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.

my target’s confusion about what sort of thing a hinge is, not an attempt to end reflection. — Sam26

Yes. And we can go on to ask: If we know what sort of thing a hinge is, does it render further questions about its status as a building block of rationality pointless? That might be the strict Wittgensteinian reading. But is it the necessary one?

Anyway . . . not really germane to your OP.

I discuss hinges in a paper located here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8443/an-analysis-of-on-certainty/p31

Scroll down to the paper titled Wittgenstein's Hinges and Gödel's Unprovable Statements.

Thanks!

Can you name a hinge you think my framework relies on, and say whether you think it should stand fast or be challenged. — Sam26

Maybe this: You/we take it to be certain that the role of understanding in human consciousness is significant, that it makes a difference, that it is a desideratum quite separate from knowledge. To be skeptical about understanding – to say something like “You can’t prove to me that what you call understanding has any effect on what I say and do” -- is a kind of undermining, as you describe, since it seems to demand the very framework which it calls into question. But I’m not sure about this; so many skeptical challenges can be interpreted not as questioning a hinge proposition but simply as demonstrating that our language allows us to ask “Why?” about pretty much anything.

At the very least, we find ourselves with a problematic involving the concepts of knowledge and understanding – perhaps that is a kind of hinge. I can’t justify my certainty that this pairing is both necessary and in tension, but nor can I imagine how to do any philosophy at all without taking it to be so, much less use the concept of "justification".

I’ll leave all this for you to decide, as you’re much more familiar with the hinge concept than I am.

But I’m not sure about this; so many skeptical challenges can be interpreted not as questioning a hinge proposition but simply as demonstrating that our language allows us to ask “Why?” about pretty much anything. — J

I am not responding on behalf of Sam26 here, but I would say that asking "why?" is not itself an epistemically "innocent" act. It assumes that there is something to ask "why" about, admits the possibility of finding an answer, and presupposes that some answers will be better than others, among other things. To ask "why" is already to make a move within the game. Would you agree?

I take a very pragmatic approach--knowledge is meant to be used to decide how to act. Both your understanding and mine focus on what it means to justify potential knowledge. For me, the requirement is adequately justified belief. I define "adequate" as providing enough certainty about outcome for us to make a responsible decision. — T Clark

INteresting - divorced from this wider thread's discussion (i guess) this seems a bit odd for me. If the purpose of calling something "knowledge" is to simply ascertain what best guides action (on this view, I don't think certainty is in play) then that fundamentally changes what we consider action-guiding information and the traditional concept of knowledge is lost. I have no intuitive problem with this, but it seems, like many problems, an attempt to semantically reduce an intractable..

divorced from this wider thread's discussion (i guess) this seems a bit odd for me. — AmadeusD

I think you're right. If you look back at my first couple of posts in this thread, you can see it wasn't clear to me whether my input would contribute or distract from the OP's intended direction. When it became clear my thoughts weren't contributing, I dropped out of the discussion.

I don't think certainty is in play) then that fundamentally changes what we consider action-guiding information and the traditional concept of knowledge is lost. I have no intuitive problem with this, but it seems, like many problems, an attempt to semantically reduce an intractable. — AmadeusD

I think that's backwards. You call it "the traditional concept of knowledge," but it doesn't match how normal, everyday people use the word in their normal, everyday lives. Everyone knows we can't be absolutely sure of what we know before we act. So we do the best we can. In that context, JTB implies that every time anyone has made a mistake in the past what was knowledge then magically turns into not knowledge now. That means that "knowledge" is meaningless, valueless, pointless. That's the only intractable I can think of--the impossibility of knowing whether I know something. And it's not really intractable, it's just silly.

And don't get me started on Gettier.

Can you name a hinge you think my framework relies on, and say whether you think it should stand fast or be challenged.
— Sam26

Maybe this: You/we take it to be certain that the role of understanding in human consciousness is significant, that it makes a difference, that it is a desideratum quite separate from knowledge. To be skeptical about understanding – to say something like “You can’t prove to me that what you call understanding has any effect on what I say and do” -- is a kind of undermining, as you describe, since it seems to demand the very framework which it calls into question. But I’m not sure about this; so many skeptical challenges can be interpreted not as questioning a hinge proposition but simply as demonstrating that our language allows us to ask “Why?” about pretty much anything.

