JTB+U and the Grammar of Knowing: Justification, Understanding, and Hinges (Paper Based Thread)
I wrote an earlier thread titled “Thoughts on Epistemology,” which was intentionally wide angle and exploratory. This thread is different. It is anchored in a single paper I wrote titled Justified True Belief Plus Understanding: A Wittgensteinian Extension, and I want the discussion to stay close to that argument rather than drifting into general questions about knowledge.
Instead of posting the complete paper, I am going to summarize the paper in a short series of posts. Each post will be self-contained, each will state one main claim, and each will end with a few questions for critique. If you respond, it will help if you reference the post number and tell me where you think the argument needs tightening, or where you think it fails.
If you want to read the paper (25 pages), I can email it to you.
Instead of posting the complete paper, I am going to summarize the paper in a short series of posts. Each post will be self-contained, each will state one main claim, and each will end with a few questions for critique. If you respond, it will help if you reference the post number and tell me where you think the argument needs tightening, or where you think it fails.
If you want to read the paper (25 pages), I can email it to you.
Comments (187)
What JTB+U is claiming
My paper defends a practice-oriented refinement of the traditional JTB account. I call it JTB+U: “justified true belief” plus Understanding. My point is not to add a new requirement onto JTB as if we had discovered a fourth ingredient. My point is to make explicit something justification already presupposes in everyday epistemology, i.e., the competence to grasp what counts as support, what counts as error, and what would count as correction within a practice.
On this view, many familiar puzzles arise when we picture justification as something essentially private, an inward sense of being entitled (e.g. the use of know as an expression of a conviction), as if the fact that a belief feels well supported could stand in for the standards by which it is actually assessed. But in ordinary epistemic life, justificatory standing is not conferred by confidence or by an internal impression of rightness. It depends on the grammar of our practices, the criteria by which we count something as evidence, the ways we identify error, and the norms by which we correct it. When we bring that grammar into view, Gettier cases lose much of their force because many depend on a mismatch between seeming justified and having justificatory standing.
Upshot: I am not replacing JTB, I am strengthening it by making explicit the Understanding that is already doing quiet work inside justification.
Questions for critique:
Does the “+U” clarify anything real, or is it a relabeling.
Where would you draw the boundary between justification and understanding, if you think there is one.
What is your strongest reason to think Gettier still bites even after this move.
1. What JTB+U is claiming
2. What I mean by justification as practice grammar
3. What “Understanding” is doing
4. The guardrails (No False Grounds, Practice Safety, Defeater Screening)
5. The five routes of justification
6. Hinges as non-epistemic background
7. Gettier diagnosis and upshot
Should we comment as you go along or wait till you've presented the whole thing?
What I mean by “justification”
When I use the word “justification,” I am not talking about something private, a feeling of confidence, or a mere report of how things seem from a subjective point of view. I mean justificatory standing, the sort of standing a belief has when it is supported by the standards that govern a practice, standards for what counts as evidence, what counts as error, and what counts as correction.
That is why I sometimes describe justification in terms of grammar (Wittgensteinian grammar). The point is not that knowledge is “only language,” but that the difference between being entitled and merely thinking one is entitled is built into how our practices work. We learn what it is to justify by learning how claims are checked, challenged, repaired, and sometimes withdrawn. Those norms are not optional decorations added after the fact. They are part of what makes the idea of justification intelligible.
This is also why I emphasize the public character of justification. “Public” here does not mean popular agreement or institutional permission. It means that justification has criteria that can, in principle, be articulated, assessed, and disputed within a shared practice. A belief can be held with sincerity and conviction and still fail to have justificatory standing.
Upshot: justification is a normative standing within a practice, not an inner endorsement, and that is the background against which the “+U” move makes sense.
Questions for critique:
Do you think justificatory standing can be explained without appeal to shared criteria, or does that collapse into a purely psychological picture.
Is my use of “grammar” illuminating here, or does it obscure what is really going on.
Does “public in this sense” capture what we need for justification, or does it leave out something essential.
These issues are things I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I'm trying to figure out if my way of seeing things compliments or contradicts yours. I take a very pragmatic approach--knowledge is meant to be used to decide how to act. Both your understanding and mine focus on what it means to justify potential knowledge. For me, the requirement is adequately justified belief. I define "adequate" as providing enough certainty about outcome for us to make a responsible decision. I have particular standards to apply to determine that.
So--does it make sense for me to participate?
What “Understanding” is doing in JTB+U
In JTB+U, “Understanding” is not a new mental ingredient added on top of truth, belief, and justification. It names a feature already at work in justification, the grasp of the concepts and inferential roles that make justificatory standards applicable at all. If justification is a standing within a practice, then understanding is the competence by which a person can genuinely participate in that practice, not merely mimic its conclusions.
Someone can hold a true belief and even cite a correct supporting data, while still failing to grasp what that support is doing, what would count against it, what would defeat it, and what would count as a relevant correction. In that situation the belief can look justified from the outside, and even to the person themselves, but the justificatory standing is fragile, because the person does not reliably track the mistake-conditions that the practice treats as decisive. Understanding, in this sense, is the operative structure of justification, the competence that makes justificatory standards genuinely operative rather than merely repeatable.
This is also why I resist treating “justification” as if it were only a list of supporting propositions. A list can be repeated by rote. Understanding is what makes the support more than a recitation, it is the ability to locate the claim within the space of reasons, objections, defeaters, and revisions that the practice recognizes. That is not infallibility, and it is not an impossible demand. It is simply the difference between having a standing and merely borrowing one.
Upshot: “+U” marks the competence that makes justificatory standards operative, it is not a separate add on.
Questions for critique:
Is this notion of understanding genuinely distinct from justification, or does it collapse into it.
Does tying understanding to error signals, defeaters, and correction make the account clearer, or does it over intellectualize ordinary knowing.
Can you think of a counterexample, a case where someone lacks this competence but still seems to have genuine justificatory standing.
I divide certainty into different uses:
Subjective certainty, conviction, how settled a claim feels.
Hinge certainty, the bedrock that stands fast and makes inquiry and doubt possible at all.
Epistemic certainty, defeater resistant stability in practice, the kind of standing we treat as enough for responsible action within a domain.
Absolute certainty, logical or moral necessity.
With that in view, your “adequate certainty about outcome” sounds closest to what I call epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty, and not merely subjective certainty. In other words, it is not infallibility, and it is not just confidence. It is a claim having the right kind of stability under the relevant checks, given the stakes and the standards of the practice you are operating in.
Where our approaches might meet is that both of us think justiification is disciplined by standards. Where we might differ is that I frame those standards in terms of justificatory standing within a practice, including what would count as a mistake, what would count as a defeater, and what would count as a responsible correction. Practical stakes can raise the bar, but they do so by tightening what counts as adequate support, not by demanding absolute certainty.
So yes, participate. If you want a clean point of contact, tell me what your “adequacy” standards are in a concrete case, and we can ask how they relate to defeater resistance, false grounds, and practice safety, and which sense of certainty they are aiming at.
Three guardrails that discipline justification
If justification is a standing within a practice, it still needs discipline. Not every chain of support confers standing, and not every true belief that happens to be well supported counts as knowledge. In the paper I use three guardrails to mark common ways justification fails, even when a belief looks respectable.
No False Grounds (NFG). A belief cannot have genuine justificatory standing if the support it depends on is false, or if it is being carried by a false presupposition that is doing the real work. The point is simple: if the ground is false, whatever looks like support is a counterfeit support.
Practice Safety. A belief is practice safe when it is formed and maintained in a way that reliably tracks the mistake conditions recognized by the practice. This is not infallibility. It is the idea that the route by which the belief is held is not fragile, lucky, or insulated from the ordinary error signals that would count against it in a particular domain.
Defeater Screening. Even when the grounds look good, justificatory standing is undermined when there are live defeaters that have not been faced. A defeater is not merely a contrary opinion. It is a consideration that, if true, would remove or weaken the support, or would show that the apparent support is misleading. Defeater screening is the discipline of identifying and addressing such considerations, rather than ignoring them.
These are not meant as extra conditions stapled onto JTB. They are ways of making explicit the constraints that ordinary epistemic practice already applies when it distinguishes genuine support from luck, from illusion, and from rationalization.
Upshot: the guardrails do not add a new theory of knowledge, they articulate the failure modes that explain why “seeming justified” can diverge from genuine justificatory standing.
Questions for critique:
Do you think these guardrails capture real failure modes, or do they smuggle in something stronger than ordinary justification.
Is Practice Safety a useful idea, or does it collapse into defeater screening or into reliability talk.
Can you think of a case where a belief meets these guardrails and still intuitively fails to count as knowledge.
Five routes of justification (non exhaustive)
In the paper I lay out five primary routes by which beliefs commonly acquire justificatory standing. The point is not to rank them or claim that every case fits neatly into a single category. The point is to map the main ways we actually come to know, so that we can ask where a claim is getting its support, and what standards and error conditions belong to that route.
Testimony. Most of what we know comes from others, ordinary reports, books, videos, expert claims, historical records, and lived witness. Testimony can confer justificatory standing, but it has its own standards: credibility, independence, competence, convergence, and the absence of relevant defeating information.
Logic (inductive and deductive reasoning). We justify beliefs by inference, sometimes strictly, sometimes probabilistically. Here the relevant standards include valid form where appropriate, good inductive support, sensitivity to base rates, and the ability to identify where an inference is overextended.
Sensory experience. Experience is a central route of support in ordinary life. It has its own error conditions: illusion, distortion, poor conditions, and conflict with other well established checks. Sensory experience does not need to be perfect to justify, but it must be situated within the ordinary corrective practices that make perception reliable in the domain.
Linguistic training. Some things are “known” because we are trained into a practice, trained to use terms correctly, to recognize criteria, to follow rules, and to distinguish correct application from misuse. This route is often invisible because it is basic to how we learn the grammar of our concepts, but it is indispensable for explaining how justification becomes possible at all.
Pure logic (boundary setting only). There are limits that are not empirical discoveries but logical constraints, what is possible, what is coherent, what follows from definitions, what collapses into contradiction. This route does not supply new facts about the world. It sets boundaries, clarifies entailments, and exposes category mistakes.
This five route map is not meant to replace the earlier guardrails. The guardrails discipline justification. The routes describe where justification is coming from. In any concrete case, the question becomes: which route is in play, what are its standards, and do the guardrails hold.
Upshot: the routes give us a practical way to locate a claim in the space of support, standards, and error conditions, without turning epistemology into a single method.
Questions for critique:
Are these five routes a helpful map, or do you think the categories blur in a way that makes the list misleading.
Do you think “linguistic training” deserves to be a distinct route, or is it better treated as part of the background of the other routes.
Is my use of “pure logic” as boundary setting clear, or does it need a different label.
Hinges and why justification has stopping points
At some point justificatory questions come to an end, not because inquiry has failed, but because the very practice of giving and asking for justification presupposes a background that is not itself justified. If you demand a justification for everything, including the conditions that make justification possible, you do not reach a deeper standard. You undermine the justification.
This is where hinge certainties come in. A hinge is not a hypothesis, not a conclusion, and not a belief held because we have evidence for it. It is something that stands fast in a practice, a bedrock commitment expressed in how we proceed, what we take for granted, what counts as doubt, and what counts as a mistake. Hinges are not the kind of things we arrive at by argument, but they are also not arbitrary. They belong to the inherited background against which reasons, evidence, and defeaters can have their force.
That matters for two reasons. First, it explains why the demand for ultimate proof is misguided. Proof and justification always operate within a framework, and the framework is not itself established by the same tools it makes possible. Second, it explains why skepticism so often feels powerful. Skeptical questions typically target hinges and treat them as if they were ordinary empirical claims. Then, when those hinges cannot be proven in the skeptic’s demanded way, skepticism concludes that nothing can be known. The mistake is grammatical. The skeptic is asking for a kind of justification that cannot apply to the role hinges play.
None of this licenses dogmatism. It is true that some hinges can shift as practices are repaired, methods change, or persistent error signals force a reorientation. But it is equally true that some hinges do not shift, at least not within anything we would still recognize as the same form of life. Their role is constitutive, they are part of what makes inquiry, correction, and assessment possible at all. Where a hinge does shift (e.g. we are objects separate from other objects), the change is usually not a matter of ordinary argument but a deeper reorganization of the practice itself.
Upshot: hinges are not additional reasons. They are the background that makes reasons and defeaters possible, and recognizing this prevents both regress and skeptical distortion.
Questions for critique:
Do you think hinges are real features of our epistemic life, or are they a philosopher’s invention to stop regress.
Does treating skeptical challenges as hinge confusion actually answer skepticism, or does it merely set it aside.
Can you name a hinge you think my framework relies on, and say whether you think it should stand fast or be challenged.
Gettier, and why “seems justified” can mislead
Gettier cases are designed to make the traditional JTB account look inadequate. The familiar pattern is that a person has a true belief, and can cite what appears to be a justification, yet we hesitate to call it knowledge. The standard moral is that JTB is missing some extra condition. My paper argues that this moral is too quick, because it treats “justification” as if it were exhausted by having a supporting consideration that can be stated.
On the view I am developing, the key distinction is between a belief that looks justified, and a belief that has genuine justificatory standing within a practice. In Gettier style cases, the subject often has support that is either dependent on a false ground, or is insulated from the relevant mistake conditions, or is undermined by an undefeated defeater. In other words, the cases exploit a gap between seeming to meet the justification requirement and actually meeting it once the ordinary constraints on justification are made clear.
This is where the guardrails matter. If a belief depends on a false ground, No False Grounds blocks it. If the route is fragile and the belief is true by luck, Practice Safety blocks it. If there is relevant defeating information that has not been faced, Defeater Screening blocks it. The upshot is not that Gettier reveals a defect in JTB, but that Gettier is trading on an impoverished picture of justification, and once justification is properly described, the cases no longer force an additional condition.
This also brings the “+U” into focus. Understanding is not a decorative addition. It marks the competence by which a person can genuinely track what their support does, what would count against it, and what would require revision. A person can cite a reason and still be out of contact with those mistake conditions. When that happens, the belief can be true and can look justified, yet it lacks the stability we normally require for knowledge.
Upshot: Gettier cases do not show that knowledge needs a mysterious extra ingredient. They show that we should not confuse the appearance of justification with genuine justificatory standing.
Questions for critique:
Do you think Gettier cases still refute JTB even if we build in the guardrails and the “+U” clarification.
Is my diagnosis too dependent on relabeling the justification condition rather than answering the core intuition.
If you have a favorite Gettier case, post it and say which guardrail you think it slips past, if any.
Before continuing, I want to clarify a few terms that can easily be misunderstood.
What “+U” is and is not. In JTB+U, “Understanding” is not a new ingredient bolted onto JTB. It is a way of making explicit what justification already presupposes in ordinary epistemic practice, the competence to grasp what counts as support, what counts as error, and what would count as correction in the domain.
What I mean by “public.” When I say justification is public, I do not mean popular agreement or institutional permission. I mean that justification has criteria that can, in principle, be articulated, assessed, challenged, and corrected within a shared practice.
Practice Safety is not a demand for infallibility. Practice Safety means that the route by which a belief is held is not fragile or lucky with respect to the mistake conditions the practice recognizes. It is about tracking error signals in the domain, not about achieving certainty in the absolute sense.
What I mean by a defeater. A defeater is not merely disagreement. It is a consideration that, if true, would remove or weaken the support, or would show that the apparent support is misleading. Defeater screening is the discipline of identifying and facing such considerations rather than ignoring them.
Hinges are not reasons. Hinges are not hypotheses supported by evidence. They are background certainties that stand fast and make evidence, doubt, and correction possible in the first place.
Four uses of “certainty.” I distinguish subjective certainty (conviction), hinge certainty (bedrock), epistemic certainty (defeater resistant stability in practice), and absolute certainty (logical or moral necessity). When we disagree, it often helps to say which sense of certainty is in play.
A brief note for readers interested in foundations. In my paper I suggest a structural parallel between hinge certainties and Gödel style limits. The parallel is not evidential, and it is not a proof of anything in epistemology from mathematics. It is a comparison of structure.
In Gödel’s setting, once a formal system is rich enough, there are truths expressible within the system that cannot be proven by the system’s own resources, and consistency cannot be established from within in the strongest way one might want. The upshot is not that mathematics collapses, but that the practice operates with boundary conditions that are not resolved by the same methods the system makes possible.
In the hinge setting, justificatory practices also have stopping points. Certain things stand fast, not as conclusions of inquiry, but as the background that makes inquiry, doubt, evidence, and correction possible. The upshot is not that justification collapses, but that justification always operates within a framework whose role is not that of an ordinary claim awaiting ordinary support.
So the comparison is this: both domains exhibit limits on what can be achieved from within, and both continue rationally once those limits are acknowledged. That is all I mean by the parallel.
If you want to press on this, I would welcome it, but it will help to keep the debate focused on whether the analogy is illuminating rather than on technical details of Gödel’s proofs.
I've read all seven of your chapters. Just for workability, I'm going to respond to each chapter separately. This may mean that what I have to say will be a bit disjointed. We'll see.
My biggest overall issue--JTB generally applies to propositions but most of the knowledge we have and use is not really expressible in that form. As an engineer, I usually talked about "conceptual models," which means an overall picture of the situation--in my case it was real estate properties and the soil and groundwater characteristics distributed across the site and at different depths. Models like that will generally be judged and justified as accurate rather than true. As I indicated, as I see it, the way we use knowledge on a daily basis tends to be more like how I've described it rather than just the truth of propositions.
This is highlighted by your discussion of the idea of standards of practice which are used to justify truth. In general, I think that's right, but how standards are applied under JTB (or JTB-U) is different from how various practices apply their standards. How do I apply an engineering standard to a simple declarative statement?
So, I worry that I am going to send your discussion off on a tangent. Now that you've seen some of the substance of my thoughts, should I continue?
I don't think this is a tangent, I think it's exactly the kind of stress test that helps clarify my ideas.
On the first point, I agree that a great deal of what we rely on is not best described as a single proposition. Much of it is a competence, a grasp of a situation, a model, or a way of seeing how things hang together. In engineering, the object of assessment is often a conceptual model, and the operative question is whether the model is accurate, robust, and fit for use across the relevant conditions, not whether a sentence is true in isolation.
My reply is that this does not put the JTB family out of business, it forces a clarification of what “truth” and “justification” are doing. A model can be assessed for correctness in the world, it can succeed or fail, it can be refined under error signals, and it can be defeated by counterevidence. In other words, it has correctness conditions even if it's not naturally expressed as a single declarative statement. The “propositional” layer can be treated as a partial extraction from the model, for example, predictions, constraints, and consequences that can be checked. That is often how the model earns and keeps its standing.
On your second point, I agree that we should not imagine applying an engineering standard to an isolated declarative sentence as if that were the primary unit of knowledge. The better way to put it is that standards of practice govern the evaluation of the claim in its proper form, which may be a model, a procedure, a measurement protocol, or a forecast. When I say “public” or “practice-governed,” I mean that there are criteria for correct application, error, and correction that can be articulated and contested within the practice. Engineering seems like a textbook example of this, because the standards include calibration, measurement error, boundary conditions, sensitivity to assumptions, and the discipline of revising the model when it fails.
So, I would welcome you continuing, but with one focusing suggestion so we do not drift. When you respond to a post, pick one concrete engineering example of a conceptual model and say how it is justified in your sense. Then we can map it onto my vocabulary without forcing it into a single sentence: which route of justification is doing the work, what would count as a defeater, where No False Grounds shows up, and what “practice safety” looks like in that domain. If we can do that once, the “propositions versus models” worry will either dissolve or become precise enough to evaluate.
Yes, this is headed into the direction that I find most useful.
Quoting Sam26
Here is something I stole from a post I made a few years ago.
