Good, I’m happy with the way you’ve positioned JTB+U as an account of practice-based justification rather than something Cartesian. I also like Williams’s distinction between the actions of life and the search for truth, and I agree, for my purposes, the Method isn’t the standard by which ordinary knowing should be measured.

As for Williams’s: I see the distinction you’re drawing, universal illusion versus the possibility of universal illusion, and the point about strict contradictories versus everyday negations is helpful. It shows why some crude formulations of “everything might be false” are incoherent, and why the radical doubt needs to be stated carefully if it’s to have content. Still, from my Wittgensteinian angle, the pressure doesn’t entirely disappear. Even if the negations can be stated coherently, the question remains whether the skeptical posture can be sustained without borrowing the very criteria of correction that it's trying to bracket. That’s not a refutation of Williams, it’s just to say that I’m inclined to treat the Method as a philosophical exercise with a special aim, not as an account of doubt that illuminates ordinary justification.

I agree with your last point about understanding. I’m not trying to eliminate the experiential aspect of grasping. If you want to talk about “mental practice,” I’m open to that. My point is that whatever phenomenology we offer still has to be disciplined by the same kinds of constraints we’ve been discussing, i.e., it needs criteria for what counts as getting it right, what counts as misdescription, what would count as correction, and what would count as defeat. In that sense, even an inquiry into inner understanding isn’t purely private. It’s still answerable to practice-governed standards, even if its data are first-person. That’s a nice way to connect your point back to the thread without letting it drift into an uncheckable subjectivism.

I will be posting my paper in pieces for those who want to read it. I'll number the posts.

Post #1

Justified True Belief Plus Understanding: A Wittgensteinian Extension
Samuel L. Naccarato

Abstract

This paper reexamines the classical model of knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB) and argues that its core insight is clarified, not replaced, by making explicit what our justificatory practices already presuppose. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially his discussions of language-games, grammar, and hinge propositions, I argue that justification does not operate in isolation. It functions within shared forms of life and rests on a background of bedrock certainties that stand fast for us and make doubt and inquiry possible. These certainties are foundational in a non-epistemic sense. They are not themselves justified; they make justification possible.

Truth remains the success condition for knowledge. To say that a belief is true is to say that the world is as the proposition represents it. In this framework, understanding is not an additional requirement placed alongside truth, belief, and justification. It is internal to justification, the conceptual competence by which a belief achieves its proper standing within an epistemic practice. This is why Gettier-style cases lose their force. They depend on a misleading picture of justification and on beliefs that only appear to possess the right standing.

To make this structure practically applicable, I introduce three guardrails that discipline justification, No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening, and I distinguish five non-hierarchical routes through which justification typically proceeds: Testimony, Logic, Sensory Experience, Linguistic Training, and Pure Logic, understood in its boundary-setting role. The result is an account of knowledge that preserves realism without dogmatism and clarifies how justification functions in ordinary epistemic life, including under the pressures introduced by contemporary information systems and artificial intelligence.

hat would be the point in question. Bernard Williams, in his book on Descartes, has this analysis:

When we reach the fully 'hyperbolical' doubt, as Descartes called it, we encounter a new kind of problem, which concerns the meaning of the proposition which the Doubt invites us to entertain. What is the content of the idea that, compatibly with other things seeming as they do, there might not be a physical world at all? If the hyperbolical doubt were arrived at merely by generalization from the particular doubts . . . it does not look as though there could be a coherent answer to this question. All the cases of error which the Doubt seized on in the earlier stages of the argument involved the use of some perceptions to correct others, and while we might be able to say, consistently with that, that we were not absolutely sure at any given moment that the present perception was veridical, we could not consistently say that no perceptions were.
— Williams, Descartes: The project of pure enquiry, 57

Would you agree that this is the Wittgensteinian objection? If so, I can go on to say more about how Williams defends Descartes here.