At the very least, we find ourselves with a problematic involving the concepts of knowledge and understanding – perhaps that is a kind of hinge. I can’t justify my certainty that this pairing is both necessary and in tension, but nor can I imagine how to do any philosophy at all without taking it to be so, much less use the concept of "justification". — J

I think you’re close.

I’d just tighten the hinge, so it isn’t framed as a claim about human consciousness, as if it were an empirical thesis. In my use, the hinge is more grammatical than psychological: that “understanding” is a real difference in our epistemic practices, not a decorative word. We already operate with a distinction between someone who can recite the right justification and someone who can track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. If you remove that distinction entirely, the practice of calling anything “justified” starts to lose its point.

I agree with you that a radical skepticism about understanding has a self-undermining flavor. It isn’t merely another “Why?” within the practice (or form of life), it targets what makes the “Why?” game intelligible in the first place. Of course, language lets us ask “Why?” about almost anything, but that doesn’t mean every “Why?” is the same kind of request. At some point the request stops being a demand for reasons inside the practice and becomes a demand for the framework to justify itself by the very tools the framework makes possible.

Your last paragraph also lands with me. There’s a genuine problematic, knowledge and understanding belong together and can be in tension. I don’t treat that as a conclusion I prove. I think of it as part of the background against which my project makes sense at all. That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by a hinge, not a dogma, but a standing fast that is displayed in how we proceed.

I think that's backwards. You call it "the traditional concept of knowledge," but it doesn't match how normal, everyday people use the word in their normal, everyday lives. Everyone knows we can't be absolutely sure of what we know before we act. So we do the best we can. In that context, JTB implies that every time anyone has made a mistake in the past what was knowledge then magically turns into not knowledge now. That means that "knowledge" is meaningless, valueless, pointless. That's the only intractable I can think of--the impossibility of knowing whether I know something. And it's not really intractable, it's just silly. — T Clark

I agree with your everyday point, i.e., nobody in ordinary life assumes absolute certainty before acting, and any account of knowledge that required that would be unlivable. But I don’t think JTB, as I’m using it, commits us to that.

The “magically turns into not knowledge” worry comes from treating knowledge as if it had to be indefeasible. In ordinary practice, we don’t talk that way. We say, “I knew, given what I had,” and we also say, “I was wrong.” Those aren’t contradictions. They mark two different evaluations: what was justified at the time, and what we now know after a defeater has arrived.

A mistake doesn’t make past knowledge meaningless. It shows that justification is fallible and defeasible, which is exactly how everyday epistemic life works. What changes, when new information comes in, is not that the past was magic, but that the belief no longer has standing now, because the practice has acquired a defeater.

That’s also why my guardrails matter. They’re not demanding absolute certainty. They’re making explicit the constraints we already use to separate knowledge from lucky success and from fragile support. Defeater screening, in particular, is not a demand to foresee every possible counterexample. It’s the ordinary discipline of not ignoring live alternatives and known failure modes.

And on your last line, “the impossibility of knowing whether I know,” I’d put it this way: we don’t need a guarantee that we know in order to know. We need justificatory standing that’s good enough for the domain or context and the stakes, and we need openness to correction when real defeaters appear. That’s not silly, that’s exactly what “knowing” looks like in ordinary life.

I would say that asking "why?" is not itself an epistemically "innocent" act. It assumes that there is something to ask "why" about, admits the possibility of finding an answer, and presupposes that some answers will be better than others, among other things. To ask "why" is already to make a move within the game. Would you agree? — Esse Quam Videri

That's a good question. In his referenced paper on Witt and Godel, @Sam26 writes:

"As Wittgenstein observes, "There is no why. I simply do not. This is how I act" (OC 148). This insight captures something crucial about the nature of foundational certainties: they are pre-rational in the sense that they precede and enable rational discourse rather than emerging from it."