A site conceptual model is just a description, image of the site which lays out all the information gathered during the investigations. To me, the most useful way of presenting a SCM is visually, using figures. Data tables are also needed. There will also be calculations e.g. groundwater flow direction and velocity, contaminant degradation rates, averages. On the figures, you can show the locations of the sources of the contamination and how it has moved and is presently distributed across the site. You can also show the expected distribution of contamination in the future based on groundwater and fate and transport modelling. You can also show the locations of existing and potential human and environmental receptors.
Typical data points include boring logs; analytical results of soil, groundwater, and sediment samples; visual observation of site conditions; topographic and bathymetric surveys; geophysical surveys; and wetland surveys. Going deeper, there are assumptions associated with laboratory analytical methods. Which in particular are you talking about?
I’m going to be gone for a while
There's a great deal of interest to comment on, but I'll start with something relatively simple, but important.
From post #3:
Quoting Sam26
I think I've grasped how you use "understanding" here, and why it isn't a fourth criterion for knowledge, but rather an attempt to clarify what justification actually entails. At this point, an example would be helpful. The question of what it means to "mimic the conclusions" is central, I think. You write:
Quoting Sam26
As an example, I picture a student who writes a paper on some topic in science; the paper describes a true belief which the student holds, and cites all the correct data. Why is the student only mimicking the conclusions? Because their understanding of why the data really do provide that support has to involve a simultaneous understanding of the conditions under which they wouldn't -- the defeaters, in other words. If the student lacks this understanding, their claim to justification is at best shaky, and probably false.
Does all that sound right? OK, here's the question: If the belief "looks justified" both from the outside (publicly) and to the person themselves (privately), how should we describe the process that will show us it is not justified? It seems as if a verification of understanding requires a further, dialogic process with the one who claims justification (and knowledge). And that's fine, but perhaps you should emphasize the need for this further step. I agree that it still doesn't make for a fourth criterion, but it does seem significantly different from the process we would engage in to learn a person's justifications -- which, as you point out, can be merely cited or mimicked. Another homely example might be defending a thesis.
Maybe all of this is to say we can't "vet understanding" in the same way we can vet a proof, or even a proposition. The proof doesn't reply to our questions, but we do require the person to, otherwise we're not in a position to say whether the U part of JTB+U is present. This doesn't contradict your theory in the slightest, just elaborates it a bit, and puts it in a context of Habermasian "communicative action."
This is a strong reading of what I meant, and your student example captures the central point. “Mimicking the conclusions” is precisely the case where a person can reproduce the correct outputs, cite the right data, and sound fluent, while lacking a grasp of the mistake conditions, the relevant defeaters, and the revision pathways that the practice treats as decisive. In that situation, the belief can look justified, even to competent observers, because the surface marks of justification are present, but the standing is fragile because it's not anchored in the competence that makes those marks responsibly usable.
Your question about how we show that the belief is not justified is also right, and it helps to make explicit something I left implicit. In many domains we do not vet understanding by inspecting a static artifact alone, as if it were a completed proof. We vet it by exposing the claimant to the practice’s tests, especially its countercases. That often does require a dialogic dimension: questions, challenges, requests for boundary conditions, requests for what would count as defeating information, and requests for how the claim would be revised if those defeaters obtained.
But I want to put this carefully, so it does not look like an added criterion. The “further step” you describe is not a separate requirement piled onto justification, it's one of the ordinary ways a practice determines whether a person has justificatory standing or has only borrowed it. It is the difference between an utterance that happens to be correct and a competence that can carry that correctness across the relevant cases. In that sense, the dialogic process is a method of assessment, not an additional condition of knowledge.
It is also worth noting that the need for dialogue varies by context. Sometimes understanding can be vetted through performance without explicit conversation, for example by reliable error detection, appropriate revision under new data, or correct handling of nearby cases. In other settings the quickest test is indeed oral examination, thesis defense, or cross examination. Either way, the underlying point is the same: understanding is shown in how the claimant navigates defeaters, boundary conditions, and correction, not merely in the ability to cite supporting considerations.
So, I agree with your closing line as an elaboration: we cannot vet understanding in the same way we vet a proof considered as a static object. We vet it by putting the claimant into the space of questions and challenges that the practice treats as intelligible. That is compatible with my view, and I think it helps readers see that “public” does not mean “a pile of citations,” it means susceptibility to the practice’s checks, including dialogic ones when the case calls for it.
If you want a single sentence version of the answer: when a belief looks justified on the surface, the practice distinguishes genuine standing from mimicry by testing whether the person can track defeaters and revise under correction, and that test is often, though not always, dialogic.
This is what I had in mind. A site conceptual model is a perfect case of knowledge that is not best expressed as a single proposition, but as an integrated representation: figures, tables, calculations, assumptions, and forecasts. In my terms, the unit being assessed is not one sentence but a model with correctness conditions, it can be more or less accurate, it can succeed or fail under error signals, and it can be revised when it runs into defeaters.
So, when I talk about justification here, I am not asking you to apply an engineering standard to a bare declarative sentence. I am asking how the SCM earns and keeps justificatory standing in the practice. Your description already points to the routes: sensory observation at the site, measurement and sampling, inference and modelling, testimony in the form of reports and lab results, and linguistic training in the way standards and classifications are applied. The important question is how those routes are disciplined.
That is where the guardrails map cleanly:
No False Grounds: what would count as a false ground in the SCM, a faulty assumption or input that is doing decisive work, for example a mistaken stratigraphic interpretation, a mislocated source term, or an analytical artifact that propagates through the map of contamination.
Practice Safety: what makes the SCM robust rather than lucky, for example triangulation across independent data types, sensitivity checks, conservative assumptions where appropriate, and repeated checks that would expose a fragile inference.
Defeater Screening: what kinds of findings would force revision, for example a new boring log that contradicts the stratigraphy, a plume boundary that violates the predicted hydraulic gradient, or receptor evidence inconsistent with the proposed pathway.
On your last question, I am not asking about one laboratory method in the abstract. I mean the assumptions that bear the weight in the overall chain that supports the SCM.
So you mean Doxa?
Not doxa in the pejorative sense of mere opinion. I mean the normative standing a belief has when it is entitled by the standards of evidence and correction that govern a practice.
So you are borrowing from the type of standards that a scientific peer reviewed rationalism would apply to a systemic process philosophy?
In my framework, any proposed “method of justification” will usually be describable as a combination of the five routes I listed: Testimony, Logic (inductive and deductive), Sensory experience, Linguistic training, and Pure logic (boundary-setting only). The list is non-exhaustive in the sense that it doesn't pretend to capture every nuance of method, but it is meant to be covering in the sense that methods are built out of these elements, often in combination.
So, when someone proposes a new method, my first move is not to reject it, but to ask: which routes are actually doing the work here, and which guardrails are supposed to discipline them. Many disagreements then become clearer, because they turn out to be disagreements about which route is primary in the case, what the relevant mistake-conditions are, or which defeaters are being ignored.
If you think you have a method that does not pass through any of these routes, I would be interested to see it, but I suspect that in most cases what looks like a sixth method is really a composite that hasn't yet been analyzed under one or more of the methods I've outlined.
What is it that you mean by "linguistic training" in
this context?
Testimony: journals, lab notes, instrument reports, datasets, expert consensus, methodological inheritance.
Logic: inference, statistical reasoning, model selection, prediction, and constraint.
Sensory experience: observation, measurement, and interaction with the world through instruments.
Linguistic training: learning how to use the concepts correctly, what counts as a valid operational definition, what counts as a proper classification, what counts as a mistake in the domain.
Pure logic (boundary-setting): coherence constraints, definitional entailments, and the exposure of category mistakes.
Science is distinctive because it tends to force convergence by building systematic error detection into the practice. But the justificatory work still flows through the same routes. That is why it is a mistake to treat “science” as the only path to knowledge, and also a mistake to treat testimony as automatically inferior. The real question is the quality of the route in the case at hand, and whether the guardrails hold.
Much of the contemporary discussion treats Gettier’s paper as showing that JTB is insufficient. I do not think this is the right lesson. The examples do not undermine the model itself. They depend on a confusion between what looks justified on the surface and what is genuinely justified within a practice. Once we attend to the structure of justification, including its graded and fallible character, it becomes clear that these cases fail to satisfy the justification condition in the first place. They rest on false grounds or on a lack of the relevant conceptual competence, and so they fall outside the classical model rather than threatening it. Seen in this way, Gettier does not overturn JTB; it signals the need to make explicit features of justification that the classical formulation left implicit. That is the task taken up by JTB+U in the sections that follow.
Worked Gettier example (diagnostic use). Consider the familiar “ten coins” case. Smith has strong evidence that Jones will get the job, and Smith has counted ten coins in Jones’s pocket. Smith forms the belief, “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” by straightforward logical inference from what he takes himself to know. Unknown to Smith, Jones will not get the job. Smith will get the job, and Smith also happens to have ten coins in his own pocket. The belief is true, and it can look well supported, but it does not have the standing required for knowledge.
What fails is not truth, and not belief, but justification. The support Smith relies on depends on what is not the case, namely that Jones will get the job, and this triggers No False Grounds. One can say that Smith’s inference is valid, but validity is not enough, because justification is not merely a logical relation among propositions. It is a standing within a practice, fixed by public criteria that settle what counts as competent support in the context. The same case also brings Practice Safety into view. Smith stumbles into the truth by luck. In ordinary situations where the evidence is similar, he would draw the same conclusion, yet it would be false, so the belief is not practice safe. Defeater screening makes the point plain: once it is determined that Jones may not get the job, the belief loses its standing, and the only repair is to replace the faulty ground. Gettier does not refute JTB, it corrects a picture of justification as a private sense of assurance or a merely formal inference, rather than a public standing fixed by our epistemic practice.
You mean to elucidate for this audience that your project is a taxonomy of scientific method.
Not quite. What I am offering is a taxonomy of routes of justification that operate across many practices: testimony, logic, sensory experience, linguistic training, and pure logic in a boundary-setting role. Science is one prominent domain where these routes are integrated and disciplined by unusually strong correction mechanisms, but the taxonomy is not confined to science, and it is not meant to reduce every kind of knowing to scientific procedure.
The purpose is practical: when someone claims knowledge, I want to be able to ask, which route is doing the work here, what standards govern it in that domain, what would count as a mistake or defeater, and do the guardrails hold. That applies to science, but it also applies to ordinary life, history, law, engineering, and philosophy when philosophy is making knowledge claims rather than offering a mere stance.
If you want a quick check, a lot of what I call “knowledge” is acquired by testimony and linguistic training long before anyone does anything recognizably scientific.
Isn't the annunciation of knowledge itself bound to the character of a localised hermeneutic. Do you give the least weight to individual or subjective testimony? Where is the rationale for weighted significance in your system for each or a combination of what you term, 'routes'?
Yes, the annunciation of knowledge is always situated in a local hermeneutic, a language, a practice, a way of drawing distinctions. I'm not trying to deny that. My point is that this doesn't reduce justification to “mere interpretation,” because within a practice there are criteria for correct and incorrect application, there are recognized mistake-conditions, and there are ways of correcting ourselves when the practice throws up error. The hermeneutic is real, but it isn't the whole story.
On individual or subjective testimony, I do give it weight. Testimony is one of the primary routes by which we acquire knowledge, and that includes first-person reports. The question isn't whether the report is subjective, it's how it stands within the standards that govern testimonial support: provenance, competence, independence, convergence, and defeater sensitivity. A single report is rarely self-authenticating, but it can still carry justificatory standing, especially when it's consistent, detailed, and later supported by independent lines of check.
As for weighting the routes, I'm not assigning a fixed hierarchy. I'm saying that the weight is determined by the case. In a given context we ask: which route is actually doing the work, what would count as a mistake in this domain, what would count as a defeater, and how strong are the correction mechanisms that are available. Then we look for convergence across routes, because that's often what turns a fragile support into stable standing. So the rationale for weight isn't that one route always dominates, but that different practices and different questions demand different standards, and the guardrails, No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening, discipline whatever routes are in play.
A digression, perhaps and forgive my tone which is not intended to be strident. Are there not innumerable contributions on variations of this matter already, from Bart Ehrman to Richard Carrier?
Does Christianity fail if the Jesus story can’t be demonstrated? And what does “fail” mean here?
We already know that there’s no eyewitness testimony from the time of Jesus, let alone for a resurrection. The Gospels were written years later by anonymous authors and survive only as copies of translations of earlier copies. We also know that Jews didn’t think much of the preacher's claims. Do we need more on this? I sometimes wonder if debunking the evidence in detail just makes some people take the story more seriously.
I'm trying to think of how I would translate this into a way to approach this issue from an engineering, or at least pragmatic, perspective. I guess I would call your No False Grounds guardrail "quality control and assurance." These are the procedures you follow and standards you apply to assure the quality of the data you use as input. For engineering or scientific activities, these procedures and standards will generally be formal, concrete, and mandatory. For less critical activities, they will be applied less formally, although the general principles are similar. This is a complex issue and is at the heart of my understanding of "truth." Here's something I wrote years ago that might shed some light, keeping in mind this is just a small part of the issues to be addressed by an overall quality control program.
Say I have data--chemical laboratory analysis and data measurements for 100 water samples for 10 chemical constituents. So I have a 10 x 100 table of data. Is it true? What does that even mean? What can possibly go wrong?
These issues would be addressed by use of what are called standard operating procedures (SOPs) during data collection. Data validation would then be performed after data collection and reduction to verify procedures have been met. To put this is more general terms for situations where this level of formality is not required--for all the "grounds" you use to establish truth, you must know where it came from, how you know it, and what the uncertainties are,
I guess your Practice Safety guardrail could be comparable to an engineering standard of practice. These are formal requirements established by regulations, codes, technical standards, and administrative standards created by governments, industry groups, engineering societies, and other organizations.
I'm not sure how I would fit your "defeator screening" procedure into the system I'm describing.
No False Grounds (NFG) = “Are we building on bad inputs?”
This is your QA/QC point. It asks whether the data or the key assumptions are incorrect in a way that would make the conclusion questionable.
Examples: wrong sample, mishandled sample, wrong method, transcription error, the lab did not follow procedures, etc.
Practice Safety = “Is the method we used a safe, normal way to reach this kind of conclusion?”
This is closer to standard of practice. It is not perfection, it is “we used a route that usually catches mistakes.”
Examples: proper calibration, chain of custody, replication, using accepted modeling procedures, etc.
Defeater Screening = “Even if the data are good, is there something that would overturn the conclusion?”
This is the part that is easiest to miss, because it happens after you think you are done.
It is the deliberate search for “what would make this conclusion fail.”
Examples in your setting:
A different source could explain the same contaminant pattern.
A missing geological feature changes the direction of some flow.
Seasonal changes that would modify an important consideration.
Another dataset (borings, field observations, historical site use) conflicts with the story you are telling.
So in one line:
NFG: inputs are not false.
Practice Safety: the route to the conclusion is not fragile.
Defeater Screening: no overlooked “gotcha” would overturn the conclusion.
That is how your quality program maps into my epistemology. That's the best I can do not being an engineer. It's just a matter of getting use to the procedure. Engineering has these procedures built into their conclusions.
I wonder if this suggestion is Wittgensteinian at heart or whether it just seeks an agreed upon justification methodology. That is, would it be incompatible for someone who held meaning is attached to private states to demand an agreed upon methodology as you have here. And contrawise, would it be non-Wittgensteinian to allow for subjectively based justifications? I would think not so long as the meaning was tied to use such that the community of speakers could follow how the term was used and engage in the practice.
So what this boils down to is how to avoid Gettier cases, which do seem to arise from reasonable evaluations based upon incomplete knowledge. Your idea seems straightforward: force a community based standard for what constitutes a justification to avoid poor reasoning and perhaps require deeper investigation before declaring "knowledge."
If you tell me you're coming to my house, I see a blue jeep coming toward my house, you own a blue jeep, I say I know you're on the way, and you then arrive moments later to my house, we can say that I had knowledge of your arrival of the JTB variety. But then we learn it wasn't your jeep I saw and you took the bus, now we have a broken J, and a Gettier problem.
If you mean to add to the J methodology a stricter confirmation of all facts to avoid sloppier individualized justifications, that could be a solution, but I ask why that invokes Wittgensteinian other than perhaps reference to community involvement, but, as noted, the community could still use the word justification to mean whatever it decided without concern for avoiding Gettier.
That is, Wittgenstein wouldn't care whether a term were more useful. He'd only insist it's meaning were derived from use.
I do think the framing is Wittgensteinian, but not because it appeals to “community agreement” as if justification were whatever a group votes into existence. The Wittgensteinian point I'm borrowing is about grammar: what makes a claim of justification intelligible is that it's answerable to standards of correct and incorrect application, and those standards are exhibited in a practice, in how we check, correct, and withdraw claims when error signals appear.
On “private meaning,” I'd put it this way. A person can have private experiences, and can have subjective certainty (e.g., a conviction about a belief), but if the meaning of the terms involved were tied only to private states, then the distinction between correct and incorrect use would collapse. You could still demand an “agreed methodology,” but it would be unstable, because there would be no shared criteria to tell whether the methodology was actually being followed or merely seemed to be. That's why, in my framework, justification is not a private experience. It is practice-governed standing, and it is “objective” in the modest sense that the criteria for support, error, defeat, and correction can, in principle, be stated and applied within the practice. This is not consensus, not social permission, and not institutional authority, it is answerability to criteria.
That doesn't make subjectively based justification illegitimate. It means that subjective support has to be connected to use and to criteria that others can follow. If I say “I see blue,” or “I remember,” those are first-person claims, but they still live inside practices with mistake-conditions and correction, misperception, lighting, memory distortion, and so on. I'm not excluding subjective sources. I'm saying that their justificatory standing depends on how they are embedded in standards of assessment.
Now to Gettier. I'm not trying to avoid Gettier by requiring stricter confirmation of all facts. That would be impossible and it would smuggle in an infallibilist demand. The point is different: Gettier cases arise because we treat “seems justified” as if it were the same as having justificatory standing. In your blue-jeep example, what fails is not simply that you lacked a further fact, it is that the apparent support was not connected in the right way to the truth-maker, and the route is lucky. The practice would normally treat that as a fragile inference, and it would tighten the standards when the stakes are higher.
My proposal is not “let the community define justification however it likes.” It's: if we are using the word “justification” at all, we are already committed to certain constraints, no false grounds, practice safety, and defeater sensitivity, because those constraints are built into how justificatory talk functions in our life. Wittgenstein would not tell us to adopt a more useful vocabulary, but he would help us see what our vocabulary already commits us to when we use it.
If you want a one sentence summary: the Wittgensteinian element is not communal voting, it is the insistence that justification has a grammar of correct use and correction, and once we make that explicit, many Gettier intuitions are revealed as cases where the support was only apparent.
Quoting Sam26
This suggests a Wittgensteinian impossibility, which is that "justification" currently fails to adhere to usage derived meaning , so we need to regulate this rogue term by insisting it follow Wittgensteinian protocol so we can dissolve Gettier issues.
Meaning is use even for terms we wish had better usages.
That is, per Wittgenstein, justification has a grammar whether we insist upon it or not. He's describing the way words obtain meaning. If "justification" has a fragile use where its meaning fluctuates, then that is what it means. We can't "insist" the word have a better meaning to avoid Gettier cases and that then become its meaning unless our insistence changes its community use. But that's not a Wittgenstein issue. That's just step 1, wanting a new definition, and Step 2, implementing that definition however it's done.
I think your Wittgenstein point is right, and it helps me say what I am, and am not, claiming.
I'm not treating Wittgenstein as offering a methodology for manufacturing definitions, and I'm not proposing that “justification” is a rogue term that fails to have a grammar until we regulate it. Meaning is use, and “justification” already has a grammar whether we legislate it or not.
What I'm doing is different. I am trying to make explicit features of the existing use that are often left implicit, and then to use that clarified grammar to diagnose why Gettier cases feel forceful. In other words, I'm not saying, “we should insist on a better meaning.” I'm saying, “look at what we already do when we call something justified, and notice the constraints that are already operating.”