I’m not asserting an empirical thesis about consciousness, as if I were claiming “understanding has causal power in the brain” or “understanding is a measurable mental property.” I’m pointing to the role the concept plays in our justificatory practices.
— Sam26

Yes. But isn't it also the case that understanding is an actual mental phenomenon, something that can occur for you or me? Or perhaps this represents a philosophical difference along the usual public/private lines; perhaps you don't countenance talk of inner mental states, etc. I do, but I'm happy to acknowledge that your project doesn't need a decision one way or the other about that in order to discuss how justificatory practices work. — J

Yes, I’m basically with Williams there, and I do think what he’s pointing to lines up with the Wittgensteinian point. Once doubt becomes “hyperbolical,” it stops looking like an extension of ordinary doubt and starts raising a question about whether the doubt still has content. The earlier stages of doubt trade on the practice of using some perceptions to correct others, but the global move, “no perceptions are veridical,” threatens to remove the very contrast class that makes “veridical” and “error” intelligible. That’s very close to what I mean when I say the Cartesian maneuver starts to doubt the structure doubt depends on.

So yes, I’d say Williams is articulating a Wittgensteinian style objection: hyperbolical doubt risks misfiring because it tries to generalize beyond the conditions under which doubt and correction have a role. If you want to explain how Williams defends Descartes, I’m interested, but I’d also want to keep the distinction clear between (a) Descartes as a philosophical exercise and (b) whether that exercise should be allowed to set the standards for ordinary, practice-governed justification aimed at epistemic certainty.

On understanding as a mental phenomenon: I’m happy to grant that understanding can be an inner occurrence, something that happens to you or me. I’m not denying inner life. My point is only that my argument doesn’t hinge on a metaphysics of mental states. What matters for my project is that “understanding” marks a real difference in our epistemic practices: the difference between repeating conclusions and being able to track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. That’s the sense in which I called it grammatical rather than psychological. It’s about the role the concept plays in how we assess justifiable conclusion, even if there’s an inner phenomenology of grasping.

I don’t need to take a hard line on public versus private. I can accept inner understanding as real, while still insisting that justificatory standing isn’t a private feeling and can’t be reduced to a report of how things seem. The practice-governed side is what I’m trying to keep in view.

Just to emphasize: Descartes isn’t just doubting particular claims, he’s trying to doubt the very structure that makes doubt intelligible, and that’s why, from a Wittgensteinian standpoint, the method misfires as doubt.

Thanks, that helps me understand what you’re defending in Descartes, and I’ll grant two points up front. First, Descartes isn’t doing “global doubt” in the crude sense of doubting absolutely everything forever. Second, his project is weirder than ordinary life, he’s trying to sculpt certainty itself, not simply settle ordinary questions.

Even so, my Wittgensteinian worry doesn’t depend on caricaturing him as a fool who doubts everything indiscriminately. The worry is about the kind of standard he builds into his method. When the method’s endpoint is absolute certainty (indubitability), and when the method treats the ordinary grounds of our practice as always defeasible in principle, it stops functioning as doubt in the ordinary, practice-governed sense. It becomes a philosophical performance with an atypical success condition: certainty that can’t be unsettled by any defeater the practice would normally recognize. That’s not an accusation, it’s a diagnosis of what the method is doing.

This is exactly where my certainty distinctions matter. Ordinary justification aims at epistemic certainty, defeater-resistant stability in practice. Descartes is aiming at absolute certainty, and the danger is that people let that aim quietly redefine what counts as justification and knowledge in ordinary epistemic life. My project in the paper is explicitly not that. I’m trying to make practice-governed justification explicit, including error, correction, and defeaters, without importing an absolute-standard demand that collapses most knowledge into “not really knowledge.”

On Gettier, I’m with you that the literature can become inflated. In my paper I’m not treating Gettier as an existential crisis for knowledge. I’m treating it as a diagnostic that exposes a common confusion: the slide from “looks supported” to “has justificatory standing.” That slide shows up constantly in real life, and it’s even more visible now in environments where the appearance of justification seems like justification.

Now to your final question about the hinge I tightened. When I say the hinge is “more grammatical than psychological,” I mean this. I’m not asserting an empirical thesis about consciousness, as if I were claiming “understanding has causal power in the brain” or “understanding is a measurable mental property.” I’m pointing to the role the concept plays in our justificatory practices. We already treat it as a real difference between (a) repeating conclusions and (b) being able to track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. That difference shows up in how we assess competence, explanation, and responsibility in reasoning. In that sense it’s grammatical: it’s built into how “justification,” “mistake,” “correction,” and “understanding” function in our practices, regardless of any particular theory of consciousness.