And he offers these examples:

". . . basic statements like "I have two hands" or "The Earth exists." Unlike nonlinguistic hinges, these can be spoken and seem propositional, yet they resist the usual patterns of justification and doubt."

So what happens if we ask "Why?" about the justification of such a statement? We might give two analyses. In the first, which I think is yours, we'd say, "The question is meaningful, and admits of an answer. It may be the case that no satisfactory answer presents itself, but that is not the question's fault, so to speak. The fault lies with us (with philosophy), in our inability to provide a deep enough explanation." In the second, which uses the hinge idea (if I understand it), we'd say, "This sort of 'why?' takes us outside of what it means to look for a justification. There's no satisfactory answer because the standpoint from which the question can be meaningfully asked presupposes the conceptual (Sam would say 'grammatical') equipment needed to ask it."

That said, I lean more toward the first analysis than the second. Is it possible to doubt whether I have two hands? Yes. Do we know the general sorts of things that justify our (comparative) certainty about two-handedness? Yes. Perhaps Sam can go on to elaborate the ways in which "the usual patterns of justification and doubt" are resisted. To me, it seems equally possible that we are simply more certain about two-handedness.

So what happens if we ask "Why?" about the justification of such a statement? We might give two analyses. In the first, which I think is yours, we'd say, "The question is meaningful, and admits of an answer. It may be the case that no satisfactory answer presents itself, but that is not the question's fault, so to speak. The fault lies with us (with philosophy), in our inability to provide a deep enough explanation." In the second, which uses the hinge idea (if I understand it), we'd say, "This sort of 'why?' takes us outside of what it means to look for a justification. There's no satisfactory answer because the standpoint from which the question can be meaningfully asked presupposes the conceptual (Sam would say 'grammatical') equipment needed to ask it."

That said, I lean more toward the first analysis than the second. Is it possible to doubt whether I have two hands? Yes. Do we know the general sorts of things that justify our (comparative) certainty about two-handedness? Yes. Perhaps Sam can go on to elaborate the ways in which "the usual patterns of justification and doubt" are resisted. To me, it seems equally possible that we are simply more certain about two-handedness. — J

I think you’ve set up the contrast well, but I’d adjust one thing. My view isn’t that the first “why?” is always meaningful and the second is always meaningless. The point is that the word “why?” can function in more than one way, and we have to look at what’s being asked.

There’s a perfectly ordinary “why?” about “I have two hands (as Witt points out),” and it does admit of familiar answers: perception, memory, proprioception, photographs, other people’s reports, medical records, and so on. That’s all inside the practice, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I mean by practice-governed justification.

The hinge point shows up when the “why?” is no longer a request for more evidence, but a request to put the whole practice of checking on trial at once. In that mode, the question isn’t “what justifies my belief that I have two hands,” it becomes “what justifies the entire framework in which perception, memory, testimony, and correction count as checks at all.” That's when the demand starts to misfire, not because we are too stupid to answer, but because the request is asking for a kind of justification that cannot apply to the role the background plays.

When you say you lean toward the first analysis, I think I mostly agree, provided we keep the second analysis available for a particular sort of escalation. It's not that hinge talk denies that we are simply more certain in some cases. It's that in some cases the certainty isn't just a higher degree of ordinary confidence. It's functioning as a stopping point for the practice, something that is shown in how we proceed.

On your question about “the usual patterns of justification and doubt” being resisted: one way to mark it is this. In ordinary doubt, there are recognizable defeaters and recognizable tests. If I doubt whether the bus comes at 9, I know what would settle it. In hinge cases, the demand for justification either has no settled criteria of satisfaction, or it treats the ordinary criteria as illegitimate in advance. That's a sign we have shifted from a local “why?” inside the practice to a global “why?” that tries to step outside the practice while still borrowing its tools.

I’d put the point like this: sometimes we are simply more certain, and we can cite ordinary supports. But sometimes the “why?” is being used in a way that attempts to make the whole background answerable as if it were an ordinary claim, and that's where hinge talk earns its keep.