In ordinary practice, we already distinguish between a person who can recite supporting considerations and a person who can track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. We already withdraw claims when new defeating information comes in. We already treat certain routes as too fragile for knowledge, and we tighten standards when stakes rise. Those are not reform proposals. They're part of the lived grammar of justificatory talk.
So where does Gettier fit. The Gettier phenomenon arises when we let the surface marks of justification substitute for justificatory standing, and then we are surprised when the belief is true by luck. My claim isn't that we should redefine “justification” to avoid that surprise. My claim is that the surprise shows a mismatch between two things that our practice already distinguishes: seeming to have justification and actually having it under the practice’s own mistake-conditions and defeater sensitivity.
On your final point, you are also right that if a community’s use is genuinely unstable, then that instability is part of the meaning. But that isn't the situation I think we're in with “justification.” The use isn't arbitrary, and it's not merely fluctuating. It's stable enough to underwrite our ordinary distinctions between support, error, defeat, and correction. What fluctuates is often our philosophical picture of what justification must be, for example, thinking it is exhausted by a list of cited reasons, or thinking it must amount to infallible certainty. My project is aimed at dissolving that picture by returning to how justificatory standing actually functions in practice.
So I agree with the Wittgensteinian constraint. I am not legislating a new definition. I'm clarifying the one we already live by, and showing that once the lived constraints are made explicit, Gettier cases stop looking like a deep refutation and start looking like cases where the support was only apparently in order.
Guardrails and the Discipline of Justification
The five routes describe the ordinary ways in which justification proceeds. They show how a belief can be supported within our language-games, through testimony, inference, sensory experience, linguistic training, and the boundary-setting role of pure logic. Yet a route is not, by itself, a guarantee that a belief has the standing required for knowledge. A belief can travel along one of these routes and still fail to count as knowledge because something in the justificatory situation does not have the right shape.
This is why it is helpful to make explicit a set of guardrails, not as additions to the classical model, but as clarifications of what our practices already require when we speak carefully. These guardrails articulate constraints that belong to justification as it functions within a practice. Their point is grammatical (Wittgensteinian grammar). They mark what it is for justificatory support to count as support within a language-game, rather than as something that merely looks supportive from a distance.
I call these guardrails No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening.
I've explained some of this already, but I want to reiterate it so that it's easier to understand. I'll do this in a series of short posts.
Yes, this is the main elaboration I was offering. And it connects with what you say here:
Quoting Sam26
You're right, of course, that (linguistic) dialogic confirmation is not always the only route. Perhaps we need to think in terms of interactive confirmation of understanding, leaving as open as possible what sort of interaction is appropriate.
Quoting Sam26
Very good. We can't lose sight of the role (and placement) of understanding in this scheme. The distinction between "method of assessment" and "additional condition" keeps this clear. Would you want to go into more of the problems with the traditional construal of "justification" (without the +U)? Or maybe you can assume your readers are already familiar with the literature.
Here are a few responses to your questions:
From post #2
Quoting Sam26
I find it easy enough to understand, in context, but it isn't what I'd call illuminating. Depends on one's comfort with Witt, I think. Maybe drop it, for a general philosophical audience?
post #3
Quoting Sam26
As discussed above: In a certain sense it does "collapse into it," but not in an invidious way. The collapse is a matter of where you locate the work of understanding, as part of what we mean by justification. Conceptually, there is no collapse, however, and the terms can't be interchanged.
post #4
Quoting Sam26
I like it. It captures something over and above defeaters and reliability.
post #5
Quoting Sam26
I don't think it's a distinct route, which tells you a lot about my philosophical commitments! If it were me, I'd make it a background condition, but there are strong Witt-related reasons not to.
post #6
Quoting Sam26
Frankly, this is too big a question to be handled here. For your purposes, they fit the theory and do explanatory work. If you're asking for a personal response . . . I believe there are unjustified "inherited backgrounds" we require in order to do philosophy. I prefer Nagel's discussion to Witt's, partially because for Nagel the status of this situation is problematic, a spur to further thought, whereas for Witt, if I understand him, the hinge concept is meant to close the subject, as an antidote to perplexity. But my knowledge of Witt isn't deep.
On whether to expand on the traditional construal of justification, I think a forum audience can be assumed to know the basics. I can probably limit it to one clarification: justification is often treated too thinly, as if it’s exhausted by citeable supports, and that makes it easy to confuse the appearance of support with justificatory standing. The “+U” is my way of preventing that slide.
On “grammar,” I accept the point. The term’s accurate for Witt readers but it can feel like jargon. If I keep it, I should consistently translate it as “criteria for correct use, error, and correction in a practice,” which is what I mean anyway.
I’m glad Practice Safety landed as doing work beyond defeaters and beyond generic reliability talk, that’s exactly why I separated it. On linguistic training, I hear your hesitation. I keep it explicit to remind us that being trained into criteria and rule following is itself a genuine source of standing, even if it often operates in the background of the other routes.
On hinges, I agree the topic can swallow the thread. For my purposes I’m not using hinges to close inquiry, but to mark a structural point: reasons and evidence operate against a background, and not everything that stands fast stands fast as a conclusion. If Nagel’s way of keeping the situation problematic is what helps here, I think that can sit alongside my use of hinges, because my target’s confusion about what sort of thing a hinge is, not an attempt to end reflection.
Yes. And we can go on to ask: If we know what sort of thing a hinge is, does it render further questions about its status as a building block of rationality pointless? That might be the strict Wittgensteinian reading. But is it the necessary one?
Anyway . . . not really germane to your OP.
Scroll down to the paper titled Wittgenstein's Hinges and Gödel's Unprovable Statements.
Quoting Sam26
Maybe this: You/we take it to be certain that the role of understanding in human consciousness is significant, that it makes a difference, that it is a desideratum quite separate from knowledge. To be skeptical about understanding – to say something like “You can’t prove to me that what you call understanding has any effect on what I say and do” -- is a kind of undermining, as you describe, since it seems to demand the very framework which it calls into question. But I’m not sure about this; so many skeptical challenges can be interpreted not as questioning a hinge proposition but simply as demonstrating that our language allows us to ask “Why?” about pretty much anything.
At the very least, we find ourselves with a problematic involving the concepts of knowledge and understanding – perhaps that is a kind of hinge. I can’t justify my certainty that this pairing is both necessary and in tension, but nor can I imagine how to do any philosophy at all without taking it to be so, much less use the concept of "justification".
I’ll leave all this for you to decide, as you’re much more familiar with the hinge concept than I am.
I am not responding on behalf of Sam26 here, but I would say that asking "why?" is not itself an epistemically "innocent" act. It assumes that there is something to ask "why" about, admits the possibility of finding an answer, and presupposes that some answers will be better than others, among other things. To ask "why" is already to make a move [I]within[/I] the game. Would you agree?
INteresting - divorced from this wider thread's discussion (i guess) this seems a bit odd for me. If the purpose of calling something "knowledge" is to simply ascertain what best guides action (on this view, I don't think certainty is in play) then that fundamentally changes what we consider action-guiding information and the traditional concept of knowledge is lost. I have no intuitive problem with this, but it seems, like many problems, an attempt to semantically reduce an intractable..
I think you're right. If you look back at my first couple of posts in this thread, you can see it wasn't clear to me whether my input would contribute or distract from the OP's intended direction. When it became clear my thoughts weren't contributing, I dropped out of the discussion.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think that's backwards. You call it "the traditional concept of knowledge," but it doesn't match how normal, everyday people use the word in their normal, everyday lives. Everyone knows we can't be absolutely sure of what we know before we act. So we do the best we can. In that context, JTB implies that every time anyone has made a mistake in the past what was knowledge then magically turns into not knowledge now. That means that "knowledge" is meaningless, valueless, pointless. That's the only intractable I can think of--the impossibility of knowing whether I know something. And it's not really intractable, it's just silly.
And don't get me started on Gettier.
I think you’re close.
I’d just tighten the hinge, so it isn’t framed as a claim about human consciousness, as if it were an empirical thesis. In my use, the hinge is more grammatical than psychological: that “understanding” is a real difference in our epistemic practices, not a decorative word. We already operate with a distinction between someone who can recite the right justification and someone who can track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. If you remove that distinction entirely, the practice of calling anything “justified” starts to lose its point.
I agree with you that a radical skepticism about understanding has a self-undermining flavor. It isn’t merely another “Why?” within the practice (or form of life), it targets what makes the “Why?” game intelligible in the first place. Of course, language lets us ask “Why?” about almost anything, but that doesn’t mean every “Why?” is the same kind of request. At some point the request stops being a demand for reasons inside the practice and becomes a demand for the framework to justify itself by the very tools the framework makes possible.
Your last paragraph also lands with me. There’s a genuine problematic, knowledge and understanding belong together and can be in tension. I don’t treat that as a conclusion I prove. I think of it as part of the background against which my project makes sense at all. That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by a hinge, not a dogma, but a standing fast that is displayed in how we proceed.
I agree with your everyday point, i.e., nobody in ordinary life assumes absolute certainty before acting, and any account of knowledge that required that would be unlivable. But I don’t think JTB, as I’m using it, commits us to that.
The “magically turns into not knowledge” worry comes from treating knowledge as if it had to be indefeasible. In ordinary practice, we don’t talk that way. We say, “I knew, given what I had,” and we also say, “I was wrong.” Those aren’t contradictions. They mark two different evaluations: what was justified at the time, and what we now know after a defeater has arrived.
A mistake doesn’t make past knowledge meaningless. It shows that justification is fallible and defeasible, which is exactly how everyday epistemic life works. What changes, when new information comes in, is not that the past was magic, but that the belief no longer has standing now, because the practice has acquired a defeater.
That’s also why my guardrails matter. They’re not demanding absolute certainty. They’re making explicit the constraints we already use to separate knowledge from lucky success and from fragile support. Defeater screening, in particular, is not a demand to foresee every possible counterexample. It’s the ordinary discipline of not ignoring live alternatives and known failure modes.
And on your last line, “the impossibility of knowing whether I know,” I’d put it this way: we don’t need a guarantee that we know in order to know. We need justificatory standing that’s good enough for the domain or context and the stakes, and we need openness to correction when real defeaters appear. That’s not silly, that’s exactly what “knowing” looks like in ordinary life.
That's a good question. In his referenced paper on Witt and Godel, @Sam26 writes:
"As Wittgenstein observes, "There is no why. I simply do not. This is how I act" (OC 148). This insight captures something crucial about the nature of foundational certainties: they are pre-rational in the sense that they precede and enable rational discourse rather than emerging from it."
And he offers these examples:
". . . basic statements like "I have two hands" or "The Earth exists." Unlike nonlinguistic hinges, these can be spoken and seem propositional, yet they resist the usual patterns of justification and doubt."
So what happens if we ask "Why?" about the justification of such a statement? We might give two analyses. In the first, which I think is yours, we'd say, "The question is meaningful, and admits of an answer. It may be the case that no satisfactory answer presents itself, but that is not the question's fault, so to speak. The fault lies with us (with philosophy), in our inability to provide a deep enough explanation." In the second, which uses the hinge idea (if I understand it), we'd say, "This sort of 'why?' takes us outside of what it means to look for a justification. There's no satisfactory answer because the standpoint from which the question can be meaningfully asked presupposes the conceptual (Sam would say 'grammatical') equipment needed to ask it."
That said, I lean more toward the first analysis than the second. Is it possible to doubt whether I have two hands? Yes. Do we know the general sorts of things that justify our (comparative) certainty about two-handedness? Yes. Perhaps Sam can go on to elaborate the ways in which "the usual patterns of justification and doubt" are resisted. To me, it seems equally possible that we are simply more certain about two-handedness.
I think you’ve set up the contrast well, but I’d adjust one thing. My view isn’t that the first “why?” is always meaningful and the second is always meaningless. The point is that the word “why?” can function in more than one way, and we have to look at what’s being asked.
There’s a perfectly ordinary “why?” about “I have two hands (as Witt points out),” and it does admit of familiar answers: perception, memory, proprioception, photographs, other people’s reports, medical records, and so on. That’s all inside the practice, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I mean by practice-governed justification.
The hinge point shows up when the “why?” is no longer a request for more evidence, but a request to put the whole practice of checking on trial at once. In that mode, the question isn’t “what justifies my belief that I have two hands,” it becomes “what justifies the entire framework in which perception, memory, testimony, and correction count as checks at all.” That's when the demand starts to misfire, not because we are too stupid to answer, but because the request is asking for a kind of justification that cannot apply to the role the background plays.
When you say you lean toward the first analysis, I think I mostly agree, provided we keep the second analysis available for a particular sort of escalation. It's not that hinge talk denies that we are simply more certain in some cases. It's that in some cases the certainty isn't just a higher degree of ordinary confidence. It's functioning as a stopping point for the practice, something that is shown in how we proceed.
On your question about “the usual patterns of justification and doubt” being resisted: one way to mark it is this. In ordinary doubt, there are recognizable defeaters and recognizable tests. If I doubt whether the bus comes at 9, I know what would settle it. In hinge cases, the demand for justification either has no settled criteria of satisfaction, or it treats the ordinary criteria as illegitimate in advance. That's a sign we have shifted from a local “why?” inside the practice to a global “why?” that tries to step outside the practice while still borrowing its tools.
I’d put the point like this: sometimes we are simply more certain, and we can cite ordinary supports. But sometimes the “why?” is being used in a way that attempts to make the whole background answerable as if it were an ordinary claim, and that's where hinge talk earns its keep.
The only place I'd put up a little flag would be when you speak about "the ordinary criteria as illegitimate in advance" as a sign of hinge-questioning doubt. This problem goes back to Descartes, and is outside the scope of your OP, but I would make the case that Cartesian methodical doubt doesn't actually posit anything as illegitimate in advance, and neither does the skeptic in our example. In both instances, the skeptic is really raising a question about certainty, not about some subject. No genuine doubt is being expressed -- existential doubt, I might call it -- concerning two-handedness. Doubt is wielded as a tool to sculpt certainty, to learn how far the whole method can be pushed before we have to cry "I can conceive of no further doubt!"
From a Wittgensteinian standpoint, I still can’t make sense of the Cartesian maneuver as doubt. Doubt isn’t a free-floating posture you can apply to anything at will. It’s a move inside a practice, and it only makes sense where there are criteria for what would count as checking it, correcting it, or settling it. When you try to doubt everything at once, you don’t get a deeper form of doubt, you remove the background that gives “doubt,” “test,” and “justification” their role in the first place.
That’s also why it helps to keep my four senses of certainty explicit: subjective certainty (conviction), hinge certainty (what stands fast and makes inquiry possible), epistemic certainty (defeater-resistant stability in practice), and absolute certainty (logical or moral necessity). Ordinary, practice-governed justification aims at epistemic certainty. Cartesian doubt pushes toward absolute certainty, and it treats hinge certainties as if they were ordinary claims waiting for ordinary support. From the Wittgensteinian angle, that isn’t a legitimate extension of doubt, it’s a shift in the grammar of the activity.
The issue isn’t that the skeptic declares ordinary criteria illegitimate. The issue is that the exercise changes the kind of question being asked, and once it does that, it stops looking like genuine doubt within a practice and starts looking like a philosophical performance aimed at an impossible standard.
Which is exactly what JTB does. I understand you’re trying to modify it to address that issue, but I’d rather just toss the whole thing in the hopper.
Quoting Sam26
Those are fine things to say. So why do we need all the JTB trappings—with or without U. What I want to do is focus on the important part of the JTB formula—J. Adequate justification is what’s needed. It’s the best we can do. What does adequate mean? It depends mostly on the consequences of being wrong.
Quoting Sam26
You talk about this with really different language than I do. That’s why I stopped participating in this discussion. As I said, I don’t want to try to make JTB work, I want to discard it entirely.
“Adequate justification” still presupposes a target. Adequate for action isn’t the same as adequate for knowledge. If you collapse knowledge into “what I’m willing to act on,” you turn epistemic standing into risk tolerance. Two people with the same evidence can differ just because they’re more cautious. That’s prudence, not knowledge.
The so called JTB trappings are the distinctions you still need. Truth is about how things are, belief is what the subject holds, justification is the belief’s standing. If you throw those out, you end up rebuilding them anyway to explain the difference between “I acted responsibly” and “I knew.”
Your engineering language already matches my guardrails. QA/QC is No False Grounds. Standards of practice are Practice Safety. “Don’t ignore known failure modes” is Defeater Screening. The real question isn’t JTB versus adequacy. It’s whether “adequate” stays vague, or whether you spell out the failure modes that make a belief look supported when it isn’t.
Discarding JTB doesn’t remove Gettier, it relocates it. If knowledge is “adequately justified true belief,” you still need to exclude lucky truths. Either you tighten adequacy to rule out luck, which is exactly what Practice Safety and defeater sensitivity do, or you let luck count as knowledge.
No. It’s adequately justified belief. Truth isn’t in the equation.
Quoting Sam26
As I define it, adequate justification means sufficient to allow responsible decision making. So, yes. Adequate for action is the same as adequate for knowledge.
Quoting Sam26
You can make the standards for adequacy anything you want. It’s a question of risk management and liability.
Quoting Sam26
As I quipped previously, let’s not get into Gettier. I have strong negative feelings about the whole subject.
My analysis would actually be closer to the second than the first, and I largely agree with 's reply, though I framed it differently. The basic idea is that some "why?" questions misfire because they try to put into question that which makes questioning possible in the first place. Framed like this, it can be seen as a retorsion argument, or argument from pragmatic contradiction.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes, I think we're all on the same page with this now. I raised a question about how the Cartesian method does or doesn't fit this conception, and that could be a good discussion too (I appreciate what @Sam26 is saying about it) but outside the OP.
Quoting Sam26
Right, that would be the difference between a skepticism that is meaningful, versus one that merely capitalizes on our language's ability to frame "why?" questions. As above, I think Descartes stays within a recognizable practice using his method, but TBC elsewhere.
Back to Sam's questions:
Quoting Sam26
Your analysis of JTB pretty well answers the first question, I think. You conclude, "Gettier is trading on an impoverished picture of justification," implying that Gettier cases never refuted JTB, properly understood, in the first place. Your guardrails and "+U" show why, and once again it's key to your concept that it is a showing, an explanation, not an added ingredient required to save JTB from the jaws of Gettier.
The second question is a little unclear to me. How would you lay out "the core intuition"?
On your second question, by “the core intuition” I mean the feeling that makes Gettier cases grip us:
The belief is true.
The subject can qbite supporting considerations that look like justification.
Yet the truth shows up by luck, because the support is fragile, or dependent on a false ground, or insulated from the mistake-conditions the practice recognizes.
That’s why we resist calling it knowledge, even though it can look like JTB is met on the surface.
This is not rare. It happens a lot in ordinary life because most of what we call knowledge isn’t absolute certainty. We’re usually dealing with epistemic certainty, defeater-resistant stability in practice, and in many domains that stability is unavoidably probabilistic.
My diagnosis isn’t just relabeling. It’s an attempt to explain why the Gettier intuition arises so often: we mistake surface marks of support for justificatory standing. Once you make explicit the ordinary constraints that already govern standing, No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening, the Gettier case stops looking like a refutation of JTB and starts looking like a case where the belief was true, but the route was lucky or too fragile to count as knowledge.
I agree. Some “why?” questions misfire because they try to question what makes questioning possible in the first place. In that sense the move is retorsion, a pragmatic contradiction: it borrows the norms of justification while attempting to place the background that makes those norms operative on trial. The key is to keep the point limited to that kind of global “why?,” and not treat it as a dismissal of ordinary, practice-governed activiity for reasons aimed at epistemic certainty.
Doubting cannot be applied in any context; it's a move inside a practice. It has a role only where there are standards for what would count as checking it, correcting it, or settling it (this is an important point). If I doubt whether the train is at 9, I know what would settle it: look at the schedule, check the platform, ask an attendant, and so on. That doubt makes sense because the practice contains criteria that can settle the matter.