The hinge isn’t “consciousness has this property.” The hinge is that the distinction between genuine grasp and mere repetition is constitutive of what we mean by justificatory standing. That’s the sense in which skepticism about understanding can become self-undermining: it tries to erase a distinction the practice relies on to make justification intelligible.

AI and why it matters to my paper

A quick application that’s relevant to why I wrote this paper at all. One reason I keep talking about “justificatory standing” and “understanding” is that we now live in an environment where it’s easy to generate what seems like justification. AI is the clearest example.

In my paper, I’m not saying AI can’t output true statements, or that it can’t be useful. It can. My point is narrower: producing fluent answers, even with citations, isn’t the same thing as knowing. Knowledge, as I’m using the term, involves a belief’s standing inside a practice, answerability to error, correction, and defeaters. A model can mimic the surface marks of that standing (Searle makes similar arguments), it can sound like it understands, it can even be right, but it doesn’t occupy the practice in the way that makes it responsible for tracking mistake-conditions, handling defeaters, and revising under correction.

This is exactly why I added the “+U” clarification. Understanding, on my view, isn’t a fourth ingredient. It’s the competence to track what would count against a claim, what would defeat it, and what correction would look like. AI can help us do that work, but it can also tempt us to skip it by handing us ready-made conclusions that look justified.

For me, the AI case isn’t a side issue. It’s a modern stress test: it shows how easy it is to confuse “looks justified” with “has justificatory standing,” and that confusion is the same pressure point that Gettier cases expose in a more controlled form.

Many people treat Cartesian doubt as if it were the gold standard of intellectual seriousness. From a Wittgensteinian standpoint, I don’t think it works that way, because it misunderstands what doubt is, and what counts as a legitimate doubt.

Doubting cannot be applied in any context; it's a move inside a practice. It has a role only where there are standards for what would count as checking it, correcting it, or settling it (this is an important point). If I doubt whether the train is at 9, I know what would settle it: look at the schedule, check the platform, ask an attendant, and so on. That doubt makes sense because the practice contains criteria that can settle the matter.

Now consider the Cartesian project of doubting everything. When doubt is applied universally, it stops working as doubt, because it starts targeting what I call hinge certainties, the background that makes the entire practice of questioning and checking possible. Hinges are not conclusions we reached by evidence. They are what stands fast in our activity: the things we take for granted when we test, correct, infer, and even when we doubt. If you try to put that background on trial using the very tools that depend on it, you haven’t discovered a deeper form of doubt. You’ve changed the grammar of what it means to doubt.

This is where my four uses of certainty help keep the discussion honest:

Subjective certainty: conviction, how settled something feels.

Hinge certainty: bedrock, what stands fast and makes inquiry possible.

Epistemic certainty: defeater-resistant stability in practice, enough for responsible action.

Absolute certainty: logical or moral necessity.

Ordinary justification aims at epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty. It’s corrigible and defeasible, but it’s still knowledge in the ordinary sense. Cartesian doubt quietly shifts the goal toward absolute certainty, and then it treats hinge certainty as if it were a hypothesis that ought to be justified in the same way as an ordinary claim. That’s the mistake.

The Wittgensteinian objection isn’t “Descartes is being irrational.” It’s that the method asks for the wrong kind of thing. It demands that the framework be justified by the very methods the framework makes possible. That’s why the Cartesian maneuver often feels impressive but doesn’t actually describe how doubt and justification function in real epistemic life.

If someone insists Cartesian doubt is legitimate, the pressure question is simple: what would count as settling the global doubt. If the answer is “nothing could,” then the exercise isn’t an epistemic demand inside a practice. It’s a philosophical performance aimed at an impossible standard. And once we see that, we can stop letting it redefine what “justification” and “knowledge” mean in ordinary practice.

I treat the beliefs with disdain, not the people. They are ridiculous, culturally destructive and intellectually antithetical to truth, progress and reason. Anyone who actively choose to reject those notions probably wont be someone I could be friends with. — AmadeusD

That's true of many systems of beliefs, not just religious beliefs.

