Dr. Cullison and Dr. Feit came up with DJDD, which is:
The “Doesn’t Justify the Denial of a Defeater” View:
S knows p if and only if
(i) S believes p,
(ii) p is true,
(iii) S is justified in believing p, and
(iv) no ground that is essential to S’s justification for p justifies S in believing the negation of a defeater.
—————————————–
While defeasibility or “no defeaters” accounts of knowledge also make use of this notion (or something like it), it will become clear on reflection that the theory to be proposed in the text is not a version of such an account.
The only thing that I can object to in the examples is the one dealing with time and the fancy watch. Since there is no real hard concept of an exact global time that is governed by natural laws of physics, then it would be difficult to place a justified belief in any time-piece, since one time piece, the fancy watch says 2:58, and according to another time piece, it is 2:56, we must assume that this difference causes a falsehood, though unknown to the fancy watch bearer. In order to assume that the time-piece that reads 2:56 is the timepiece that resides in the meeting room, so as a point of reference, the fancy watch would be indeed false. Yet my main point of concern does not lay within the reasoning that this guy miight be late, which, in this time zone he would not be, what if that time-piece in the meeting room is off? What does that time-piece refer to? Say there are three other people coming to that meeting. What happens when all of thier time pieces are malfunctioning? Say all of thier watches are 5 hours ahead but in differing degrees? One of those people actually set that time-piece in the meeting room, but that time-piece was later set by the janitor, who with his own time-piece set it, thinking it was wrong. Who would be late then? The final question then comes down to what can we refer to, in the question of time, a seemingly artificial concept, as a truth? What if each one of the people then set the time piece throughout the day to match thier own time-piece, but the janitor, after all of them, set it to a completely different time?
Other than that, I don’t really see many other complaints. The infallible thing baffles me, as I assume that being infallible means that the subject that is infallibe cannot be wrong, as such, there would be no way that any knowledge could be false if the subject is truly infallible. It does not matter what the circumstances are, since the subject that is infallible is always right. If there is one thing that makes the infallible subject wrong, even the existence of something that makes the line of reasoning false for the infallible subject, then that subject is not infallible. This is not to mean that the same subject, though not infallible, can not be assume that they are infallible, but as such it is only an illusion that they are infallible, and this seemingly justified self-belief counts as knowledge for that person. As such, I see this person then still adhering to the DJDD since they are justified, for them, in believing that they have true knowledge.
One Comment
Talking about weighting our intuitions in class today was very interesting. As Andy described, many physical theories in physics can seem counter intuitive at first glance but can be proven to be true. But as he went on to say, many philosophical theories are only based on intuitions to begin with anyways, so maybe something as complicated as physics isn’t the best way to judge intuitions. And the idea of simpleness contrasted linguistically and metaphysically was very interesting as well. At first something like the DJDD theory can be a complete mouthful, but on further examination and explanation it is actually pretty simple.