Now consider the Cartesian project of doubting everything. When doubt is applied universally, it stops working as doubt, because it starts targeting what I call hinge certainties, the background that makes the entire practice of questioning and checking possible. Hinges are not conclusions we reached by evidence. They are what stands fast in our activity: the things we take for granted when we test, correct, infer, and even when we doubt. If you try to put that background on trial using the very tools that depend on it, you haven’t discovered a deeper form of doubt. You’ve changed the grammar of what it means to doubt.
This is where my four uses of certainty help keep the discussion honest:
Subjective certainty: conviction, how settled something feels.
Hinge certainty: bedrock, what stands fast and makes inquiry possible.
Epistemic certainty: defeater-resistant stability in practice, enough for responsible action.
Absolute certainty: logical or moral necessity.
Ordinary justification aims at epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty. It’s corrigible and defeasible, but it’s still knowledge in the ordinary sense. Cartesian doubt quietly shifts the goal toward absolute certainty, and then it treats hinge certainty as if it were a hypothesis that ought to be justified in the same way as an ordinary claim. That’s the mistake.
The Wittgensteinian objection isn’t “Descartes is being irrational.” It’s that the method asks for the wrong kind of thing. It demands that the framework be justified by the very methods the framework makes possible. That’s why the Cartesian maneuver often feels impressive but doesn’t actually describe how doubt and justification function in real epistemic life.
If someone insists Cartesian doubt is legitimate, the pressure question is simple: what would count as settling the global doubt. If the answer is “nothing could,” then the exercise isn’t an epistemic demand inside a practice. It’s a philosophical performance aimed at an impossible standard. And once we see that, we can stop letting it redefine what “justification” and “knowledge” mean in ordinary practice.
A quick application that’s relevant to why I wrote this paper at all. One reason I keep talking about “justificatory standing” and “understanding” is that we now live in an environment where it’s easy to generate what seems like justification. AI is the clearest example.
In my paper, I’m not saying AI can’t output true statements, or that it can’t be useful. It can. My point is narrower: producing fluent answers, even with citations, isn’t the same thing as knowing. Knowledge, as I’m using the term, involves a belief’s standing inside a practice, answerability to error, correction, and defeaters. A model can mimic the surface marks of that standing (Searle makes similar arguments), it can sound like it understands, it can even be right, but it doesn’t occupy the practice in the way that makes it responsible for tracking mistake-conditions, handling defeaters, and revising under correction.
This is exactly why I added the “+U” clarification. Understanding, on my view, isn’t a fourth ingredient. It’s the competence to track what would count against a claim, what would defeat it, and what correction would look like. AI can help us do that work, but it can also tempt us to skip it by handing us ready-made conclusions that look justified.
For me, the AI case isn’t a side issue. It’s a modern stress test: it shows how easy it is to confuse “looks justified” with “has justificatory standing,” and that confusion is the same pressure point that Gettier cases expose in a more controlled form.
As to whether the method occurs within a practice, I think it does: Descartes is clear about what would dispel or legitimize a given doubt. Granted, there is debate about whether his criterion (which rests on a particular notion of incorrigibility) is a good one. But we have to remember that Descartes's target is doubt and certainty themselves, not whether a certain subject "really" is how it seems. As he wrote, "No one of serious mind ever doubted" the existence of the external world.
You say, "Ordinary justification aims at epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty," and perhaps this is key. The Method is not ordinary; it doesn't attempt to mimic how we arrive at epistemic certainty. Descartes's project was weirder than that.
Quoting Sam26
Yeah, and that's why I was curious what you thought the "core intuition" was. Perhaps it was deeper than I'd thought . . . but no, I'm with you on this.
*
I'd meant to circle back to this:
Quoting J
Quoting Sam26
Could you say more about this? I think I see why you believe that talk of consciousness in this context has to be empirical, but before replying I want to be sure I understand you.
Even so, my Wittgensteinian worry doesn’t depend on caricaturing him as a fool who doubts everything indiscriminately. The worry is about the kind of standard he builds into his method. When the method’s endpoint is absolute certainty (indubitability), and when the method treats the ordinary grounds of our practice as always defeasible in principle, it stops functioning as doubt in the ordinary, practice-governed sense. It becomes a philosophical performance with an atypical success condition: certainty that can’t be unsettled by any defeater the practice would normally recognize. That’s not an accusation, it’s a diagnosis of what the method is doing.
This is exactly where my certainty distinctions matter. Ordinary justification aims at epistemic certainty, defeater-resistant stability in practice. Descartes is aiming at absolute certainty, and the danger is that people let that aim quietly redefine what counts as justification and knowledge in ordinary epistemic life. My project in the paper is explicitly not that. I’m trying to make practice-governed justification explicit, including error, correction, and defeaters, without importing an absolute-standard demand that collapses most knowledge into “not really knowledge.”
On Gettier, I’m with you that the literature can become inflated. In my paper I’m not treating Gettier as an existential crisis for knowledge. I’m treating it as a diagnostic that exposes a common confusion: the slide from “looks supported” to “has justificatory standing.” That slide shows up constantly in real life, and it’s even more visible now in environments where the appearance of justification seems like justification.
Now to your final question about the hinge I tightened. When I say the hinge is “more grammatical than psychological,” I mean this. I’m not asserting an empirical thesis about consciousness, as if I were claiming “understanding has causal power in the brain” or “understanding is a measurable mental property.” I’m pointing to the role the concept plays in our justificatory practices. We already treat it as a real difference between (a) repeating conclusions and (b) being able to track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. That difference shows up in how we assess competence, explanation, and responsibility in reasoning. In that sense it’s grammatical: it’s built into how “justification,” “mistake,” “correction,” and “understanding” function in our practices, regardless of any particular theory of consciousness.
The hinge isn’t “consciousness has this property.” The hinge is that the distinction between genuine grasp and mere repetition is constitutive of what we mean by justificatory standing. That’s the sense in which skepticism about understanding can become self-undermining: it tries to erase a distinction the practice relies on to make justification intelligible.
Would you agree that this is the Wittgensteinian objection? If so, I can go on to say more about how Williams defends Descartes here.
Quoting Sam26
Yes. But isn't it also the case that understanding is an actual mental phenomenon, something that can occur for you or me? Or perhaps this represents a philosophical difference along the usual public/private lines; perhaps you don't countenance talk of inner mental states, etc. I do, but I'm happy to acknowledge that your project doesn't need a decision one way or the other about that in order to discuss how justificatory practices work.
Yes, I’m basically with Williams there, and I do think what he’s pointing to lines up with the Wittgensteinian point. Once doubt becomes “hyperbolical,” it stops looking like an extension of ordinary doubt and starts raising a question about whether the doubt still has content. The earlier stages of doubt trade on the practice of using some perceptions to correct others, but the global move, “no perceptions are veridical,” threatens to remove the very contrast class that makes “veridical” and “error” intelligible. That’s very close to what I mean when I say the Cartesian maneuver starts to doubt the structure doubt depends on.
So yes, I’d say Williams is articulating a Wittgensteinian style objection: hyperbolical doubt risks misfiring because it tries to generalize beyond the conditions under which doubt and correction have a role. If you want to explain how Williams defends Descartes, I’m interested, but I’d also want to keep the distinction clear between (a) Descartes as a philosophical exercise and (b) whether that exercise should be allowed to set the standards for ordinary, practice-governed justification aimed at epistemic certainty.
On understanding as a mental phenomenon: I’m happy to grant that understanding can be an inner occurrence, something that happens to you or me. I’m not denying inner life. My point is only that my argument doesn’t hinge on a metaphysics of mental states. What matters for my project is that “understanding” marks a real difference in our epistemic practices: the difference between repeating conclusions and being able to track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. That’s the sense in which I called it grammatical rather than psychological. It’s about the role the concept plays in how we assess justifiable conclusion, even if there’s an inner phenomenology of grasping.
I don’t need to take a hard line on public versus private. I can accept inner understanding as real, while still insisting that justificatory standing isn’t a private feeling and can’t be reduced to a report of how things seem. The practice-governed side is what I’m trying to keep in view.
Post #1
Justified True Belief Plus Understanding: A Wittgensteinian Extension
Samuel L. Naccarato
Abstract
This paper reexamines the classical model of knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB) and argues that its core insight is clarified, not replaced, by making explicit what our justificatory practices already presuppose. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially his discussions of language-games, grammar, and hinge propositions, I argue that justification does not operate in isolation. It functions within shared forms of life and rests on a background of bedrock certainties that stand fast for us and make doubt and inquiry possible. These certainties are foundational in a non-epistemic sense. They are not themselves justified; they make justification possible.
Truth remains the success condition for knowledge. To say that a belief is true is to say that the world is as the proposition represents it. In this framework, understanding is not an additional requirement placed alongside truth, belief, and justification. It is internal to justification, the conceptual competence by which a belief achieves its proper standing within an epistemic practice. This is why Gettier-style cases lose their force. They depend on a misleading picture of justification and on beliefs that only appear to possess the right standing.
To make this structure practically applicable, I introduce three guardrails that discipline justification, No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening, and I distinguish five non-hierarchical routes through which justification typically proceeds: Testimony, Logic, Sensory Experience, Linguistic Training, and Pure Logic, understood in its boundary-setting role. The result is an account of knowledge that preserves realism without dogmatism and clarifies how justification functions in ordinary epistemic life, including under the pressures introduced by contemporary information systems and artificial intelligence.
Yes, that distinction is important, and as we've said, Descartes's project is off on a tangent from ordinary epistemic certainty. His kind of certainty is interesting to analyze, but no one would reach for Cartesian doubt as a way to understand JTB. Here's how Williams puts it:
This is precisely the same distinction you want to make, I believe -- except that for you, "the search for truth" looks chimerical from a Wittgensteinian standpoint, and you have reasons for doubting (sorry!) whether the Method should "be taken entirely seriously". No matter. What's important as a takeaway here is that JTB+U is a contribution to understanding "the actions of life", the actions of practice-governed justification.
As for Williams' defense of the validity of Descartes's radical doubt: It hinges on the distinction Williams makes between "the universal possibility of illusion" and "the possibility of universal illusion." Descartes believes that "it is epistemically possible that all supposedly perceptual judgments are mistaken," and Willams points out that "the strict contradictory of a perceptual judgment is not itself a perceptual judgment." What he calls "the everyday negation" of a statement like "There is a table in front of me" is a contrary, not a contradictory -- that is, it translates as "What is in front of me is not a table." So radical doubt is only senseless if misunderstood as "the universal possibility of illusion."
Williams's book is a great read, but I don't want to belabor Descartes.
Quoting Sam26
Good. My only reason for introducing the experiential aspect of "understanding" was to ground it in what we might call "mental practice," something we do, in a different sense from "what we do" in the practice of justification. But an inquiry into that aspect of understanding would be a type of phenomenology, governed by the public guardrails you outline.
As for Williams’s: I see the distinction you’re drawing, universal illusion versus the possibility of universal illusion, and the point about strict contradictories versus everyday negations is helpful. It shows why some crude formulations of “everything might be false” are incoherent, and why the radical doubt needs to be stated carefully if it’s to have content. Still, from my Wittgensteinian angle, the pressure doesn’t entirely disappear. Even if the negations can be stated coherently, the question remains whether the skeptical posture can be sustained without borrowing the very criteria of correction that it's trying to bracket. That’s not a refutation of Williams, it’s just to say that I’m inclined to treat the Method as a philosophical exercise with a special aim, not as an account of doubt that illuminates ordinary justification.
I agree with your last point about understanding. I’m not trying to eliminate the experiential aspect of grasping. If you want to talk about “mental practice,” I’m open to that. My point is that whatever phenomenology we offer still has to be disciplined by the same kinds of constraints we’ve been discussing, i.e., it needs criteria for what counts as getting it right, what counts as misdescription, what would count as correction, and what would count as defeat. In that sense, even an inquiry into inner understanding isn’t purely private. It’s still answerable to practice-governed standards, even if its data are first-person. That’s a nice way to connect your point back to the thread without letting it drift into an uncheckable subjectivism.
This is actually Descartes's phrase -- quite a prescient distinction for a 17th century person!
Quoting Sam26
Yes. The first step is to rescue Descartes from incoherence, and then his defender has to take a position on the "criteria of correction" that separates them out from ordinary justifications. I agree that Williams doesn't have the last word here.
Quoting Sam26
Absolutely. And again, philosophers will differ on whether that special aim really makes sense. Descartes thought he had discovered something about the connection of knowledge and incorrigibility. But had he? I think that depends entirely on how convincing one finds the cogito. My own take, in a sentence, is that the cogito tells me that I am, but not what I am -- what "I" is. Well, enough of that. :smile:
Quoting Sam26
Yes indeed. How far can the basic "bracketing" move take us away from our experiences as intersubjective/public intelligences? While it's correct that only I can supply the first-person data that would confirm or deny whether "I am now thinking of a purple cow" is true, it remains the case that getting this right, even in the privacy of my own mental home, means accepting the same public criteria we'd need for an actual purple cow. And all the more so when we turn to the much more complicated case of understanding.
Post #2
Introduction
The classical model of knowledge as JTB has remained a durable point of reference in epistemology. Its appeal lies in its clarity. To know something is to hold a true belief that stands within an appropriate practice of justification. The model is simple without being simplistic. It expresses a structure that is familiar in ordinary life. When we claim to know something, we ordinarily take ourselves to have a belief that is true and properly supported. For this reason, JTB has persisted as a natural starting point for thinking about knowledge.
The simplicity of the classical model can, however, obscure features of our epistemic life that play a quiet but indispensable role. Our practices of justification do not occur in isolation. They take place within shared language-games, where words already have their use and where standards of assessment are already in place. These practices depend on a background of bedrock certainties that lie outside the space of knowing and doubting. Such certainties mark where justification comes to an end and reveal the background against which our epistemic concepts have their life.
A further feature of our epistemic practices is that justification requires more than the presence of supporting grounds. It requires the ability to use our concepts correctly within a form of life. This ability is not something added to justification from the outside. It is internal to justification itself. Understanding, in this sense, belongs to the grammar of knowing. When understanding is absent, a belief may appear well supported but still fail to count as knowledge, because it does not stand in the right way within a practice of justification.
Contemporary discussion often treats Edmund Gettier’s examples as showing that the classical model is inadequate. I do not think this is the right lesson. These cases do not expose a defect in JTB itself. They trade on a confusion between beliefs that merely appear justified and beliefs that are genuinely justified within a practice. They also assume a picture of justification that exceeds anything governing ordinary epistemic life, as though the appearance of support were enough to settle matters conclusively. Once we attend carefully to how justification functions, including its graded and fallible character, these examples lose the weight they are often given. They rest on a distorted conception of justification, not on a flaw in the classical model.
These considerations suggest that the classical model can be refined without abandoning its core insight. I develop this refinement in terms of JTB+U, which retains truth, belief, and justification while making explicit the role understanding plays within a practice of justification. Truth remains the condition that marks the success of a belief. Belief continues to mark commitment. Justification continues to name the standing a belief must have within shared epistemic practices. The refinement lies in bringing into view the conceptual competence that justification presupposes and the background of certainties that allows it to function.
To make this more concrete, I outline five routes through which justification typically proceeds in everyday life: testimony, logic, sensory experience, linguistic training, and pure logic in its boundary-setting role. These routes are presented in the order in which they most often appear in our language-games, not as a hierarchy of epistemic importance. Alongside these routes, I describe three guardrails that structure our practices of justification: No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening. Together, they express the discipline internal to justification rather than an external checklist imposed upon it.
Later sections examine the role of bedrock certainties more closely and consider a structural parallel between Wittgenstein’s treatment of hinges and Gödel’s limit results. I also distinguish the expressive from the epistemic use of “know,” a distinction that clarifies how hinge commitments operate outside the space of justification. In closing, I consider how this Wittgensteinian extension of JTB bears on our current epistemic environment, including the status of claims made by artificial systems. My aim is not to replace the classical model, but to show how it can be clarified once these background features are brought into view. The result is an account of knowledge that remains continuous with the classical tradition and better aligned with the practices in which our epistemic standards are at home.
That’s exactly why I’m willing to talk about “mental practice” while still resisting uncheckable subjectivism. First-person data can be real, but the terms we use to describe it still have to be disciplined by criteria of correct use, misdescription, correction, and defeat. When we turn to the more complex case of understanding, the same point intensifies. It’s not enough to say “I understand” as a private feeling. The claim earns standing by how it shows up in competence: tracking mistake-conditions, handling counter cases, recognizing defeaters, and making the right corrections when error signals appear.
So yes, I think your bracketing question is correct. The more we try to pull meaning and assessment entirely into the private sphere, the more we lose the very distinction between getting it right and merely seeming right, and that distinction is exactly what justification, and understanding are supposed to preserve.
Post #3
1. The Classical Model and Its Enduring Appeal
The classical model of knowledge as justified true belief has served as a central framework because it captures something steady in our epistemic practices. When we say that someone knows something, we normally take the claim to involve a true belief that is supported within a practice of justification. The structure is not artificial. It mirrors the way we distinguish between mere belief and belief that has a secure place in our shared life. In this respect, JTB remains a natural starting point for thinking about knowledge.
The appeal of the model is strengthened by how easily it fits the examples that shape our everyday assessments. In ordinary contexts we do not treat knowledge as rare or fragile. We routinely take ourselves to know many things and rely on others to know as well. The classical model reflects this confidence. It expresses a pattern in which truth, belief, and justification work together to mark out the space in which epistemic claims have their home. When each element is in place, we are usually content to say that someone knows what they claim to know.
Much of the contemporary discussion treats Gettier’s paper as showing that JTB is insufficient. I do not think this is the right lesson. The examples do not undermine the model itself. They depend on a confusion between what looks justified on the surface and what is genuinely justified within a practice. Once we attend to the structure of justification, including its graded and fallible character, it becomes clear that these cases fail to satisfy the justification condition in the first place. They rest on false grounds or on a lack of the relevant conceptual competence, and so they fall outside the classical model rather than threatening it. Seen in this way, Gettier does not overturn JTB; it signals the need to make explicit features of justification that the classical formulation left implicit. That is the task taken up by JTB+U in the sections that follow.
Worked Gettier example (diagnostic use). Consider the familiar “ten coins” case. Smith has strong evidence that Jones will get the job, and Smith has counted ten coins in Jones’s pocket. Smith forms the belief, “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” by straightforward logical inference from what he takes himself to know. Unknown to Smith, Jones will not get the job. Smith will get the job, and Smith also happens to have ten coins in his own pocket. The belief is true, and it can look well supported, but it does not have the standing required for knowledge.
What fails is not truth, and not belief, but justification. The support Smith relies on depends on what is not the case, namely that Jones will get the job, and this triggers No False Grounds. One can say that Smith’s inference is valid, but validity is not enough, because justification is not merely a logical relation among propositions. It is a standing within a practice, fixed by public criteria that settle what counts as competent support in the context. The same case also brings Practice Safety into view. Smith stumbles into the truth by luck. In ordinary situations where the evidence is similar, he would draw the same conclusion, yet it would be false, so the belief is not practice safe. Defeater screening makes the point plain: once it is determined that Jones may not get the job, the belief loses its standing, and the only repair is to replace the faulty ground. Gettier does not refute JTB, it corrects a picture of justification as a private sense of assurance or a merely formal inference, rather than a public standing fixed by our epistemic practice.
Post #4[/b]
2. Bedrock Certainties and the Grammar of Doubt
Our practices of justification presuppose a background that is not itself the product of justification. Certain claims stand fast for us, not because we have examined them and found them secure, but because they form part of the setting in which doubt and inquiry take place. Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty help bring this structure into view. These certainties are not items of knowledge, nor are they justified by appeal to further grounds. They are the conditions under which epistemic justification has its life. In this sense they are foundational, though not in the familiar epistemic sense. They do not support our judgments by supplying evidence. They show the limits within which justification makes sense.