No. Not even close to being in the realm of the same vicinity as being strong enough. William Lane Craig is probably the best example for why: It rests on incredulity about people's reportage which is, itself, derived from a bare acceptance of hte testimonies, despite their contradictions, time-lapses and what not. — AmadeusD

That's the point of my thread, viz., that the testimonial evidence doesn't come close to justifying the belief in the resurrection.

It is bewildering to me that anyone who can understand, for instance, mass delusion, could neverhteless rest their entire cosmic, moral and practical life on such utterly thin and empty reasoning. I hope this comes across as harsh. I have absolutely no respect for these positions. — AmadeusD

The problem is epistemological for me (not mass delusion), i.e., that most people don't know how to justify a belief, including many of the people in this forum. I don't have much respect for many religious beliefs either, but that's different from treating religious people with disdain as many do. I try not to but fail at times.

I do think religion can put us in contact with the metaphysical source of everything, and my best description of that source is consciousness. This thread isn’t driven by the idea that religion is pointless, or that everything reduces to having the correct beliefs. A person can be oriented toward what is real, and even be changed by that orientation, without being able to justify every doctrinal claim as knowledge.

I’m not attacking Christians, and I’m not trying to score points. I’m evaluating a specific historical claim, and I’m asking whether the testimonial evidence is strong enough for it to be treated as knowledge rather than conviction.

My metaphysics doesn’t rule out God. What it rules out are many of the particular religious pictures people inherit, especially when they present themselves as public historical knowledge without the kind of evidential support that would justify that status. In other words, I’m not arguing against spirituality as such, and I’m not denying metaphysical depth. I’m arguing for clarity about what can be responsibly treated as knowledge, what functions more like orientation and practice, and where conviction has outrun justification.

My analysis would actually be closer to the second than the first, and I largely agree with ↪Sam26's reply, though I framed it differently. The basic idea is that some "why?" questions misfire because they try to put into question that which makes questioning possible in the first place. Framed like this, it can be seen as a retorsion argument, or argument from pragmatic contradiction. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree. Some “why?” questions misfire because they try to question what makes questioning possible in the first place. In that sense the move is retorsion, a pragmatic contradiction: it borrows the norms of justification while attempting to place the background that makes those norms operative on trial. The key is to keep the point limited to that kind of global “why?,” and not treat it as a dismissal of ordinary, practice-governed activiity for reasons aimed at epistemic certainty.

You’re right that my view is that Gettier trades on an impoverished picture of justification, and that the guardrails and the “+U” are meant to show what our practice already treats as decisive, not to bolt on a fourth condition. I find it amazing that people find Gettier significant.

On your second question, by “the core intuition” I mean the feeling that makes Gettier cases grip us:

The belief is true.

The subject can qbite supporting considerations that look like justification.

Yet the truth shows up by luck, because the support is fragile, or dependent on a false ground, or insulated from the mistake-conditions the practice recognizes.

That’s why we resist calling it knowledge, even though it can look like JTB is met on the surface.

This is not rare. It happens a lot in ordinary life because most of what we call knowledge isn’t absolute certainty. We’re usually dealing with epistemic certainty, defeater-resistant stability in practice, and in many domains that stability is unavoidably probabilistic.

My diagnosis isn’t just relabeling. It’s an attempt to explain why the Gettier intuition arises so often: we mistake surface marks of support for justificatory standing. Once you make explicit the ordinary constraints that already govern standing, No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening, the Gettier case stops looking like a refutation of JTB and starts looking like a case where the belief was true, but the route was lucky or too fragile to count as knowledge.

If you keep “adequate justification,” you haven’t really escaped JTB, you’ve just renamed it, and you’ve made key distinctions harder to state.

“Adequate justification” still presupposes a target. Adequate for action isn’t the same as adequate for knowledge. If you collapse knowledge into “what I’m willing to act on,” you turn epistemic standing into risk tolerance. Two people with the same evidence can differ just because they’re more cautious. That’s prudence, not knowledge.

The so called JTB trappings are the distinctions you still need. Truth is about how things are, belief is what the subject holds, justification is the belief’s standing. If you throw those out, you end up rebuilding them anyway to explain the difference between “I acted responsibly” and “I knew.”

