Like, consider the weird world of the “justified true belief” definition of knowledge and the mountains of philosophers trying to patch up its leaks.
What were the major problems with JTB before Gettier? There were problems with equating knowledge with certainty...but then pretty much everyone moved to fallibilism. Without abandoning JTB. So JTB and probablism, broadly defined, aren’t incompatible. There’s nothing about justification, or truth or belief that cant come in degrees. And regarding all three of them as non-binary is a richer model than just regarding belief as non-binary.
I’m not really sure about the history. A quick search turns up Russell making similar arguments at the turn of the century, but I doubt there was the sort of boom there was after Gettier—maybe because probability wasn’t developed enough to serve as an alternative ontology.
“Classic flavor” JTB is indeed that bad. JTB shifted to a probabilistic ontology is either Bayesian, wrong, or answering a different question altogether.
I’ll go for answering different questions. Bayes, although well known to mainstream academia , isn’t regarded as the one epistemology to rule them all , precisely because there are so many issues it doesn’t address.
What were the major problems with JTB before Gettier? There were problems with equating knowledge with certainty...but then pretty much everyone moved to fallibilism. Without abandoning JTB. So JTB and probablism, broadly defined, aren’t incompatible. There’s nothing about justification, or truth or belief that cant come in degrees. And regarding all three of them as non-binary is a richer model than just regarding belief as non-binary.
I’m not really sure about the history. A quick search turns up Russell making similar arguments at the turn of the century, but I doubt there was the sort of boom there was after Gettier—maybe because probability wasn’t developed enough to serve as an alternative ontology.
It remains the case that JTB isn’t that bad, and Bayes isn’t that good a substitute.
“Classic flavor” JTB is indeed that bad. JTB shifted to a probabilistic ontology is either Bayesian, wrong, or answering a different question altogether.
I’ll go for answering different questions. Bayes, although well known to mainstream academia , isn’t regarded as the one epistemology to rule them all , precisely because there are so many issues it doesn’t address.