Calling them “certainties” can be misleading unless we are careful. They are not the product of conviction or assurance, and they are not secure because they satisfy some heightened epistemic standard. Their stability is grammatical rather than epistemic. They show themselves in what we do, in what counts as checking, correcting, and going on, rather than being items we first establish and then build upon. They reflect what we do not call into question when we assess claims within a practice. To doubt them is not to extend inquiry but to disrupt the language-game in which inquiry occurs. They do not stand as privileged beliefs but as elements of our form of life that make belief and doubt possible.
These certainties are not all on the same level. Some are so deeply woven into our life that they scarcely appear as propositions at all: that there is a world, that objects persist, that our memories normally serve us. Others reflect the training we inherit: how to use a word, how to identify an object, how to follow a rule. Still others are tied to domains of practice: the reliability of an instrument, the stability of a method, the way evidence is handled in a field. These layers differ in depth and scope, but they share a common role. They stand fast for us in ways that are not themselves open to epistemic assessment. They shape the riverbed against which justificatory flow is possible.
Belief is not exhausted by what we say. A belief can be expressed in a statement, but it can also be shown in action, in what we treat as settled, in what we rely on without question, and in what would count as a mistake. In that sense, hinges can be called beliefs, not because they are conclusions supported by justification, but because they are displayed in the way we live and inquire. They are part of the background that shapes our practices of justification, and they show themselves in the fact that we go on as we do.
This is also why meaning as use matters for epistemology. The concept of knowledge does not float above our language-games as a definition waiting to be discovered. Its grammar is shown in how we use the word “know” across a range of cases. The uses are not identical, and they do not form a tidy essence. They exhibit family resemblance. Yet this variation does not imply relativism. It shows that the stability of the concept lies in the rules of its use, in what counts as justification, correction, and withdrawal within the practices that give the word its life.
Understanding the role of these certainties also clarifies the relation between knowing and doubting. Doubt always presupposes a background that is not in doubt. To question everything is not a form of radical inquiry; it is the loss of any standpoint from which inquiry can proceed. Our doubts and our claims to know both operate within a structure that is taken for granted, not as an expression of conviction but as part of the grammar of our practices. This is why hinges cannot be treated as knowledge or as hypotheses waiting to be confirmed. They are neither. They are the background against which the contrast between knowledge and error has meaning.
This non-epistemic foundation does not conflict with the classical model of knowledge. On the contrary, it clarifies how the model functions within a form of life. Justification can do its work only because something stands fast. To bring this into view is not to replace the classical model but to make explicit what it already presupposes. The refinement developed in JTB+U rests on this point. By acknowledging the structure of bedrock certainties, we can make clearer how justification operates and why it has the limits it does. These limits do not diminish our epistemic practices; they make them possible.
A possibly interesting question occurred to me, reading this. Most sophisticated theology would maintain that the existence of God is certain, but not open to epistemic assessment, or at least not any assessment that would resemble ordinary justification. Is there any reason not to accept such a claim, along with claims like "There is a world" and "Objects persist"?
One natural reply is, "But there being a world, and objects persisting, are essential parts of how we play the game of justification. Their 'grammatical certainty' is evident. This is not the case with 'God exists'. We can do all the things we need to do in our practice-based justification without needing 'God exists' to be certain or even true."
So this may be the often unacknowledged basis for building a structure of rational theology. The theologian hears this reply and responds, "Very well. You've challenged me to show you why 'God exists' is indeed part of the grammar of rational justification." And from this we get, for instance, Thomism, or a Plantinga-like "analytical theism."
My point is that the wish to show the necessity of God to human existence is, oddly, in harmony with the wish to establish certainties that define our practices. Whether the theologian succeeds is of course another matter.
My caution is this. People are increasingly tempted to treat “God exists” as a hinge, but we have to be careful about what a Wittgensteinian hinge is. A hinge isn’t merely a proposition someone holds with great confidence, and it isn’t simply a belief a community cherishes. A hinge is a standing-fast commitment that is displayed in the practice in such a way that ordinary doubt about it doesn’t have a stable role. In that sense, hinges are tied to the language-game of doubting: they mark the background against which doubt and justification can get traction, and that’s why they aren’t ordinarily subject to epistemic inquiry.
Belief in God doesn’t function like that for most of us, even for many believers. It's very much a live topic of doubt, dispute, argument, conversion, deconversion, and counterargument. If “God exists” is treated as hinge-certain in the same way as “there is a world,” it risks becoming a category mistake: it treats a contested metaphysical claim as if it were a background condition of inquiry.
Now, you’re right that sophisticated theology often wants something like hinge-status: not just “God exists” as a hypothesis, but “God exists” as a necessary condition for rationality, morality, or intelligibility. That’s exactly the Thomist or analytic theist move you’re describing: to argue that God isn’t merely one more claim inside the system, but part of what makes the system possible.
My point is: that’s a coherent aspiration, but it’s also a very high bar. To succeed, the theologian would have to show that the denial of God undermines the grammar of justification itself, not just that God is a good explanation, or a satisfying metaphysical picture. And until that bar is met, “God exists” looks less like a hinge and more like a substantive claim that remains open to epistemic assessment, including defeaters, alternatives, and the usual standards of practice.
I’d put it this way: the desire to make God hinge-certain is structurally parallel to the hinge idea, but whether it earns hinge status depends on whether it can be shown to be a condition of intelligible justification, rather than a powerful thesis within a wider field of disputable metaphysics. I don't think it works as a hinge.
In looking at the snippets of the paper you have been slowly unleashing, I’ve been trying to place its core method and approach with respect to the philosophical communities I am familiar with. What is its relation to poststructuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, Criitical theory, American pragmatism, and figures like Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Dilthey, Dewey and Peirce? It seems to me your perspective aligns most closely with the work of post-Sellarsians like Robert Brandom, John Mcdowell and Donald Davidson, who draw centrally from Kant and Hegel, and all but ignore the post-Hegelian approaches to reason, justification and ground offered by these other communities.
You make frequent mention of the later Wittgenstein, but you force him into the post-Sellarsian ‘space of reasons’ box occupied by Brandom, Pippin, MacDowell and other Pittsburgh school Hegelians, and strip away the hermeuneutic and phenomenological elements which make his work so different from the Hegelians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but If you haven’t read Brandon, you might find his approach to be a better fit for what you’re going after than the later Wittgenstein.
That’s a fair attempt to place the paper, but I'll make my goal simpler. Mostly what I’m doing is starting with the classical JTB framework and then modifying it with Wittgenstein’s later thinking.
The center of gravity isn’t Brandom or a “space of reasons” program, and it isn’t a grand map of poststructuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, or critical theory. The point is narrower and more practical: JTB is a useful starting grammar for “knowledge,” but it tends to invite a thin picture of justification, as if justification were exhausted by citeable supports. Wittgenstein helps me clarify what J is doing in real epistemic life: justification has a role within practices, it is disciplined by standards of error and correction, it relies on background certainties that “stand fast,” and it can’t be made into an all-purpose demand for absolute certainty.
That’s also why I added “+U.” It’s not an extra ingredient bolted onto JTB. It’s a way of making explicit something that’s often left implicit in how justification actually works: the competence to track mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction, so we don’t confuse the appearance of support with genuine justificatory standing.
If there are affinities with pragmatism or with later analytic work on normativity and practice, I’m happy to acknowledge them. But I’m not trying to force Wittgenstein into Hegelian inferentialism. I’m using later Wittgenstein to keep JTB anchored in how our practices actually operate, and to keep the discussion aimed at epistemic certainty, not Cartesian absolute certainty.
Post #5[/b]
3. The JTB+U Refinement
Truth remains the condition that marks the success of a belief within a practice. To say that a belief is true is simply to say that the world is as the proposition represents it. I do not offer this as a theory of truth but as part of the grammar of our concept of knowledge. Nothing in the refinement developed here alters this point. What changes is not the truth condition but our understanding of how justification functions within a practice and what it presupposes.
As my teacher Dr. Byron Bitar often emphasized, “know” is a success word: it applies only when a belief has succeeded in being true. The point is grammatical rather than theoretical. To call something knowledge is to mark that the proposition stands as things are and that the belief stands properly within a practice of justification.
The classical formulation of knowledge as justified true belief identifies the core elements that shape our epistemic practices. What it leaves implicit is the internal structure of justification, the conceptual competence required for it, and the background of certainties that allow it to function. The refinement I call JTB+U does not add a new condition to the classical model. It brings into clearer view the role of understanding within justification and the constraints that govern how justification proceeds within a practice. Truth and belief remain as they are. What changes is our grasp of the conditions under which justification has its place.
Understanding is not an optional supplement to justification; it is internal to it. To justify a belief is to use the relevant concepts correctly, to navigate their connections, and to appreciate how they function within the language-game in which the claim is made. A belief can have the appearance of support while lacking this internal structure. In such cases, failure is not an external defect but a grammatical one. The belief does not stand within the practice in the way it appears to. JTB+U makes explicit that justification requires this kind of conceptual competence, and without it the belief is not justified, even if it appears well grounded on the surface.
Nothing in this account requires absolute certainty or infallibility. The certainty involved in knowledge is not the logical or metaphysical certainty sometimes assumed in discussions of justification, but the epistemic certainty appropriate to a practice, that is, a defeater-resistant standing within established norms of assessment. A belief may fail to constitute knowledge without any demand for infallibility having been violated. What is missing in such cases is not certainty in the absolute sense, but the kind of justificatory standing that allows a belief to function as settled within an epistemic practice. Gettier cases trade on a tacit slide from epistemic certainty to absolute certainty, treating the failure of the latter as evidence that justification was never genuinely in place. JTB+U blocks this slide by preserving fallibility while insisting that genuine justification must still confer the sort of certainty that marks a belief as properly held within its epistemic context.
A useful comparison can be drawn here with the familiar distinction between syntax and semantics, often emphasized in discussions of artificial intelligence. As John Searle has argued, a system may manipulate symbols in a formally correct way without thereby grasping their meaning. The parallel in epistemology is not exact, but it is instructive. A person may produce correct statements, cite appropriate considerations, or even follow valid patterns of inference, while lacking an adequate grasp of the concepts involved or of the justificatory relations that give those considerations their standing. Understanding, as it figures in JTB+U, marks this difference. It is not an inner state added to justification, but the competence displayed in using concepts correctly within a linguistic practice, in recognizing what supports what, and in seeing what would count as a mistake. Unlike Searle’s contrast, however, this distinction is not all-or-nothing. Understanding admits of degrees, and epistemic failure often consists not in its absence but in its fragmentation or misapplication. This is why justification can appear to be present while still failing to confer knowledge: the syntax of justification is in place, but its grammar has not been fully grasped.
The role of understanding within justification should not be mistaken for a call for greater formalization, or for something that could be captured by adding further logical or mathematical conditions. Formal models can be useful for clarifying constraints and dependencies, but they abstract away from the language-games and forms of life in which epistemic concepts have their use. When this abstraction is mistaken for an account of justification itself, justification is reduced to a relation among propositions rather than a standing within a practice. The same mistake underlies the temptation to treat definitions of truth as explanatory foundations rather than as grammatical reminders. In JTB+U, logic retains its proper place as a tool for clarification and boundary-setting, but justification and understanding remain internal to the practices in which believing, correcting, and withdrawing claims have their life. To detach them from those practices is not to strengthen the classical model, but to empty it of the very grammar that gives it sense.
Wittgenstein’s point can be put another way. If we try to treat understanding as an inner item, something to which one privately points as the basis of one’s epistemic standing, we lose the grammar of justification. The beetle in the box is the warning. If what is supposed to ground a claim is sealed off from the public criteria of the practice, then whatever it is, it cannot do the justificatory work we require of it. Justification depends on what can be shown in the language-game, on what counts as correct use, correction, and withdrawal. When we detach support from those criteria and relocate it in the private interior, we have not strengthened knowledge. We have removed it from the practice in which “know” has its use.
This point is reinforced by the various ways in which we justify beliefs in everyday life. These routes are not ranked, nor do they form a hierarchy. They reflect the ordinary movement of our practices. We justify beliefs through testimony, through patterns of reasoning, through sensory experience, through the linguistic training that shapes our use of concepts, and through pure logic in its boundary-setting role. These routes differ in form but not in status. They do not compete for epistemic priority. They mark out the ways in which justificatory support can be given within different contexts of assessment.
Each route is governed by constraints that help maintain the stability of our epistemic practices. A belief cannot be justified if it rests on false grounds. It must be safe within the practice, meaning that its support remains intact under ordinary scrutiny. And it must stand free of undefeated challenges. These constraints do not form an external checklist. They articulate the discipline internal to justification. They describe what it is for a belief to stand within a practice in a way that warrants the attribution of knowledge.
Taken together, these features clarify the refinement offered by JTB+U. The classical model remains intact, but we gain a sharper view of the background grammar that governs justification and the conceptual competence that allows it to function. What appears to be a new condition is better understood as a description of what justification already requires. The refinement is not an alteration of the model but an articulation of its underlying structure. Knowledge remains true belief that stands within a practice of justification. JTB+U helps us see more clearly what it is for a belief to stand there.
Quoting Sam26
Post-Sellarsianism is defined by where one locates normativity, which seems to be the same site you situate it, in public justificatory standing governed by mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. Like the post-Sellarsians, you treat JTB as a legitimate starting grammar, whereas Wittgenstein aims to dissolve this starting point. Wittgenstein uses hinges to stop explanation, not to underwrite it. Once hinges are recruited to keep JTB “anchored,” they have been absorbed into a normative architecture. That architecture is Sellarsian in spirit even if it is anti-foundational in tone.
That’s a fair challenge, and I’ll concede the affinity while rejecting the conclusion.
If “post-Sellarsian” just means locating normativity in assessable standing, mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction, then yes, my account has overlap. But overlap isn’t identity. My use of Wittgenstein is meant to limit that normative architecture, not to extend it.
Here’s the key point: hinges aren’t part of justificatory standing in my framework. They aren’t reasons, warrants, or items that get graded as justified or unjustified. At the same time, I do think hinges are foundational, but not in the classical sense of “foundations” as justified premises from which knowledge is derived. Their foundational role is structural: they’re conditions of possibility for inquiry and justification. They stand fast as the background against which evidence, error, correction, and defeaters can have a role at all. So they’re foundational like the river-bed is foundational to the flow, not like axioms are foundational to a proof.
When I say hinges “anchor” JTB, I don’t mean they underwrite it with deeper reasons. I mean they prevent the J in JTB from being misconstrued as a Cartesian demand for foundations. Hinges mark where justificatory talk stops, they constrain the reach of “why?” questions, they don’t answer them.
Post #6[/b]
4. Hinges and Limits: A Structural Parallel with Gödel
Our justificatory practices do not begin from nowhere. They move within a setting of certainties that stand fast for us and form the background against which our judgments make sense. These certainties do not arise from inquiry. They are the conditions from which inquiry proceeds. Wittgenstein’s image of a river with a relatively fixed bed helps bring this structure into view. Some propositions shift with experience, while others lie beneath that shifting surface, not as items known but as parts of our form of life. They are the points at which doubt gives out.
This helps explain why justification has limits that are not defects. Doubt always operates against a background that is not itself in doubt. To imagine otherwise is to lose the distinction between doubting and knowing. Hinges cannot be justified, and they do not need justification. Their role is not to supply evidence but to provide the stability against which the difference between evidence and error is intelligible. They do not enter the space of justification; they make that space possible.
A useful parallel can be drawn here with Gödel’s incompleteness results, understood in a strictly structural sense. Gödel showed that any sufficiently rich formal system operates against constraints it cannot, by its own rules, fully account for or secure. This is not a defect in the system but a consequence of its being rule-governed at all. The relevance of this result for epistemology is not mathematical and does not concern the formal incompleteness of human knowledge. Rather, it serves as an illustration of how practices governed by rules depend on background conditions that are not themselves established by the standards those practices deploy. Justificatory practices are similar in this respect. They cannot justify everything they rely on, not because of oversight or failure, but because justification itself requires a background that stands fast. Hinges mark these internal stopping-points. They are not axioms, and epistemology is not a formal calculus, but the comparison helps make clear how limits can arise from within a practice without undermining its authority or coherence.
This perspective clarifies the place of bedrock certainties. They are not hidden assumptions or unexamined beliefs. They are the inherited background against which justification takes its form. To recognize them is not to adopt dogmatism but to acknowledge the grammar of epistemic life. Doubt cannot extend everywhere, not because we refuse to question certain things, but because the possibility of questioning presupposes a foundation that is not itself the outcome of justification. The stopping-points are part of the practice.
This insight strengthens the refinement offered by JTB+U. Justification requires a background that is not itself produced by justificatory means, and understanding involves navigating the concepts that operate within that background. These limits do not undermine the classical model of knowledge. They show the conditions under which it can function. Gödel’s work reminds us that structured practices have horizons. Wittgenstein reminds us that epistemic life is no exception. Hinges mark the horizon of justification and teach us what must remain fixed for the river of belief and doubt to flow at all.
One way to describe what this paper asks the reader to do is to speak of aspect-seeing. Nothing new is added to our evidence by making these distinctions explicit. What changes is the way we see the epistemic landscape. We stop treating justification as if it were an inner glow that accompanies a belief, and we see it as a public standing within a practice, governed by routes, constrained by guardrails, and framed by what stands fast. The shift is not a new theory but a clearer view of the grammar that has been at work all along.
Post #7
5. The Five Routes of Justification in Practice
Justification in our epistemic life does not take a single form. It moves along routes that reflect how our language-games operate, each showing a way in which a belief can acquire the standing required for knowledge. These routes are not methods competing for priority. They mark different moments at which justificatory support is given within a practice. Their unity lies in the grammar of justification rather than in any shared procedure.
Testimony is the route on which we rely most naturally. Much of what we count as knowledge depends on the word of others, taken within practices that give their claims standing. Testimony is not a lesser form of justification. It is part of the training through which we learn to distinguish the credible from the questionable and to recognize when a speaker’s role, authority, or position within a practice makes their statement a source of support. Testimony functions because our language-games already contain criteria for when a statement may be accepted.
Logical inference shows a different movement. Here, the standing of a belief comes from its relation to other propositions. Patterns of inference, whether deductive or inductive, reflect the conceptual links we inherit through training. They do not impose external rules on thought but express the grammar of our concepts. To follow an inference is to move correctly within a practice whose standards are already in place.
Sensory experience provides justification when what we perceive aligns with how things are described in our language-games. Perception does not stand outside our practices as an independent foundation. It is shaped by our capacity to apply concepts, to distinguish appearance from reality, and to place what is seen within the background that stands fast for us. Sensory experience supports belief because our training has already taught us how perceptual reports function within the practice.
Linguistic training is often overlooked, though it is involved in nearly every case of justification. To possess a concept is to be able to use it correctly, and much of what we call knowledge depends on this competence. When a belief rests on the proper application of a concept within a language-game, its standing reflects the training that guides our use. This route makes explicit why understanding is internal to justification rather than something added afterward.
Pure logic occupies a more limited role, though it remains important. It does not track experience or testimony, nor does it guide ordinary inference. Its task is to clarify the structural limits of what can coherently be said. Pure logic justifies by ruling out what cannot find a place within our language-games. It draws the boundary of sense rather than supplying support for particular beliefs.
These routes do not form a hierarchy. Each contributes to the standing a belief must have to count as knowledge, and each operates within the background of certainties that makes justification possible. JTB+U clarifies how these routes function together by showing that no route, taken on its own, guarantees justificatory standing. To see how that standing is disciplined in practice, we must also attend to the constraints that govern when support counts as support. That task is taken up in the next section.
