Interesting thought but surely the answer is no. If I take the word “knowledge” in this context to mean having a model that reasonably depicts reality in its contextually relevant features, then the same model of what the word “insane” in this specific instance depicts two very different albeit related brain patterns.
Simply put the brain pattern (wiring + process) that makes the person think they are Nero is a different though surely related physical object than the brain pattern that depicts what that person thinks “Nero being insane” might actually manifest like in terms of beliefs and behaviors. In light of the context we can say the person doesn’t have any knowledge about being insane, since that person’s knowledge does not include (or take seriously) the belief that depicts the presumably correct reality/model of that person not actually being Nero.
Put even simpler we use the same concept/word to model two related but fundamentally different things. Does that person have knowledge about being insane? It’s the tree and the sound problem, the word insane is describing two fundamentally different things yet wrongfully taken to mean the same. I’d claim any reasonable concept of the word insane results in you concluding that that person does not have knowledge about being insane in the sense that is contextually relevant in this scenario, while the person might have actually roughly true knowledge about how Nero might have been insane and how that manifested itself. But those are two different things and the latter is not the contextually relevant knowledge about insanity here.
I don’t think that explanation works. One of the standard examples of the Gettier problem is, as eli described, a case where you believe A, A is false, B is true, and the question is “do you have knowledge of (A OR B)”. The “caused by the truth of the proposition” definition is an attempt to get around this.
So your answer fails because it doesn’t actually matter that the word “insane” can mean two different things—A is “is insane like Nero”, B is “is insane in the sense of having a bad model”, and “A OR B” is just “is insane in either sense”. You can still ask if he knows he’s insane in either sense (that is, whether he knows “(A OR B)”, and in that case his belief in (A OR B) is caused by the truth of the proposition.
Interesting thought but surely the answer is no. If I take the word “knowledge” in this context to mean having a model that reasonably depicts reality in its contextually relevant features, then the same model of what the word “insane” in this specific instance depicts two very different albeit related brain patterns.
Simply put the brain pattern (wiring + process) that makes the person think they are Nero is a different though surely related physical object than the brain pattern that depicts what that person thinks “Nero being insane” might actually manifest like in terms of beliefs and behaviors. In light of the context we can say the person doesn’t have any knowledge about being insane, since that person’s knowledge does not include (or take seriously) the belief that depicts the presumably correct reality/model of that person not actually being Nero.
Put even simpler we use the same concept/word to model two related but fundamentally different things. Does that person have knowledge about being insane? It’s the tree and the sound problem, the word insane is describing two fundamentally different things yet wrongfully taken to mean the same. I’d claim any reasonable concept of the word insane results in you concluding that that person does not have knowledge about being insane in the sense that is contextually relevant in this scenario, while the person might have actually roughly true knowledge about how Nero might have been insane and how that manifested itself. But those are two different things and the latter is not the contextually relevant knowledge about insanity here.
I don’t think that explanation works. One of the standard examples of the Gettier problem is, as eli described, a case where you believe A, A is false, B is true, and the question is “do you have knowledge of (A OR B)”. The “caused by the truth of the proposition” definition is an attempt to get around this.
So your answer fails because it doesn’t actually matter that the word “insane” can mean two different things—A is “is insane like Nero”, B is “is insane in the sense of having a bad model”, and “A OR B” is just “is insane in either sense”. You can still ask if he knows he’s insane in either sense (that is, whether he knows “(A OR B)”, and in that case his belief in (A OR B) is caused by the truth of the proposition.