Your engineering language already matches my guardrails. QA/QC is No False Grounds. Standards of practice are Practice Safety. “Don’t ignore known failure modes” is Defeater Screening. The real question isn’t JTB versus adequacy. It’s whether “adequate” stays vague, or whether you spell out the failure modes that make a belief look supported when it isn’t.

Discarding JTB doesn’t remove Gettier, it relocates it. If knowledge is “adequately justified true belief,” you still need to exclude lucky truths. Either you tighten adequacy to rule out luck, which is exactly what Practice Safety and defeater sensitivity do, or you let luck count as knowledge.

The only place I'd put up a little flag would be when you speak about "the ordinary criteria as illegitimate in advance" as a sign of hinge-questioning doubt. This problem goes back to Descartes, and is outside the scope of your OP, but I would make the case that Cartesian methodical doubt doesn't actually posit anything as illegitimate in advance, and neither does the skeptic in our example. In both instances, the skeptic is really raising a question about certainty, not about some subject. No genuine doubt is being expressed -- existential doubt, I might call it -- concerning two-handedness. Doubt is wielded as a tool to sculpt certainty, to learn how far the whole method can be pushed before we have to cry "I can conceive of no further doubt!" — J

From a Wittgensteinian standpoint, I still can’t make sense of the Cartesian maneuver as doubt. Doubt isn’t a free-floating posture you can apply to anything at will. It’s a move inside a practice, and it only makes sense where there are criteria for what would count as checking it, correcting it, or settling it. When you try to doubt everything at once, you don’t get a deeper form of doubt, you remove the background that gives “doubt,” “test,” and “justification” their role in the first place.

That’s also why it helps to keep my four senses of certainty explicit: subjective certainty (conviction), hinge certainty (what stands fast and makes inquiry possible), epistemic certainty (defeater-resistant stability in practice), and absolute certainty (logical or moral necessity). Ordinary, practice-governed justification aims at epistemic certainty. Cartesian doubt pushes toward absolute certainty, and it treats hinge certainties as if they were ordinary claims waiting for ordinary support. From the Wittgensteinian angle, that isn’t a legitimate extension of doubt, it’s a shift in the grammar of the activity.

The issue isn’t that the skeptic declares ordinary criteria illegitimate. The issue is that the exercise changes the kind of question being asked, and once it does that, it stops looking like genuine doubt within a practice and starts looking like a philosophical performance aimed at an impossible standard.

The point of my paper (the paper this thread is based on) was to strengthen traditional JTB with Witt's later philosophy.

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.

The importance of testimony isn't just how it relates to the resurrection argument, but it's important across a wide range of domains even in science

Post 6: Number

“Number” matters in testimony, but only when it means independent lines, not just a large headcount or a story repeated many times.

In ordinary life, testimony gets stronger when multiple witnesses report the same event independently, through different channels, with the possibility of cross checking. But when many reports trace back to the same source, the “number” can look large while the evidential base stays narrow.

So here’s the question for the resurrection: How many independent lines of testimony do we actually have, once we separate sources from repetition?

A few quick ways to keep this honest:

Lists aren’t automatically independent. A later summary that reports “many people saw” doesn’t give us many independent reports, it gives us one report about many.

Multiple documents don’t automatically mean multiple lines. If documents share a tradition, depend on one another, or arise from the same inner circle, the apparent number can outpace the real independence.

Sincerity doesn’t add independence. A community can sincerely repeat what it inherited without adding new evidential weight.

If someone’s Christianity doesn’t rise or fall on a bodily event in history, then my argument won’t work in the same way, because it’s aimed at the attempt to treat that event as knowledge on the basis of testimony.

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.

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.

Post 5: Variety

Conviction can spread even when the evidence is thin. One of the things that keeps testimony from collapsing into group reinforcement is variety.

By variety I mean diversity in the lines of testimony: different contexts, different audiences, different pressures, and different routes of transmission. In ordinary life, testimony is stronger when it doesn’t all come through the same social channel or the same interpretive community. Variety matters because it helps separate what’s being reported from what’s being carried along by shared expectations and shared identity.