Right. The necessity of God for the very structure of justification is -- if true -- deeply hidden. So much so, that it requires huge systematic effort to bring it to light. As you say, this is a coherent project, and many philosophers and theologians believe it can succeed. This does require abandoning what you're calling the substantive claim, which many are reluctant to do. I would say it also requires at least some explanation of why the hinge-certainty here is so much more difficult to establish than that of, say, "The world exists," and of why a person can evidently do all the practice-based work of justification while vigorously denying the God-hinge, even after it's been carefully argued for. (This is harder than it looks, because the idea of a hinge is that it represents a place you stop, and advocates of the God-hinge simply refuse to stop with "The world exists" etc. Must they be wrong? What is the persuasion for "You should stop at X"? I've often wondered this about Wittgensteinian phil. in general.)
Quoting Sam26
This was really my point, or observation. In both cases, what's wanted is an acknowledgment that justification or rationality depends upon a deep-background source that is not itself an item for justification. Theologians probably have better success showing God as ontologically, rather than conceptually (grammatically), necessary. Which raises an odd question: Could you consistently maintain that God is necessary for there to be Being at all, but not necessary for there to be rationality and justification?
By contrast, “God exists” is, for most people, a substantive metaphysical claim that remains active in the space of assessment. People can vigorously deny it while still fully participating in the practices of evidence, error, correction, and defeater sensitivity. That fact is exactly what makes the “God as hinge of rationality” project such a high bar. If the denial doesn’t collapse the grammar of justification, then the claim hasn’t shown itself to be a hinge in the Wittgensteinian sense.
On “must they be wrong” and “what’s the persuasion for ‘you should stop at X’”: I don’t think the hinge idea is a recommendation about where one ought to stop, as if Wittgenstein is issuing a rule. It’s a description of where our justificatory practices actually do stop, where reasons run out and the background stands fast. You can refuse to stop, but at some point the demands cease to be ordinary justificatory demands and become a different kind of philosophical ambition, for example a metaphysical demand for an ultimate ground. That ambition can be coherent, but it’s no longer the same as ordinary epistemic judgements.
On your last question, yes, I think you can consistently hold that God is ontologically necessary without claiming God is grammatically necessary for rationality and justification. That’s basically the difference between a metaphysical thesis and a thesis about the conditions of intelligible justification. A person could say: “God is the ground of Being,” while also saying: “human justificatory practices, as practices, can operate without explicitly presupposing that claim.” In such a case, God would be ontologically basic on their view, but not a hinge of rationality in the Wittgensteinian sense.
And that’s why I keep separating two things, viz., the ontological project asks what must exist for anything to exist. The hinge project asks what must stand fast for our practices of doubt, evidence, error, and correction to be intelligible. Those projects can converge, but they don’t automatically converge, and the burden is on the theologian to show that they do.
Post #8
6. Guardrails and the Discipline of Justification
The five routes describe the ordinary ways in which justification proceeds. They show how a belief can be supported within our language-games, through testimony, inference, sensory experience, linguistic training, and the boundary-setting role of pure logic. Yet a route is not, by itself, a guarantee that a belief has the standing required for knowledge. A belief can travel along one of these routes and still fail to count as knowledge because something in the justificatory situation does not have the right shape.
This is why it is helpful to make explicit a set of guardrails, not as additions to the classical model, but as clarifications of what our practices already require when we speak carefully. These guardrails articulate constraints that belong to justification as it functions within a practice. Their point is grammatical. They mark what it is for justificatory support to count as support within a language-game, rather than as something that merely looks supportive from a distance.
I call these guardrails No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening.
6.1 No False Grounds
The first guardrail is straightforward. A belief cannot be justified when the support doing the work is false in a way that matters to the case. This is not a demand for certainty. It is a demand that the grounds on which the belief is placed in standing not be defective at the point where the practice treats the defect as disqualifying. When a belief is supported by a mistaken identification, a fabricated report, a misdescribed circumstance, or a misapplied concept, the belief may still be true, but its standing is not the standing of knowledge. It is not properly grounded within the practice.
This is one reason Gettier-style constructions do not function as counterexamples to JTB. They rely on the appearance of justificatory support while allowing false grounds to do essential work. Once justification is understood, as argued above, as a standing within an epistemic practice rather than the mere presence of supporting considerations, the pressure of these cases dissolves. What they reveal is not a defect in the classical model, but the need for greater care in describing what counts as genuine justification.
No False Grounds therefore clarifies the discipline internal to our epistemic life. It is not a philosophical invention. It is already present in the way we withdraw standing when a belief is traced back to something that is not so.
Post #9[/b]
6.2 Practice Safety
The second guardrail concerns stability. In ordinary life we distinguish between a belief that is true and a belief that is true in a way that is secure enough to count as knowledge. Practice Safety names this distinction without turning it into a demand for infallibility. A belief is practice safe when, given the way it is supported, it would not easily have been wrong under the nearby variations that the practice itself treats as relevant.
This matters because a belief can be true by luck, and yet still look supported. In such a case the belief has a kind of success, but it does not have the standing of knowledge. Knowledge is not merely arriving at the truth. It is arriving there in a way that fits the discipline of a practice of justification. Practice Safety captures the sense in which our language-games require more than coincidence, not by imposing an abstract condition, but by reflecting the ordinary difference between what is dependable and what merely happens to work out in a single instance.
The point applies across all five routes. Testimony is practice safe when the source and the circumstances supply stable standing for the report, not a fortunate accident. Inference is practice safe when the transitions hold in the way the practice requires, not only in the one case where they happen to land correctly. Sensory experience is practice safe when the conditions are not the sort that regularly generate error signals. Linguistic training is practice safe when the relevant concepts are applied in the way the language-game calls for, not in a way that merely sounds right. Pure logic, in its boundary setting role, is practice safe when it draws limits of sense correctly, rather than excluding or permitting claims by a mistake in grammar.
Practice Safety therefore records a feature of our epistemic practices that many discussions of knowledge ignore. We do not treat every true belief with surface support as knowledge. We treat knowledge as something that stands within a stable pattern of justification, stable in the sense our practices recognize.
Good, that works for me. And we can notice that the liminal area between the two projects would lie in how to understand the term "stand fast". It has to refer to something different than ontology, but exactly how would we characterize what it is that is standing fast? And in what space, so to speak, does this occur -- is it strictly a linguistic/grammatical inquiry?
Quoting Sam26
I'm not sure I agree with this. It implies that Witt is innocently noting a fact of the matter -- "Here is where our justificatory practices stop" -- rather than making a recommendation to avoid what he considers to be nonsense or, indeed, a kind of mental illness. If the question were really so simple, everyone would be a Wittgensteinian, and that would be that. Closer to the truth, I think, is what's implied in your phrase "at some point," and what Witt thought happened after that point.
The point at which an exploration of language becomes a metaphysical inquiry is far from clear, I would say. And while you generously call coherent "a metaphysical demand for an ultimate ground," I'm really not sure Witt would. Isn't his attitude more like "Fine, go ahead and refuse to stop at the point I've indicated, but what you think you're doing is no longer what you're in fact doing. So you really should comport your practice with what I'm showing you to be the limits of sensible discourse"? Two different references for "ought," I guess. It's as if someone said, "I'm going to win this 500-yd foot race by running 1,000 yards." Witt might reply, "You ought to stop at 500 yards, not because that's better in some way, but because past 500 yards you're no longer running the race." He's not saying, "The race ought to stop at 500 yards." That's the part he claims he's merely indicating, as a fact. But you should stop there, if you want to still be part of this practice.
A hinge, or related group of hinges, is meant to be where epistemic justification stops. But any unclarity about what counts as justification is going to be a problem for Witt as much as for JTB. That's part of why I like your work on this topic. An explanation of justification must itself be justified, and that's why you're writing your paper. You don't claim to be able to simply show the place where "justification" now holds water as a concept; you argue for it carefully. I often wish Witt was as careful, brilliant aphorist though he was. But then I've only read parts of "On Certainty," so I may be talking out my ass.
Here’s the crucial point: hinges don’t function as claims inside our epistemic framework, they function as the framework. They aren’t supported by evidence in the ordinary way, and they aren’t normally overturned by ordinary counterevidence, because they are what make evidence, counterevidence, mistake, and correction intelligible in the first place. If a hinge were routinely up for the same kind of assessment as ordinary propositions, if it had the same kind of defeaters and the same criteria of confirmation as the claims we test within inquiry, then it wouldn’t be doing hinge work. It would just be another hypothesis among hypotheses. That’s why doubting everything at once doesn’t produce a deeper epistemology, it dissolves the background that makes doubt possible.
Second, on whether Witt is merely “innocently noting a fact.” I think this is where the hinge point is easy to miss. It can sound as if Witt is mainly giving a recommendation, “stop here or you’re doing nonsense.” But a hinge isn’t a proposition we choose to stop with because we’re tired of explaining. It’s what has to stand fast for the practice of giving and asking for reasons to have traction at all. So when Witt indicates a stopping point, the point isn’t “here is where I recommend you stop.” It’s “past this point your demands no longer operate as epistemic demands.” The “ought” is internal to the practice, not moral policing. Your race analogy captures it: past 500 yards you may still be running, but you’re no longer running that race. Likewise, you can refuse to stop, but then you’ve shifted from ordinary epistemic assessment into a different philosophical ambition, a demand for an ultimate ground.
That’s also why everyone isn’t automatically a Wittgensteinian. The disagreement isn’t whether practices have hinges, they do. The disagreement is where to locate them, how to describe them (I think there's a hierarchy of hinges), and whether someone’s philosophical demand has genuinely left the space of epistemic assessment or is still a legitimate request for further justification within it. My paper is trying to make those boundaries explicit without using hinge talk as a conversation-stopper.
Finally, I agree completely that unclarity about justification is a problem for Witt and for me. That’s why I’m writing the paper. Hinges are unavoidable, and they mark a legitimate limit: you can’t treat justifiication as an all-purpose demand that reaches all the way down. What you can do is make the standards of justificatory standing explicit, error, correction, defeaters, and the role of understanding in tracking mistake-conditions, so that “this is where we stop” isn’t a gesture, it’s a disciplined account of how our epistemic life actually works.
No, the hinges are neither habitual nor pragmatic/convenient. But . . . "By which we take ourselves to be in contact" -- that's the rub. What is the practice being described which can result in contact with reality, aka, that which ontology studies? This question isn't limited to Witt-related thought, of course, but nor do the Wittgensteinian moves render it unproblematic.
Another way of saying it: To carry ontological commitments -- which I agree that hinges do -- is not to be part of what ontology studies or describes. There remains the question of the status of our epistemic practices as they relate to what we're pleased to call "reality." That is an Ur-metaphysical question, so possibly out of bounds for the Witt line of thought?
More to say about the rest of your reply -- as always, you nail the issues beautifully -- but gotta run now.
This having just read the first post. (I feel I should always say that all my statements of the way I take things to work are meant as provisional and questioning (brainstorming, however arrogant in appearance), subject to being accepted or clarified.)
Interesting juxtaposition. Unrelated essentially, but there are other kinds of “knowledge” than propositions with justification, like “I know how to put together a gun”, or, at least, the justification is putting together the gun. Or, as in On Certainty, “I know you are in pain”, as I walk away, or, alternatively, sit by your hospital bedside to console you. Again, maybe tangential, but just to mention cases outside the dichotomy of, let’s call it emotional vs rational, or to note these are legitimate (non-“private”) while still individual (vs general) or even personal.
Quoting Sam26
All I know about this to comment on is that the confusion attempting to be addressed is because people imagine knowing or understanding as objects, which we “have” or which are an internal state, instead of a judgment we make (based on criteria), i.e., they are not “physical”, but logical. “You know, you don’t.” If knowing or understanding is like an object that I possess, and then it turns out that I didn’t know, they ask: where/when was the understanding? instead of seeing the whole process and, as Sam says, the place of poor judgment, errors, misunderstandings, rectification, etc.
In some cases justifiable knowledge might not have, or at least require, justification, say, if it is uncontested. One reason being that justifications are not necessary beforehand, showing that knowledge is claimed, and so is something in time, an event, but also that it is claimed by someone. As with reasons (a different matter), we provide justification after the fact—though we may gather it beforehand—because we justify it to others, though the (philosophical) ideal is that it is to/for everyone, and even imagined as apart from anyone (wishing it were not a matter of judgment, but undeniable, thus forceful—able to change behavior or set “norms”).
Now a claim of knowledge may legitimately rest on authority. If you are an expert, that can be all we need as justification that you know. The proof is still in the pudding, but I bring this up because a claim to know is a stance that I take analogous to a promise to another [from Austen], that puts me—my authority and reputation—on the line, different than just saying (unsure, shrugging) “I believe(?) [think…] it’s…”. If I claim to know, I’m asking to be trusted, subject not just to being wrong, but being delegitimized, losing standing. Relatedly, a belief is not always a claim that is not justified, but can also just be a guess that is afterwards verified. So we don’t hold a person’s feet to the fire in the same way with belief as when they claim to know. An aside, the authority of conviction is not a claim of knowledge, nor even a strong belief (feeling) that a claim is true, but a willingness to be true to something (a claim of who I am, what I stand for).
Quoting Sam26
We may need to differentiate justifying knowledge from understanding. I would take “understanding” as, with the gun example, a claim that is demonstrated. “Do you understand?” “[Claim] I understand.” “Then show me… how to long divide, build a cabinet, critique a poem, justify a claim to know, etc.” When I claim that I understand, I subject myself to judgment, rather than, or more than, with a claim to knowledge, which, apart from, say, correctness, is subject to ongoing responsibility (to its promise).
But this also leads to whether judging what is knowledge (or whether I know) sometimes relies on different types of criteria depending on the case. It seems the variety of criteria is sometimes a matter of interest in the question. If I say I know a tune that is playing, I may be asked to give the title of the song (right/wrong), or to hum the rest of it. I may hum poorly but enough to verify it is the same song I claimed to know, but one could say I am not justified to claim I know it (well). Also, I could claim I know Bigfoot exists. When asked for a justification, I might say that I saw it. And in some cases, witnessing first-hand is considered evidence of knowledge, as in court, but then the legitimacy of the witness comes under judgment (with particular criteria), but differently then a claim to authority.
So yes, to make a claim to knowledge (of the justified kind), we should be familiar with (understand) the standards for justification. This may be part of Sam’s animus here, to say that: not only can a claim to knowledge be wrong, but illegitimate, because of a misunderstanding of the criteria for justification. I might know the answer about the elements of water, but I don’t need to understand chemistry. What I do understand (demonstrate) though is the way truth and falsity are judged, through verification. If we make a claim to knowledge without understanding the workings and criteria for justification, I would think we break them, or ignore them. Witnesses can be impeached, evidence can be illegitimate, and experts can be discredited, but are there consequences of not understanding/demonstrating the standards of justification? There is the abuse of ignoring them and simply relying on authority (say, power), but there are also abuses in not accepting justification, say, in wrongly delegitimizing a claimant, perhaps even because of or through the use of criteria of justification.
I think that’s the right pressure point, and I don’t want to dodge it with Wittgenstein slogans.
When I say by which we take ourselves to be in contact with reality, I’m not trying to smuggle in a practice that gives us access to Being. I mean something more minimal, i.e., that our ordinary epistemic practices already operate with a contrast between getting it right and getting it wrong, between correction and mistake, between appearance and reality. Hinges are part of what makes that contrast intelligible. They don’t secure contact with reality, they are the background commitments that make the very idea of contact, miscontact, error, and correction usable.
So, I agree that carrying ontological commitments is not the same as doing ontology. Hinge talk isn’t an ontology and it doesn’t settle ontology. What it does is clarify the foundational/bedrock commitments under which ontological discourse, or any discourse can even get off the ground. In that sense it’s neither merely a pragmatic convenience nor a metaphysical proof. It’s a claim about the grammar (Wittgensteinian grammar of course).
On the fundamental metaphysical question about the status of our practices in relation to reality: yes, that question remains. Wittgenstein doesn’t abolish it. What his line of thought does is block a certain way of posing it, the way that tries to demand a justification for the whole framework while still using the framework’s notions of justification, evidence, and correction. If you ask the Ur-question as a metaphysical project, fine. My point is just that it’s no longer an ordinary epistemic demand, and it can’t be answered by ordinary justificatory moves, because those moves presuppose the very standing-fast background under discussion.
I’d say it this way. Hinges have ontological commitments, and in that sense they touch ontology. But they don’t deliver ontology. They set the stage on which ontological arguments can be intelligible, and they explain why some global demands for justification misfire: not because reality is off limits, but because the demand is asking for a kind of validation that cannot be supplied without circularity or infinite regress.
I don't want to make the thread all about hinges, but I also don't want to not take questions about hinges.
Post #10[/b]
6.3 Defeater Screening
The third guardrail concerns challenge. Justification is not only a matter of placing a belief within support. It is also a matter of whether that standing survives relevant disruption. Defeater Screening names the fact that, within our practices, certain challenges count as undermining, and when they are present and undefeated the belief no longer has the standing required for knowledge.
This does not mean that one must answer every skeptical possibility. Our language-games do not treat every imaginable doubt as relevant. What matters is the kind of defeater that the practice itself recognizes as bearing on the standing of the claim. Sometimes a defeater shows that the grounds were false. Sometimes it shows that the route was misapplied, that the inference did not hold, that the perceptual situation was misleading, that the testimony lacked standing, or that a concept was applied outside its proper range. In each case the issue is not private reflection but public standing. A belief is not counted as knowledge when it stands under an undefeated challenge that the practice takes to be disqualifying.
Defeater Screening therefore belongs to the grammar of justification. It is part of what it is for a belief to stand properly within a practice, rather than to be held in a way that collapses under the first relevant counter-consideration.
On that score, I agree that knowing and understanding aren’t inner objects we possess. They’re statuses we attribute within practices, and practices have standards for what counts as getting it right and what counts as correction. That’s why I talk about justificatory standing rather than private confidence or conviction.
Where the “+U” bites is this: in the propositional cases I’m focused on, understanding is competence with mistake-conditions. It’s being able to say what would count against the claim, what would defeat it, and what would correct it. That’s what keeps justification from collapsing into citation, authority, or lucky success.
And on authority: yes, propositional knowledge often rests on testimony and expertise, but authority isn’t self-certifying. It’s answerable to provenance, track record, and defeaters. If someone can’t track those, then there's an obvious problem, and that is exactly what many Gettier style worries are seeming to expose.
Where I separate myself. Contemporary hinge epistemology often gets stuck arguing over one global theory of what hinges are, or over whether hinge frameworks really deliver the anti-skeptical payoff people want. You can see that pressure in recent work that argues the prominent “framework” formulations don’t succeed on their own terms. My paper isn’t mainly trying to win that internal hinge debate. I use hinges to mark the structural background of epistemic assessment, and then I focus on what actually disciplines claims to propositional knowledge inside language-games and forms of life.
My distinctive move: I start with JTB as a familiar grammar for propositional knowing, then I tighten the “J” condition with explicit guardrails, and I treat “+U” as a clarification of justificatory standing, not a fourth ingredient. The separate the person who can track mistake conditions, defeaters, and correction, from the person who can only recite the right conclusion. That’s also why testimony matters so much in my account, it’s not a lesser substitute for real knowledge, it’s a primary route that has to be disciplined by the same practice governed rules.
One more divergence, and I’m happy to own it. I treat hinges as arational and foundational, and I also think they carry ontological commitments. That’s stronger than a purely “methodological” reading, but it explains why global skepticism misfires, viz., it tries to call into question the very background that gives doubt, checking, and correction their sense. (Whether you want to call that a “solution” or a “dissolution” is secondary.)
OK, good enough.
Quoting Sam26
Also OK, as long as we don't get too excited about "appearance and reality." That, as you say, is a different metaphysical animal in most philosophical approaches.
