Conceptual Truth Defended

Abstract

Philosophers often rely on hypothetical scenarios to establish claims about causation, consciousness, knowledge, and the like. Consider e.g. this line of thought: (1) Knowledge is not justified true belief. Just contemplate the scenarios Gettier (1963) puts forth. In the situations Gettier describes, we find a protagonist having a true justified belief that p – but he still does not know that p. This is a paradigmatic instance of what I call scenario-based reasoning. In (1), Gettier’s scenarios are brought up to justify a claim about knowledge. Contemplating the situations Gettier describes is taken to somehow show, first, that this holds true: (2) Someone could be in a Gettier-style situation. Contemplating the Gettier-cases is, secondly, assumed to establish a rather substantial counterfactual conditional, to wit: (3) If someone were in a Gettier-style situation, she would have justified true belief, but she would still lack knowledge. Since (2) and (3) entail that someone could have justified true belief but no knowledge, we may conclude that knowledge cannot be justified true belief. In much the same vein