So here’s the question for the resurrection: Do we have genuinely diverse and independent streams of testimony, or do we mainly have one community preserving and repeating its own founding story?

Volume isn’t variety. Repetition isn’t independence. And a single community can preserve a tradition and also shape it, even when nobody is trying to deceive. When the same circle supplies the report, the meaning of the report, and the setting in which it’s repeated, the conditions for drift are present.

I know this is a different strand, but I don’t understand how the resurrection is supposed to be useful in the first place. Let’s assume it is true. Why would an immortal god enact a primitive blood sacrifice and ruin a weekend just to free people from rules he himself created? Why not simply appear and set people straight? It seems unnecessarily convoluted: if the goal is to guide or save humanity, there are far clearer ways to communicate or intervene. The story reads less like a practical solution and more like a patchwork of old religious myths woven into a narrative. — Tom Storm

The resurrection is supposedly God's stamp of approval on Jesus, that he's God. It's also supposed to solve the problem of sin, etc.

There are plenty of reasons someone might reject Christianity besides the weakness of the testimonial evidence. For instance, why would an omniscient God create human beings knowing in advance that many would reject him and end up in hell? That isn’t a small side issue. It raises a moral and philosophical problem about divine goodness and foreknowledge, and it forces Christians to explain why a world with that outcome the world is a perfectly good and all-knowing creator would choose to bring into existence.

Post 4: Consistency

Conviction can be sincere and stable, but sincerity doesn’t settle standing. One of the things that strengthens testimony is consistency, not in the sense of word for word agreement, but in the sense of stable convergence on the features that matter.

I’m not arguing that every discrepancy makes a report false. Real witnesses differ. They notice different details. They tell the story differently. In ordinary life, that doesn’t automatically discredit testimony. The question is what the differences look like, and what they do to the claim’s ability to stand without constant repair.

So, here’s the question for the resurrection: Do the accounts substantially converge on the crucial features without requiring harmonization to make them fit?

A few clarifications so we don’t talk past each other:

Consistency isn’t sameness. I’m not looking for identical phrasing. I’m looking for stable agreement on the load bearing elements: what happened, to whom, where, when, and in what kind of mode.

Some differences are minor, some aren’t. Differences about incidental details may not matter much. Differences about the structure of the event, the nature of the appearances, the timing, or the witness list do matter, because they affect what kind of claim is actually being made.

Harmonization is not the same as convergence. If the accounts need to be combined, smoothed, or reinterpreted so they can be made consistent, that itself tells us something about the strength of the testimony. Strong testimony usually doesn’t need a later strategy of repair to keep it stable.

Legend is a live alternative here. Not “fraud,” not “mass delusion,” but ordinary development over time as stories are told, retold, and shaped to carry meaning. Consistency, in the relevant sense, is one of the things that can block the “legend” drift. If the record doesn’t block it, then “legend” remains a serious contender.

So, I’m putting the question plainly: when we read the resurrection accounts, do we find a stable, convergent core that stands on its own, or do we find a pattern that requires later stitching?

Even granting a stable core, “Jesus died, the followers proclaimed he was raised, and there were claims of appearances,” the consistency question turns on what happens when we ask for recoverable particulars. When we move from proclamation to narrative detail, the resurrection tradition shows a pattern of variation that matters, who goes to the tomb, what is encountered there, what is said, where the appearances are centered, and the sequence of events. These aren’t merely stylistic differences, because they shape what kind of claim is actually being made and how well it can stand without later stitching. None of this proves fabrication. But it does mean that the testimony, as it has reached us, is less able to block the ordinary alternatives, development over time, legend drift, interpretive reshaping, without relying on harmonization to stabilize it. And when the claim being asked to stand is a bodily resurrection, that dependence on repair is a weakness under the consistency criteria.

Forgive my meandering response. From what I read, that all seems fair and seems to come down to “a book says a thing”. I wonder though, even if there were a couple of witnesses would this resolve the matter? How would we establish, centuries later, if a given witness is truthful or mistaken?

As I said on a different thread, isn’t it generally understood that, resurrection aside, there are no eyewitness accounts of whoever it was who inspired the Jesus story? Was it one person or more than one? Or are the mythicists right in saying it is all fictional? I am inclined to think there may have been some historical origin to the story. But it's accepted that Muhammad was a real historical person, and that does not mean he literally cut the moon in two or rode a flying horse.