Quoting Sam26
Fair enough. I don't want to pull you away from the focus of the thread, though I think we both agree that JTB+U is an attempt to shore up a strong notion of what justification actually means, which requires the hinge idea to carry a lot of weight, as a limit point for ordinary epistemic justification.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This example raises a possibly disconcerting question. Suppose what I say is, "I know I've heard that tune before." Is there any justification I can be asked for, or can offer? This seems different from the earlier "purple cow" example, where we can separate out "purple," "cow", etc., which are public, from the private data of "I am thinking of . . ." What would be the equivalent public criteria for "to know one has heard before"?
Returning to your earlier post from yesterday:
Quoting Sam26
So the question is, Is this stopping point as clear as the one that ends the 500-yd race? The right answer might be, Some are and some aren't. In fact, it might be helpful to take a pair of alleged hinges that may be central to epistemic justification and really work through a demonstration of why one is, while the other may not be. How exactly does skepticism about, say, "There is an external world" necessarily and unambiguously undercut the concept/grammar of doubting? (I think your familiarity with all this may make it appear more obvious than it is to others.) I'm not suggesting this is an impossible challenge, quite the contrary. I think the more we understand about why the limits of justification are what they are, the better we'll be able to circle back and ask what knowledge really is.
Which is all merely to affirm what you say here, especially about the hierarchy:
Quoting Sam26
Lastly:
Quoting Sam26
A tangential question: Would you allow any of this to be culturally conditioned? That is, might Chinese philosophy's epistemic life "actually work" differently? Or is that move the same as the psychological move concerning an individual, where justification becomes an empirical study about the human consciousness rather than an analysis of concepts/grammar?
And now . . . I'll read your paper. Are you looking for more or less the same kinds of feedback as the earlier questions for the original posts?
Ask ChatGPT what its hinges are. Even if you agree with its answer, is it in a position to know what it says, given that its output is a deterministic consequence a sequence of transformer blocks applied to a query? Where precisely do hinges fit in the machine learning pipeline?
When I think of a justified claim, I imagine judging the claim. When I think of a practice, I picture the person conducting the practice. Is this a separate concern of the legitimacy of the claim at all? as “That belief is not justified.” is different than “That is not justifying!”
Quoting Sam26
I agree that understanding justification is being competent in the practice. But we do not “understand”, or “have” competence, in the same way we don’t have an internally-pictured object; we are only judged to have understood, i.e., we demonstrate understanding. So understanding is not a matter of saying (or “knowing”) something (beforehand), because, as I mentioned, it’s a matter of timing. Only in our adherence to the practices of justification during the process, do we demonstrate our understanding of justification, and so it is impossible to judge competence before an attempt at justification is made. Otherwise, we would never have the possibility to judge between a mistake in justification and a lack of understanding of justifying. And thinking we can judge beforehand ignores the same error and correction in the practice (afterwards) as with the claim.
Quoting Sam26
Is “justified” the standing? I may grant that your belief is justified, but why must that be a “status”? Because justification is the practice. Like all practices, it is the practice that is “normative”. If you don’t follow the practice of apologizing, the apology is not wrong, you just aren’t apologizing (didn’t). And the statement of a proposition as true or false does not require justification, just verification. So the correct answer to a math problem is true whether it was a “lucky guess” or not. However, if you apologize correctly, there is still no assurance it will be accepted; that’s the nature of that business. A claim to knowledge also does not start out requiring justification (presumably all done beforehand). We may request it, and the claim must be open to repudiation (not rest on authority). If you follow the practice of justification, the claim now has justification. But is it necessarily justified (reached a standing or status in and of itself)? say, as something is necessarily true if it is verified? There still appears to be the process of judging whether the justification of the claim is sufficient, and thus the question of where we stop. But perhaps these requests for justification are part of the practice, subject to being appropriate, or correctly requested.
I’m not sure why “genuineness” comes into it. Why is that even introduced into the conversation? Maybe we are thinking of participating completely? “operatively”? being able to respond appropriately to all requests for justification? Are we making a comment that justification is a process, a conversation, rather than just conclusions, only correct answers?
Quoting Sam26
The bolder text is problematic for me. I take “from the outside” as not a measure opposed to something I may have or not, but referring to superficiality, without depth. As you say, “fragile”. And so “decisive” is not the correct end, as it would be (could be) with a matter like truth, rather than a process of, say, reaching or creating trust.
And we appear to again be putting the cart before the procedural horse in judging a superficial justification “does not reliably track” (that is a critique after a request that might led to ignoring a condition for a mistake—only able to be judged ongoingly). Stopping superficially may only be a reflection of the low stakes.
Quoting Sam26
This mirrors my point of understanding justification as a demonstration of a process in time, and so, yes, not a matter of “infallibility”, but then also not a matter of ending in “decisiveness”. If this is a process, do we “have” a standing (when?), rather than stand ready to justify (more)? From what I can tell so far, the criteria here are (or wish to be) a matter of just exclusion (from participation, from having standing to participate), but I will continue. Perhaps it is a matter of holding up (appropriately) under the demands for justification.
Quoting Sam26
And here we come up against it. Are we entitled to exclude someone from the process due to incompetence? Yes. Must we? No, as it is not the description of a status (knowing or understanding), but the outcome of a process; a process that may be set on the tracks again. As Wittgenstein qualifies, we are only “inclined” to throw up our hands (PI #217)—it is up to us whether we start again. Also, as I said, how are we to (outside of going forward) judge between a lack of competence and a mistake (or even defiance)? Is the questioner the only one with the power to call foul?
This of course makes perfect sense within the framework of our present knowledge. So not sure this matters, but there is the case where a belief turns out (in the future) to be based on false support that was true/legitimate at the time. Now, does this mean we didn’t know? Sure, but that might just be to say that we didn’t know the support was false. The claim was justified. In the case of WMDs, we could say we were simply never given the time to adequately justify the claim, refute the false support. In the case of relativity, we didn’t make a mistake, but, say, overlooked something. I take this to show there are different cases, and so not just that “seeming” to be justified is not a thing, but being justified is also not a matter of the opposite being the case (being true, genuine, etc.).
Quoting Sam26
But of course we cannot face all live defeaters before we would say a claim is justified. I would suggest this again demonstrates the ongoing nature of justification, our responsibility for it (to respond), so we do not reach a “decisive” end.
As for the cultural question, I think cultural conditioning in a limited sense is only natural (how much depends on the context). Different cultures can weight different routes, emphasize different norms of authority, etc. But that’s not the same as saying the grammar of justification is an empirical study of how this group thinks. The hinge point is structural, any community that has a practice of giving and asking for reasons, correcting mistakes, and distinguishing seeming from being will have some things that stand fast in order for the practices to function. So yes, there can be variation in which commitments play hinge roles and how they’re expressed, but the need for a bedrock background isn’t optional, and it’s not reducible to psychology. Just as the hinge background of chess (board and pieces) aren't optional if you're playing traditional chess.
Of course there is formal logic, which has it uses, but I would think more important is the internal logic of a practice, some of which are particular versions of ones you mention. As I said above, there are criteria for what we consider to be an apology, a sufficient one to categorize it as an apology. There are constraints for correctness, boundaries for appropriateness. The implications of certain acts within a practice have specific implications. All this is to say that formal logic is but one practice, no better, more important, or more necessary/powerful than others. Of course, its independence and certainty make it more desirable.
Quoting Sam26
I think yes, it is like an underlying condition. Perhaps tangential, but it would be enough to say we are trained in practices (indoctrinated, pick up by osmosis). We are sometimes taught with language; sometimes taught how and when to use language, but to label it “linguistic” is to trivialize that we are really learning how the world works.
Formal logic is one practice among others, and a lot of what governs our epistemic life is the internal logic of practices, what counts as an apology, what counts as correction, what counts as evidence, and so on. That’s why I talk about objective justification as part of the five ways we justify our beliefs, rather than treating justification as a purely formal relation between propositions.
Formal logic isn’t more important in the sense that it's some master key to knowledge, but it has a particular role. It doesn't supply the whole grammar of justification on its own, because most practices involve standards of relevance, error, correction, and defeaters that aren’t reducible to formal entailment. I’m happy to say, logic is indispensable for certain jobs, but it’s not the whole story, and it shouldn’t be treated as the model for every kind of justification. Finally, I make a distinction between pure logic and the logic of deductive and inductive reasoning.
Post #11[/b]
6.4 The Guardrails as Clarifications of Justification
Taken together, these guardrails clarify the shape of justification as it functions. No False Grounds excludes cases in which the support is defective at a crucial point. Practice Safety excludes cases in which truth is reached only by luck. Defeater Screening excludes cases in which the belief cannot retain standing under relevant challenge. None of this adds a new condition to JTB. It makes explicit the discipline that our justificatory practices already embody.
This is also where the role of understanding, as I use the term, becomes sharper. Understanding is not a separate achievement layered on top of justification. It is the conceptual competence through which justificatory support has its proper use within a language-game. The guardrails describe the constraints that this competence must respect if a belief is to have the standing required for knowledge. When a belief violates these constraints, it may still be true, and it may still feel compelling, but it does not stand as knowledge within our practices of justification.
With these guardrails in view, the classical model is not weakened but clarified. We can see why some beliefs that look well supported nevertheless fail to constitute knowledge, without treating Gettier-style cases as decisive objections. The next step is to apply this clarified grammar to contemporary pressures, including the temptation to describe artificial systems as knowers and the need to preserve the ordinary concept of knowledge in an information environment that often rewards persuasion over justification.
Rule-following brings the point into sharper focus. To use a concept correctly is not to consult a private rule, nor to match an inner image, but to have been trained into a practice where “correct,” “mistake,” “same,” and “different” have their use. The standards that govern justification are therefore not hidden in the mind. They are displayed in our shared procedures of correction and agreement, in what counts as getting it right and what counts as needing revision. This is why justification is public in its grammar even when it concerns matters that are privately experienced. If there were no practice in which correctness could be shown, there would be no sense to the claim that a belief is justified.
Post #12[/b]
7. JTB+U and Artificial Intelligence: Why AI Does Not “Know”
The present interest in artificial intelligence has brought an old temptation back into view. We are inclined to treat fluent performance as if it were knowledge, and to treat the production of correct sounding answers as if it were understanding. This temptation is understandable. The outputs of large language models can resemble the surface of competent human speech. They can summarize, explain, and argue, and they can do so in a way that often passes casual scrutiny. Yet the resemblance is grammatical only at the level of appearance. When we look more closely, we see that the ordinary criteria for knowledge are not satisfied, not because the machine lacks a private mental state, but because it does not stand within the practices that give the concept of knowledge its use.
Truth remains the success condition for knowledge, and nothing in what follows weakens that point. An artificial system can produce a true statement, sometimes with striking reliability. But knowledge is not merely the arrival at truth. Knowledge is true belief that stands within a practice of justification, and the standing is not a decorative label. It depends on the routes by which the belief is supported, the guardrails that discipline that support, and the background of bedrock certainties that makes the whole practice possible. This is the first reason the language of knowledge becomes slippery when we apply it to machines. The system produces assertions, but it does not participate in the language-games in which assertion, challenge, withdrawal, and justification have their life.
This is also where the role of bedrock certainties becomes decisive. Human justification presupposes a background that stands fast for us. These certainties are not items we know. They are the inherited conditions under which doubting and knowing take place. They form a hierarchy in the sense that some stand deeper than others, and they are displayed in action rather than defended by argument. The point is not that a machine lacks a set of stored assumptions. It is that the machine is not trained into a form of life in which such certainties function as the background of justification. An AI system does not stand within the practices that define what counts as a mistake, what counts as correction, and what counts as the withdrawal of a claim. It can be updated, constrained, and fine-tuned, but this is not the same as occupying the human space in which bedrock certainties show themselves as what stands fast.
The five routes also clarify the difference. When a person justifies a belief through testimony, inference, sensory experience, or linguistic training, the support is situated within a practice in which the believer can be held responsible to standards. These standards are public and they include the possibility of being corrected in the relevant way. A language model can mimic the outward form of these routes. It can cite sources, draw inferences, and use perceptual language, but these are linguistic gestures, not placements within the practice itself. The model does not have testimony in the human sense, since it is not a participant in the practices that give testimony its standing. It does not infer in the human sense, since it does not operate with the conceptual competence that makes an inference a movement within a language-game rather than a pattern of token transitions. It does not perceive, and so it does not have sensory experience as a route of justification. It displays linguistic training in the limited sense that it has been trained on linguistic material, but this is not the kind of training by which a human learner comes to grasp the use of a concept within a form of life. It is closer to the acquisition of a statistical profile of usage than to the possession of a concept.
This is why the distinction between statistical competence and conceptual competence matters. A model can be statistically competent, in the sense that it produces language that fits patterns in its training data. It can do this at scale and with impressive fluency. But conceptual competence is not the possession of patterns. It is the ability to use a concept correctly within a practice, to respond to correction, to recognize when a challenge is relevant, and to withdraw a claim when the practice requires it. These are not private mental achievements. They are displayed in the way one stands within a language-game. The machine can be made to output a retraction. It can be prompted to list possible objections. Yet these are outputs, not the standing of a belief within a practice of justification.
The guardrails bring the point into sharper focus. No False Grounds matters because a model can generate support that looks acceptable and yet includes a false claim doing essential work. Practice Safety matters because a model’s correct output may be the result of a fortunate match rather than stable standing, especially in domains where the system has not been constrained by reliable sources. Defeater Screening matters because, while a model can generate lists of objections, it does not occupy the public discipline in which defeaters arise as challenges that change the standing of a belief. The model can simulate the discourse of justification, but it does not stand within a practice where its claims are owned, corrected, and withdrawn in the way that our language-games require.
None of this implies that AI is useless in epistemic life. The opposite is true. Artificial systems can be powerful instruments within human practices of justification, especially when their outputs are constrained by reliable data and when they are treated as aids rather than as knowers. They can help gather information, surface patterns, and organize arguments. But this usefulness does not collapse the grammatical distinction between producing true sentences and knowing. To treat the machine as a knower is to project the grammar of our concept of knowledge onto something that does not meet its criteria of use.
This is why JTB+U is especially valuable in the present environment. It gives us a disciplined way to distinguish persuasion from justification, fluency from conceptual competence, and the appearance of support from genuine standing within a practice. It also helps explain why the language of certainty is often misused in discussions of AI. A model can produce confident sounding claims, and this can resemble subjective certainty. But hinge certainty is not confidence, and epistemic certainty is not mere persistence under repetition. The kinds of certainty that matter to knowledge are rooted in practices and in what stands fast within them. The machine does not inhabit that structure, even when its outputs resemble the surface of a human epistemic performance.
For these reasons it is better to say that artificial systems can produce true statements, and can assist human beings in practices of justification, without saying that they know. The temptation to speak otherwise is understandable, but it blurs the grammar of knowledge at exactly the moment when we most need it to be clear.
This is a strong reply, and I agree with much of it, but I don't think it gets to the heart of @J's concern. My interpretation is that J is not questioning whether global doubt is incoherent, but is asking why grammar should be considered sufficient to settle the issue. In other words, what explains why grammar imposes the limits it does?
I would argue that Wittgenstein's anxieties over transcendental reification make it difficult for him to adequately address this question. I don’t think the deepest explanation can be grammatical. Grammar registers the limits, but it doesn’t generate them. These ultimately need to be grounded in the structure of our normative/epistemic acts themselves: to doubt, correct, or inquire is already to be oriented toward what is the case, toward conditions of fulfillment that distinguish seeming from being. An act of doubt misfires when it asks for fulfillment while cancelling the conditions of that very fulfillment.
So doubting is a form of judgment guided by reasons. Reasons presuppose the possibility of correcting mistakes by attending to data and testing insights. If you globally deny the existence of any constraint on the data of experience then you undercut the very idea of error, correction, learning and also doubt itself. Inquiry is intelligible only as a self-correcting process of answering questions about what is the case and is therefore rendered unintelligible under the assumption that there is nothing in principle that can settle such questions.
If someone hears grammar as some self-contained explanation, they might ask: why does grammar have that authority? Your answer is, it doesn’t float free. Grammar is the surface expression of deeper constraints built into what it means to doubt, inquire, and correct at all. In that sense, grammar gives us limits, but the limits are generated by the structure of normative acts, what you call conditions of fulfillment, the difference between seeming and being, and the possibility of error and correction.
This doesn’t really oppose the Witt line, it strengthens it. The hinge point isn’t language settles reality, it’s that global doubt misfires because it cancels the very conditions that make doubt an intelligible, or an answerable activity. The constraint isn’t merely linguistic, and it isn’t a transcendental reification either. It’s built into the logic of inquiry as a self-correcting practice, so if you deny in principle that anything can count as settling questions, you haven’t adopted a stricter epistemology, you’ve made the whole enterprise of error, learning, and correction unintelligible.
I’d frame it this way, grammar is sufficient to diagnose the misfire because of how it tracks the role our concepts play, but a deeper explanation is much morre practical and normative, the structure of what it is to seek fulfillment, be answerable to correction, and distinguish appearance from reality. That’s exactly why global skepticism collapses. Hopefully this answers your concern.
I agree with you, though many would disagree. I was curious where you would fall on the question. Sounds like we broadly agree on these issues.
Yes, though at this point I do wish we had a different term than "grammar," since grammar has such a specific meaning within language. Obviously none of us is saying that English grammar can settle philosophical questions. What sort of grammar, then, are we referencing? I tend to translate it as "mutual conceptual coherence," but perhaps there are other ways.
Quoting Sam26
A good insight, and a potential answer to the question raised above. Again, it allows us to turn away from the idea that language is actually the issue. Doubt and inquiry are practices, not units of language.
Quoting Sam26
Yes. And I'm focusing on these "very conditions" -- how should we describe them? What ontological commitments are involved, exactly? It sounds like all three of us see the same basic picture, but we're each working to give the most perspicuous account of what we see. I may be over-obsessing about the idea of "distinguishing appearance from reality," but is this really what we must claim for justificatory practices? To ask it differently: Could we instead claim that we distinguish truth from opinion? Is our warrant for talking about truth any stronger than our warrant for talking about reality? It's a genuine question; I'm not sure.
We don’t have to start with the heavy phrase “appearance vs reality.” We can start with something leaner. For instance, settled vs unsettled, correct vs incorrect, passes the check vs fails the check. Those distinctions are already enough to rule out global doubt, because global doubt tries to remove the very idea that anything could ever count as settled.
“Truth vs opinion” can express the same structure, but only if truth means “what would be correct even if no one endorsed it.” If “truth just means “what our group happens to treat as correct,” then the difference between error and correction disappears into sociology. So, the real commitment isn’t a grand metaphysics of Reality with a capital R, it’s the thinner claim that correctness answers to something beyond mere endorsement. Call that truth, call it reality, call it constraint, it’s the same role.
I believe that’s the ontological answer here, not a theory of what exists, but the insistence that inquiry isn’t just opinion-management, it’s answerable to what settles these epistemological questions.
Even if you were omniscient someone would disagree. It means nothing, don't you think?
Post #13
8. Broader Consequences for Epistemic Life Today[/b]
The refinement offered by JTB+U is not meant to remain at the level of conceptual reconstruction. Its point is to clarify how our epistemic practices actually work, and to make visible the distinctions that are now repeatedly blurred. In many contemporary settings, the appearance of support is treated as if it were justification, fluency is treated as if it were understanding, and conviction is treated as if it were certainty. The result is not merely disagreement. It is a weakening of the grammar of knowledge, a drift in the very criteria by which we distinguish knowing from persuading, and truth from mere plausibility.
One consequence of the framework is that it restores the place of justification as a public practice. When justification is treated as something private, or as an inner feeling of confidence, the discipline of epistemic life collapses into rhetoric. JTB+U makes explicit that justification depends on shared criteria, on the ability to locate a belief within an established route of support, and on the willingness to submit that standing to correction. This is why the language-games of knowledge depend on practices of challenge and withdrawal. A belief that cannot be corrected within a practice is not thereby strengthened. It is severed from the ordinary conditions under which justification has its point.
