“The claim that Gettier cases don’t accurately describe the world because they are referentially opaque cuts to the heart of how language smuggles ambiguity into epistemology.
When we say “the person who gets the job has ten coins,” the proposition refers to one thing (e.g., Jones) but mediates that reference through an appeal to the set of all possible things with that quality (e.g., “people with ten coins”).
This creates a sleight of hand: the belief’s justification is anchored to a specific referent (Jones), while its truth depends on a different member of the set (Smith).
The problem isn’t just luck (as others have claimed) [I hope to refute this one day, but I just don’t have enough time on my hands at the moment to do so]
Instead—the constraint to possible referents of an agent’s truth statement is linguistically flexible enough to retroactively validate accidental truths.
Whether these manipulations of language are actually valid or not remains underexplored. I attempt to explore them in my post.
[I tackle this in the original post, but I would like to expand on it further].
If propositions like “the person who…” are inherently semantically unstable—their referents shifting with context—then Gettier cases must be artifacts of linguistic looseness, not genuine paradoxes of truth.
[It is likely someone has come close to this perspective at some point. I think if Wittgenstein were around he would have demolished Gettier cases.]
The question is: are we allowed to “edit” the referent post hoc when evaluating truth, or must propositions rigidly designate their objects?
Okay, this has received some replies, and some downvotes. This is one of the replies:
“No, there is nothing wrong with the referents in the Gettier examples”
I will have to revisit this assumption when I have done a bit more research into the topic. This is an interesting question that I would like to follow more.
>The problem is not that the proposition refers to Jones.
Who the proposition refers to is always uncertain in Gettier cases—this is a fundamental fact about Gettier cases. I will safely discard this assumption.
>Within the universe of the scenario, it in fact did not.
This is an error in logic. Who the statement refers to, again, is unclear in the Gettier scenario. If you would like to know more about the nature of referents and the contentions about who they refer to, do some of your own research.
+ when you use the word ‘scenario’ here—you refer to two separate states of affairs.
>Smith’s mental model implied that the proposition referred to Jones, but Smith’s mental model was incorrect in this important respect.
This is the core issue that the paper attempts to work around. There are two conflicting positions: the mental model, and the reality of the situation. How we update our mental models in accordance with the reality of the situation is what is left unexplained within Gettier cases. So, in principle: I agree, and yet I disagree.
-->Due to this, the fact that the model correctly predicted the truth of the proposition was an accident.
This is a specious conclusion. What is accidental about the inherent ‘accident’ of language being indefinite? Words are not atoms. They do not exist separately from their contexts. Neither are they indelibly linked to their contexts.
Gettier Cases [repost]
“The claim that Gettier cases don’t accurately describe the world because they are referentially opaque cuts to the heart of how language smuggles ambiguity into epistemology.
When we say “the person who gets the job has ten coins,” the proposition refers to one thing (e.g., Jones) but mediates that reference through an appeal to the set of all possible things with that quality (e.g., “people with ten coins”).
This creates a sleight of hand: the belief’s justification is anchored to a specific referent (Jones), while its truth depends on a different member of the set (Smith).
The problem isn’t just luck (as others have claimed) [I hope to refute this one day, but I just don’t have enough time on my hands at the moment to do so]
Instead—the constraint to possible referents of an agent’s truth statement is linguistically flexible enough to retroactively validate accidental truths.
Whether these manipulations of language are actually valid or not remains underexplored. I attempt to explore them in my post.
[I tackle this in the original post, but I would like to expand on it further].
If propositions like “the person who…” are inherently semantically unstable—their referents shifting with context—then Gettier cases must be artifacts of linguistic looseness, not genuine paradoxes of truth.
[It is likely someone has come close to this perspective at some point. I think if Wittgenstein were around he would have demolished Gettier cases.]
The question is: are we allowed to “edit” the referent post hoc when evaluating truth, or must propositions rigidly designate their objects?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tLrwLHu2vwMsirzMe/gettier-cases-rigid-designators-and-referential-opacity
Okay, this has received some replies, and some downvotes. This is one of the replies:
“No, there is nothing wrong with the referents in the Gettier examples”
I will have to revisit this assumption when I have done a bit more research into the topic. This is an interesting question that I would like to follow more.
>The problem is not that the proposition refers to Jones.
Who the proposition refers to is always uncertain in Gettier cases—this is a fundamental fact about Gettier cases. I will safely discard this assumption.
>Within the universe of the scenario, it in fact did not.
This is an error in logic. Who the statement refers to, again, is unclear in the Gettier scenario. If you would like to know more about the nature of referents and the contentions about who they refer to, do some of your own research.
+ when you use the word ‘scenario’ here—you refer to two separate states of affairs.
>Smith’s mental model implied that the proposition referred to Jones, but Smith’s mental model was incorrect in this important respect.
This is the core issue that the paper attempts to work around. There are two conflicting positions: the mental model, and the reality of the situation. How we update our mental models in accordance with the reality of the situation is what is left unexplained within Gettier cases. So, in principle: I agree, and yet I disagree.
-->Due to this, the fact that the model correctly predicted the truth of the proposition was an accident.
This is a specious conclusion. What is accidental about the inherent ‘accident’ of language being indefinite? Words are not atoms. They do not exist separately from their contexts. Neither are they indelibly linked to their contexts.