The Gospels were written many years after the events they describe by anonymous authors and survive only as copies of translations of earlier copies. The names attached to them were applied later by church tradition. I was taught this, not by atheists, but by Christian lecturers, who were not fundamentalists.

You know the old C. S. Lewis “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument? many have found it interesting that he left out a fourth option: Legend. — Tom Storm

Thanks, it's not meandering, it’s actually very close to the point of the thread.

You’re correct that, at a certain level, we’re dealing with texts, and you’re also right that “a couple of witnesses” wouldn’t automatically settle anything centuries later. That’s exactly why I’m not treating this as a courtroom fantasy where we just add two affidavits and call it knowledge. The question is whether the kind of testimonial support we have, taken as a whole, is strong enough to bear a bodily resurrection claim. And part of what makes it hard is what you said: we don’t have direct access to witnesses, we have chains of transmission.

On the mythicist question, I’m not going to make that the center of this thread, because it’s a different argument. You can grant a historical Jesus and still deny that the resurrection testimony reaches justificatory credibility, the Muhammad story is such an example. A real founder doesn’t make miracle reports automatically credible. So, I’m not relying on “Jesus wasn’t real.” I’m asking whether the testimony for a bodily resurrection is strong enough even if we assume some historical origin.

On the Gospels, the anonymity and the gap in time matter here, not because “anonymous” means “false,” but because it complicates firsthand character, traceability, and corroboration. If we can’t identify the witness layer with confidence, and if our documents are late and mediated, then the testimony is structurally less able to meet the ordinary tests of reliability and correction. Again, not a refutation by itself, but it’s a real constraint on how much standing the claim has.

And yes, the “Legend” option is relevant. It’s one of the ordinary alternatives that testimony has to be able to resist if it’s going to rise above conviction. Legends don’t require fraud. They require time, transmission, interpretive pressure, and communities that preserve meaning even when details shift. That’s why my approach isn’t “liar” or “lunatic.” It’s: what does the testimonial record look like, and does it have what we need to treat a claim like this as known? My answer would be no.

Post 3: Corroboration

Conviction can be sincere and widespread, but that doesn’t give a claim justificatory standing. Corroboration is one of the main things that does.

By corroboration I mean independent confirmation, support that doesn’t just repeat the same report in another form. In ordinary life, testimony becomes strong when it isn’t trapped inside a single chain. When different lines converge, especially lines that don’t share the same incentives, the same community pressure, or the same source material, then testimony starts to earn standing.

So here’s the question for the resurrection: What independent corroboration do we have for the central claims, corroboration that doesn’t depend on the same Christian tradition simply restating itself?

A few clarifications so we don’t talk past each other:

Repetition isn’t corroboration. If one text depends on another, or if multiple accounts draw from the same underlying tradition, we may have multiple tellings, but we don’t yet have independent confirmation.

“The Church says so” isn’t corroboration. It may explain how belief was preserved, but it doesn’t supply an independent check on whether the event occurred.

Later belief doesn’t corroborate the original event. A movement can grow quickly and still be wrong about what happened at its origin. Growth can show conviction and social power. It doesn’t, by itself, confirm the event.

Hostile or neutral sources matter here. In ordinary cases, corroboration is strongest when it comes from sources that aren’t invested in the claim, or even resist it. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with everything, but it means the report is exposed to pressure that can correct it.

So I’m putting a straightforward challenge on the table:

What independent corroboration do we have that Jesus’ tomb was found empty?

What independent corroboration do we have that multiple people, in different contexts, experienced bodily appearances, rather than visions, dreams, or interpretive experiences?

What independent corroboration do we have for the timing and circumstances, beyond the internal Christian reporting itself?

If your answer is that the corroboration is mostly internal, that’s not an automatic refutation. But it is a diagnostic feature. It means the resurrection claim is being asked to stand on a narrow evidential base, and that makes the other criteria, firsthand character, consistency, variety, and number, carry far more weight than they would in an ordinary case.

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.

