we let the surface marks of justification substitute for justificatory standing, and then we are surprised when the belief is true by luck. My claim isn't that we should redefine “justification” to avoid that surprise. My claim is that the surprise shows a mismatch between two things that our practice already distinguishes: seeming to have justification and actually having it under the practice’s own mistake-conditions and defeater sensitivity.

On your final point, you are also right that if a community’s use is genuinely unstable, then that instability is part of the meaning. But that isn't the situation I think we're in with “justification.” The use isn't arbitrary, and it's not merely fluctuating. It's stable enough to underwrite our ordinary distinctions between support, error, defeat, and correction. What fluctuates is often our philosophical picture of what justification must be, for example, thinking it is exhausted by a list of cited reasons, or thinking it must amount to infallible certainty. My project is aimed at dissolving that picture by returning to how justificatory standing actually functions in practice.

So I agree with the Wittgensteinian constraint. I am not legislating a new definition. I'm clarifying the one we already live by, and showing that once the lived constraints are made explicit, Gettier cases stop looking like a deep refutation and start looking like cases where the support was only apparently in order.

I want to explain more about the guardrails, which add constraints to justification within a practice.

Guardrails and the Discipline of Justification

The five routes describe the ordinary ways in which justification proceeds. They show how a belief can be supported within our language-games, through testimony, inference, sensory experience, linguistic training, and the boundary-setting role of pure logic. Yet a route is not, by itself, a guarantee that a belief has the standing required for knowledge. A belief can travel along one of these routes and still fail to count as knowledge because something in the justificatory situation does not have the right shape.
This is why it is helpful to make explicit a set of guardrails, not as additions to the classical model, but as clarifications of what our practices already require when we speak carefully. These guardrails articulate constraints that belong to justification as it functions within a practice. Their point is grammatical (Wittgensteinian grammar). They mark what it is for justificatory support to count as support within a language-game, rather than as something that merely looks supportive from a distance.

I call these guardrails No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening.

I've explained some of this already, but I want to reiterate it so that it's easier to understand. I'll do this in a series of short posts.

it helps to make explicit something I left implicit. In many domains we do not vet understanding by inspecting a static artifact alone, as if it were a completed proof. — Sam26

Yes, this is the main elaboration I was offering. And it connects with what you say here:

“public” does not mean “a pile of citations,” it means susceptibility to the practice’s checks, including dialogic ones when the case calls for it. — Sam26

You're right, of course, that (linguistic) dialogic confirmation is not always the only route. Perhaps we need to think in terms of interactive confirmation of understanding, leaving as open as possible what sort of interaction is appropriate.

But I want to put this carefully, so it does not look like an added criterion. The “further step” you describe is not a separate requirement piled onto justification, it's one of the ordinary ways a practice determines whether a person has justificatory standing or has only borrowed it. It is the difference between an utterance that happens to be correct and a competence that can carry that correctness across the relevant cases. In that sense, the dialogic process is a method of assessment, not an additional condition of knowledge. — Sam26

Very good. We can't lose sight of the role (and placement) of understanding in this scheme. The distinction between "method of assessment" and "additional condition" keeps this clear. Would you want to go into more of the problems with the traditional construal of "justification" (without the +U)? Or maybe you can assume your readers are already familiar with the literature.

Here are a few responses to your questions:

From post #2

Is my use of “grammar” illuminating here, or does it obscure what is really going on. — Sam26

I find it easy enough to understand, in context, but it isn't what I'd call illuminating. Depends on one's comfort with Witt, I think. Maybe drop it, for a general philosophical audience?

post #3

Is this notion of understanding genuinely distinct from justification, or does it collapse into it. — Sam26

As discussed above: In a certain sense it does "collapse into it," but not in an invidious way. The collapse is a matter of where you locate the work of understanding, as part of what we mean by justification. Conceptually, there is no collapse, however, and the terms can't be interchanged.

post #4

Is Practice Safety a useful idea, or does it collapse into defeater screening or into reliability talk. — Sam26

I like it. It captures something over and above defeaters and reliability.

post #5

Do you think “linguistic training” deserves to be a distinct route, or is it better treated as part of the background of the other routes. — Sam26

I don't think it's a distinct route, which tells you a lot about my philosophical commitments! If it were me, I'd make it a background condition, but there are strong Witt-related reasons not to.

post #6

Do you think hinges are real features of our epistemic life, or are they a philosopher’s invention to stop regress. — Sam26

Frankly, this is too big a question to be handled here. For your purposes, they fit the theory and do explanatory work. If you're asking for a personal response . . . I believe there are unjustified "inherited backgrounds" we require in order to do philosophy. I prefer Nagel's discussion to Witt's, partially because for Nagel the status of this situation is problematic, a spur to further thought, whereas for Witt, if I understand him, the hinge concept is meant to close the subject, as an antidote to perplexity. But my knowledge of Witt isn't deep.

I appreciate how you’re keeping the placement of understanding in view. You’re right about the distinction that matters most: the dialogic or interactive piece is a method of assessment, not an additional condition of knowledge. It’s simply one of the ordinary ways practices distinguish genuine standing from borrowed standing, sometimes by dialogue, sometimes by performance under new data, sometimes by a task that exposes whether the competence is real.

On whether to expand on the traditional construal of justification, I think a forum audience can be assumed to know the basics. I can probably limit it to one clarification: justification is often treated too thinly, as if it’s exhausted by citeable supports, and that makes it easy to confuse the appearance of support with justificatory standing. The “+U” is my way of preventing that slide.

On “grammar,” I accept the point. The term’s accurate for Witt readers but it can feel like jargon. If I keep it, I should consistently translate it as “criteria for correct use, error, and correction in a practice,” which is what I mean anyway.

I’m glad Practice Safety landed as doing work beyond defeaters and beyond generic reliability talk, that’s exactly why I separated it. On linguistic training, I hear your hesitation. I keep it explicit to remind us that being trained into criteria and rule following is itself a genuine source of standing, even if it often operates in the background of the other routes.

On hinges, I agree the topic can swallow the thread. For my purposes I’m not using hinges to close inquiry, but to mark a structural point: reasons and evidence operate against a background, and not everything that stands fast stands fast as a conclusion. If Nagel’s way of keeping the situation problematic is what helps here, I think that can sit alongside my use of hinges, because my target’s confusion about what sort of thing a hinge is, not an attempt to end reflection.