Post 2: Firsthand Character

Conviction is always present in a system of beliefs, but conviction alone isn’t enough to justify a belief. In other words, sometimes people claim to know, but this use of "I know..." is not epistemic, it's an expression of a conviction.

In my last post I laid out five criteria for strong testimony. I’m going to start with the one that matters most here: firsthand character.

In ordinary life, testimony is strongest when we can say, with some clarity, who is reporting, what they claim to have experienced directly, and how that report reached us. The point isn’t that secondhand testimony is always useless. We rely on it constantly. The point is that as the claim becomes more weighty, and as the event becomes more unusual, the difference between “I saw” and “someone said” starts to matter a lot. And it matters even more when the chain between the event and our sources is long.

So here’s the question for the resurrection: How much of our evidence is identifiable firsthand testimony, and how much of it is tradition about what others claimed to see?

A few observations to keep the discussion focused:

Paul is early, but he isn’t giving us direct eyewitness narratives of the events in Jerusalem. He gives a summary of what he “received” and “passed on,” plus his own claim that he experienced an appearance. That matters, but it isn’t the same thing as multiple named eyewitnesses giving independent reports we can examine.

The Gospel narratives are our main source of appearance stories, but the witness layer is hard to isolate. They’re written as narratives, not as signed statements from named witnesses. Even if they preserve earlier testimony, the question remains: how much of that testimony can be traced and identified as firsthand, rather than as communal tradition shaped in the process of transmission?

When Christians say “there were eyewitnesses,” what do we actually have access to? Do we have the witnesses themselves, their independent reports, and the conditions that normally allow cross checking? Or do we have later reports about witnesses?

Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the Gospel accounts are firsthand, that concession barely strengthens the case. Firsthand character is only one criterion. A firsthand report can still be weak if it comes to us through an opaque chain, if it can’t be cross checked by independent lines, and if the normal mechanisms of correction are missing.

And the stakes here matter. In ordinary life, two or three reliable witnesses may be enough for an everyday event, especially when the event fits comfortably inside what we already know about the world. But the bodily resurrection of a dead man is not an everyday event. The claim carries far more weight than the cases where we’re content with a thin testimonial base, and that means the supporting testimony has to carry more of the stabilizing features we ordinarily rely on: independence, corroboration, and exposure to correction.

None of this proves the resurrection false. But it does locate the issue. Christianity asks this testimony to bear an enormous load: the bodily return of a dead man. If the evidence is going to reach the level of knowledge rather than conviction, the firsthand character of the testimony matters, and it matters in combination with the other criteria.

:up:

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.

I probably won't be contributing much to this thread, but . . . you do know that millions of people call themselves Christians today who don't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, despite Paul? Are they mistaken to do so, according to you? Or is it possible that your version of what Christianity involves is too traditional, given the very active, living presence of this religion in our culture? I wonder how many contemporary liberal and progressive Christian theologians you've actually read. — J

Thanks for the comment. You’re right about the sociological fact: many people today call themselves Christians who don't believe in a bodily resurrection. I’m not denying that, and I’m not trying to argue against every Christian belief system.

My point is narrower. I’m taking “Christianity” in the sense that is historically and doctrinally central to the tradition’s own proclamation, and on that point Paul’s conditional matters. If someone treats the resurrection as symbolic or non-bodily, they may still find Christian practices and moral teaching meaningful, but they’ve shifted the kind of claim being made. That shift is precisely what I’m trying to keep visible. It doesn’t settle anything by itself, but it changes what needs to be justified. A metaphor doesn’t require the same testimonial support as a claim about what happened in history.

So no, I’m not saying liberal or progressive Christians are “mistaken to do so” in a moral sense. I’m saying that if the claim is no longer a bodily event in history, then the question I’m asking in this thread isn’t aimed at that version of Christianity. This thread is about the bodily resurrection as a historical claim, because that’s the version that is most often defended as something that can be known and proclaimed as fact.

And I agree that liberal and progressive theologians are part of the living landscape. But notice what their move often is: they reduce the evidential burden by relocating the claim, from “this happened” to “this means,” from event to symbol, from history to existential interpretation. That may be a coherent religious posture, but it’s no longer a claim that stands or falls on testimony in the same way. In that sense it supports my framing rather than refutes it.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.