A second consequence is that the model clarifies the role of testimony in a world saturated with information. Testimony is not a lesser route. It is among the most common routes in ordinary life. Yet the present environment often treats testimony as interchangeable with assertion, as if the mere existence of a claim in circulation were enough to give it standing. JTB+U makes clear that testimony has standing only within the practices that grant it, and that this standing depends on criteria that are often ignored in modern informational contexts. When those criteria are weakened, testimony does not disappear. It becomes unstable, and epistemic life becomes susceptible to persuasion that imitates the surface of justification.
A third consequence concerns the probabilistic character of justification. Much of what we count as knowledge is not secured by absolute certainty. Our justificatory practices are often graded, and they frequently operate under conditions of limited information. This is not an embarrassment to epistemology. It is part of the grammar of our epistemic life. The mistake is to treat this fallibility as if it implied that knowledge is impossible, or that the classical model must be abandoned. JTB+U instead clarifies how fallibility and knowledge coexist. We can have knowledge without having what philosophers sometimes treat as conclusive proof, because the standing required for knowledge is determined within a practice, under disciplined constraints, against a stable background of bedrock certainties.
This is also where the distinction between the different senses of certainty matters. Subjective certainty is conviction. It can be intense, and it can be sincere, yet it does not settle anything about truth. Hinge certainty is bedrock, it stands fast and makes doubt possible, yet it is not knowledge. Epistemic certainty is the kind of stability a belief can have within a practice of justification, where the belief is resistant to relevant challenge and supported in the way the practice requires. Absolute certainty belongs to logic and necessity. Modern discourse often collapses these into one undifferentiated notion of certainty, and the collapse produces confusion. Conviction is treated as evidence. Bedrock is treated as dogma. Logical necessity is treated as a demand for knowledge. JTB+U separates these senses and returns each to its proper use.
A further consequence is that the framework explains why disagreement can persist even among sincere and competent thinkers. Disagreements are not always disputes over evidence. They can arise from differences in the background against which evidence is assessed, from differences in how concepts are being used, and from differences in which defeaters are treated as relevant. None of this makes truth relative. It shows that our practices of justification are complex and that the stability of knowledge depends on more than the production of arguments. When we recognize this, we are less tempted to treat disagreement as evidence of irrationality, and more able to locate what is actually at issue.
Finally, the framework provides a disciplined response to the current pressure to treat epistemic life as a contest of narratives. Persuasion is not the same as justification. A persuasive claim can be memorable, emotionally forceful, and socially reinforced, while still lacking standing within a practice of justification. JTB+U gives us a way to say this without moralizing. It identifies where the grammar breaks down. The guardrails make the point concrete. No False Grounds blocks claims whose support depends on what is not so. Practice Safety blocks claims that succeed only by coincidence or rhetorical timing. Defeater Screening blocks claims that remain compelling only because relevant challenges have been excluded or ignored.
Wittgenstein’s distinction between criteria and mere signs is useful here. Many things accompany knowledge: confidence, fluency, repetition, even social approval. Yet these are not what justify a claim. They are at best symptoms, and often only disguises. The criteria for knowledge belong to the practice: the routes by which justification is given, the guardrails that discipline it, and the ways a claim can be corrected, withdrawn, or defended when challenged. When those criteria are replaced by signs, epistemic life becomes vulnerable to persuasion that imitates the surface of justification.
In this sense, the account is realist without dogmatism. It affirms truth as the success condition. It affirms the public character of justification. It affirms the necessity of bedrock certainties without treating them as items of knowledge. It affirms fallibility without conceding skepticism. It also encourages a kind of epistemic humility that is not a retreat from truth but an acknowledgement of the limits built into our practices. The point is not that we should doubt everything. The point is that we should recognize what must stand fast for justification to function, and then take seriously the discipline by which beliefs earn their standing as knowledge within the language-games we share.
Ha. Indeed. I try to see disagreement as an opportunity to learn something new or refine what I already know, hence my curiosity.
I basically agree with 's reply here. There is a minimal metaphysical commitment that I would say is unavoidable; namely, that there is something that makes judgments true or false, independently of our taking them to be so. That’s enough metaphysics to ground inquiry — and no more than that.
I'm curious. What's fueling your "obsession" with the metaphysical question? Do you suspect that there is more to it than this?
Post #14[/b]
9. Objections and Stress Tests
Before closing, it is worth testing the framework against a few cases that are often used to pressure classical accounts of knowledge. The point is not to chase intuitions, but to show how the routes and guardrails clarify why some beliefs have the standing required for knowledge and why others do not, even when the surface looks similar.
Fake barn environment. Consider the case in which a person looks at what appears to be a barn, forms the belief “that is a barn,” and happens to be looking at the only real barn in an area filled with convincing façades. The belief is true, and from the person’s point of view the perceptual situation seems ordinary. Yet the belief lacks the standing of knowledge. JTB+U does not need a new condition to explain this. The belief proceeds through sensory experience, but the environment has altered the standing of that route. Practice Safety is decisive. In a setting saturated with decoys, the belief would easily have been false under nearby variations that the practice treats as relevant. The problem is not that perception stops functioning, but that the ordinary stability required for knowledge is not present. Defeater Screening also matters. The relevant defeater is built into the environment itself, namely that many barn-like objects are not barns. The point is not what the person privately considered, but what standing the belief has within a practice once that defeater is in play.
Testimony under distorted informational conditions. A second pressure point concerns testimony in an environment where repetition is treated as standing. Here the route is still testimony, but testimony has standing only within practices that supply criteria of credibility, provenance, and correction. No False Grounds blocks a common failure. Testimony can look supportive while resting on fabricated reports, altered media, or untraceable sources. A belief placed on such grounds can be compelling and socially reinforced, yet the support is defective at the point where the practice treats the defect as disqualifying. Practice Safety and Defeater Screening complete the diagnosis. A claim can be true by coincidence and widely repeated, while remaining unstable under ordinary informational variation. A claim can also remain persuasive only because relevant challenges are excluded rather than addressed. In either case, what is missing is not sincerity or intensity of conviction, but the standing a belief must have within a practice of justification to count as knowledge.
Human and AI hybrid cases. A third test concerns cases in which a person uses an artificial system as an aid. The temptation is to treat fluent output as knowledge, or to treat the user as having knowledge simply by receiving an answer. The framework clarifies the difference. A person can acquire knowledge with the help of AI only if the belief formed on the basis of the output is placed within a practice of justification that satisfies the guardrails. No False Grounds matters because an output can include invented citations or a false claim doing essential work. Practice Safety matters because slight prompt changes can produce incompatible outputs, which signals instability. Defeater Screening matters because relevant counter-considerations can be present and must be addressed within the practice if the belief is to have standing. This also shows the proper role of understanding. If the output is treated as a substitute for conceptual competence, then the belief can have the appearance of support while lacking the internal structure required for genuine justification. AI can be a powerful instrument within human epistemic life, but that does not collapse the distinction between producing true sentences and knowing.
What these tests show. These cases do not require a patch to JTB. They show that when justification is treated as a public practice with disciplined constraints, the difference between knowledge and lucky success is not mysterious. Truth remains the success condition. What varies is the standing of a belief within a practice, and that standing depends on the routes by which it is supported and on the guardrails that discipline that support. In this way, JTB+U does not replace the classical model. It clarifies what the model already presupposes when we speak carefully about what it is to know.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
On the minimal commitment, yes, I agree that it can ground inquiry. But are you also saying that philosophy can't or shouldn't be asking about what the "something" is that makes judgments true or false?
My perhaps obsessive concern with the appearance/reality question springs from my dislike of the term "reality" in philosophy. It's not that I think there's "more to it than this," but the opposite: I think there's less to it. I don't think we should say that epistemic justification can show us what is "real" -- though see @Sam26's point above, about how "truth," "reality" and "constraint" are all aiming at the same role in this discussion. Which is part of why I try to avoid "reality" as a term. I don't think it does much independent work. And at worst, it can blur the distinction between questions about being, and questions about thinking.
That's a fair worry. Like you I would resist any attempt to blur this distinction, but I would equally resist any attempt to detach truth from reality. If truth were nothing more than coherence of belief, stability within practice or endorsement by a community then the distinction between truth and opinion, or error and disagreement would collapse. I would argue that the normativity of truth requires that claims are answerable to something that is not exhausted by belief, endorsement or correct usage. As @sam26 said, this "something" doesn't have to be a full-blown metaphysical picture of Reality with a capital-R, but it does have to be robust enough to make sense of correction, learning, discovery and the possibility of being wrong.
Thoughts?
Post #15[/b]
10. Conclusion
The classical model of knowledge as justified true belief remains a sound starting point, not because it answers every philosophical worry, but because it captures the grammar of our ordinary epistemic life. When we call something knowledge, we are not merely reporting a psychological state of conviction. We are placing a belief within a practice of justification and marking that it has succeeded in being true. This is why the model has endured. It reflects what we already do when we distinguish between mere opinion and beliefs that genuinely have standing.
The refinements developed here do not replace that model; they make explicit what the classical formulation leaves implicit. Justification does not operate in isolation. It functions within shared language-games and presupposes a background of bedrock certainties that stand fast for us. These certainties are not items of knowledge, and they are not established by further justification. They are foundational in a non-epistemic sense. They set the conditions under which doubting, checking, and justifying have their point. This is why the demand to justify everything does not express greater rigor. It reflects a misunderstanding of the role that what stands fast plays in our epistemic life.
Understanding, likewise, is not an optional addition to justification; it is internal to it. To justify a belief is to use the relevant concepts correctly within a practice, to move competently among their connections, and to recognize what counts as correction and withdrawal when the practice requires it. The beetle in the box makes the point vivid. If we treat understanding as an inward item, something to which one privately points as the basis of epistemic standing, we detach justification from the criteria that give it life. We do not strengthen knowledge by relocating its basis to the private interior. We dissolve the conditions under which the concept of knowledge functions at all.
These clarifications also reposition the role of Gettier in epistemology. Once justification is understood as a standing within an epistemic practice, disciplined by criteria of correct use and constrained by what stands fast, Gettier-style cases lose their supposed significance. They do not show that the classical model is inadequate, but that many discussions of Gettier rely on a conception of justification that fails to reflect how our epistemic practices actually operate.
To make these points concrete, I distinguished five routes through which justification typically proceeds: testimony, logical inference, sensory experience, linguistic training, and pure logic in its boundary-setting role. These routes are not ranked by epistemic importance. They reflect the order in which justificatory support most commonly appears in our language-games. Alongside these routes, I described three guardrails that express the discipline internal to justification: No False Grounds, Practice Safety, and Defeater Screening. These guardrails do not add new conditions to knowledge. They clarify what it is for support to count as justificatory within a practice and help explain why some beliefs that look well supported fail to have the standing required for knowledge.
The structural parallel with Gödel reinforces the same lesson from a different angle. Gödel’s results show that formal systems have limits that arise from their internal structure, limits that are not defects but conditions of the system’s character. Wittgenstein’s remarks on hinges show that justificatory practices have limits as well. Not everything that makes justification possible can itself be justified. The parallel is structural, not mathematical, but it is instructive. It helps us see that the presence of limits does not entail skepticism. It marks the conditions under which epistemic life can proceed.
The application to artificial intelligence illustrates why these distinctions matter now. Artificial systems can produce true statements, sometimes with impressive reliability. Yet knowledge is not merely the production of truths. It is true belief that stands within a practice of justification, governed by routes, constrained by guardrails, and framed by what stands fast. AI systems can assist human knowers and function as powerful instruments within our epistemic practices. But to treat them as knowers is to blur the grammar of knowledge at exactly the point where clarity is most needed.
What emerges, then, is an account of knowledge that is realist without dogmatism. Truth remains the success condition. Justification remains a practice governed by shared criteria. Bedrock certainties stand fast without becoming items of knowledge. Understanding is not a private achievement but a competence displayed in use. The result is not a new theory erected on top of the classical model, but a clearer view of its working parts and of the background that makes them possible. If there is a practical upshot, it is this: when the appearance of support is everywhere, the task is to recover the discipline of justification and to keep the grammar of “know” clear enough to do its work.
Completely agree.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes again, and @Sam26 certainly sees it this way too.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
This is where I've been focusing. I think we've come a long way in clarifying what the "something" needs to do, but questions may remain. At this point I want to give myself time to read Sam's paper in its entirety, as so far I've only been responding to the original summary and subsequent discussion. Then I may be better able to say more.
I do recognize we are surrounded by a great fabric without which nothing we do would be possible, but, outside of radical skepticism, I do not see anyone asking for justification if I say “The sun will come up tomorrow”, nor can I think of an example where such a statement would be a final justification; I can’t imagine the request that would lead to it nor anyone thinking that it would conclude justification because it is so ubiquitous and uncontested to be merely banal. The fact it is so certain makes it inconsequential to justification.
Quoting Sam26
Now I acknowledge our inherited practices and share what I take as your desire to explain justification as a practice with particular internal workings and criteria upon which we naturally guide and judge behavior. But I do think describing a practice as “bedrock” is to ignore that, although there are many things which our practices rely on, there is much in the process of justification that is subject to failure. More to the point, the practice itself rests, as you say, on our commitment (what Wittgenstein calls convention; Emerson, conformity; Rousseau, the social contract). Now Witt does say we would have to imagine a vastly different society, but, say, if no one admits mistakes, nor forgives them, the “force” of the practice—without that societal participation—is lost to us; they become mere words. Confession and absolution are relegated to empty rituals. Now imagine a world were no one has inherited the guiderails of rational discourse… Of course, all the more reason to make them explicit and teach others their implications, benefits, and pitfalls; so we carry on.
I think the fact that “hinges” are in a sense so certain (as pure logic is) makes them desirable as an attempt to ensure closure with some sense of force, but I would think we should be able to agree that that kind of certainty is not necessary (a requirement) for justification of a belief, and I take that to be because the way justification works is not on a scale, with certainty as the pinnacle (nor radical skepticism as its nemesis). More along your other points, the structure of each practice provides for the way in which justification is reached in the matter (including justification itself), not even taking into account an actual particular case.
All that is to say that I think the matter of when and where justification ends is not the antithesis of, or in response to, classic philosophical skepticism. I take that world-ending skepticism to come from an initial and voracious desire for abstract, timeless universality that wipes out all ordinary, rational criteria of particular practices or cases. No fact is enough to satisfy it, but I think justification is not about being more abstract and general, but more specific and detailed.
I don’t have the familiarity with this way of problematizing justification, and I’m not sure I care to as I think you’re on the right track anyway. The only parts that set the spider sense off are the descriptors like “seems” or “looks like” or “appearance” vs “genuine”. I take “seeing” here as a stand-in for a snap judgment by some other “impoverished” means than the actual criteria of the practice, and so imagining some object or “additional condition”, ignoring that it is an ongoing process and getting on with the meat of matter, e.g., “support that is either dependent on a false ground, or is insulated from the relevant mistake conditions, or is undermined by an undefeated defeater.” There is no reason to mystify justification or classify arguments before we take a look under the hood (well, there is a reason, which is control and certainty out of fear, but that’s another can of worms).
You say it is a matter of properly “describing” or “making clear” the criteria of justification (to the claimant I assume), but I might suggest it is a matter of applying them. It might actually be those to whom Gettier is responding who need the actual criteria of justification pointed out to them (so they aren’t inventing conditions/objects from made up criteria to judge the “look” of things).
No matter though, as I think you are treating it more with an eye that some people half-@$$ it and feel they can stand pat, rather than understanding the terms of the process and submitting to it in good faith—working to know and meet its criteria, attempting to cover objections that can be anticipated, and being open to ongoing correction and additional justifications (if it is “inadequate”). I would only suggest stepping away from “appearance”/“genuine” language in seeing that we reach “justificatory standing”, which is not some condition/quality or level of “certainty”, but follows from fulfilling—as necessary—the criteria of the practice (and the as-yet unexamined relationship with and to whom we are justifying).
Quoting Sam26
But it is not a matter of “genuine” or “mimicked” justification, but strong or weak. We don’t need to look past the justification and imagine something beyond it (seemingly “before” it, like a meaning before words)—our criteria are not for that. There is nothing that exists or not at the beginning; as Sam does say: it comes out in the process. We examine the justification and apply the criteria of the practice to judge—not whether it is mimicked—but whether it is: based on falsehoods, subject to defeat, etc.
If something is judged to have justification, there is no further asking if they got lucky, whether they knew what they were doing, etc., because the proof is in the pudding, not whether the cook never went to school (that is perhaps a reason, but a reason is a different beast).
If we think a belief is justified and it turns out it isn’t, that is (usually) on us, for not looking closer, digging deeper. It might have been a snow-job, trendy, or made up of false data. We might initially think a belief is justified but the work was plagerized (literally mimicked), but that is a judgment of something other than justification (it is still justified, just not by them). It could be a mistake, and not a deception.
We imagine an “appearance” to mitigate our error in judging because we don’t realize that 1) we can’t know until we start (I think Sam realizes that, as soon as we actually push, they’ll be found out to be, if, as he puts it, it is “fragile”), and 2) there is always the possibility we might be wrong (and even that a solid justification might be not the end of the matter), and this is where philosophy gets into trouble. Descartes starts the Meditations having been surprised to be wrong and never wanting to be again, so he manufactures something beyond the physical (but unfortunately still based on it). Here that means there is this extra quality of “seeming” or the claimant’s “understanding”, somehow before the application of the logical criteria in our ongoing practice of judgment.
Again, we only judge a claimant’s understanding of justification in and by their demonstration of it. There is no other criteria for understanding because it is not an independent quality of a person, it is a logical distinction—thus why you can be judged to have (demonstrated) a poor, pretty good or excellent understanding (it’s not just either there or not, as it were, beforehand). You may have training, experience, etc., but still not understand how justification actually works, which is just another way of saying you don’t do it well. If they actually suck at it, no one is going to say they understand it.
First, on the plagiarism case. I don’t think it’s right to say, “it’s still justified, just not by them.” If the justification depends on borrowed work they can’t actually own, then what they have is at best a true claim with borrowed support, not objective justification done by them. Objective justification isn’t just that good reasons exist somewhere in the world. It’s that the person can take responsibility for the support in the way the practice requires, including answering for sources, handling challenges, and tracking what it would mean to correct one's claim. Plagiarism is a clean case of mimicking the conclusion while lacking competent justification.
Second, on “there is no other criteria for understanding.” I agree that understanding isn’t a private inner thing. But “demonstration” needs to include more than producing an argument that looks good. In a lot of cases, the difference between doing it well and doing it badly shows up when the person is pressed on mistake conditions: what would count against this, what alternatives are there, what would defeat it, what would you revise if X were true. Someone can generate a weak or even superficially strong justification and still be unable to navigate those checks. That’s why I connect understanding to the practice’s error and correction structure, not to an extra mental property.
I’m with you, viz., understanding isn’t an independent psychological quality. But it’s also not identical to any single performance of justification. It’s competence across the relevant challenges, the ability to sustain objective justification when the practice does what practices do, probe, test, correct, and sometimes expose that what looked like support but wasn't.
I don’t think we need to drop the contrast the term is trying to gesture at. The point isn’t “justification shows us the Real,” it’s that justification is answerable to something beyond mere endorsement or conviction. If truth does that job for you, then we can speak in those terms: objective justification is what entitles a claim to be treated as true within a practice, meaning it survives the practice’s tests, correction procedures, and defeaters. In that sense, reality isn’t doing much work. It’s just a way of reminding ourselves that error is possible, that correction is not merely a change of opinion, and that inquiry aims at what's true or justified.
I’m with you on minimizing metaphysical overtones. We can keep the functional point, answerability to constraint, without treating reality as some heavyweight philosophical concept.
Great. Yes, it's the contrast that's important. We don't need a terminological conclave to decide which term might be the "right" one to capture it. IMO, way too much time is wasted in philosophy trying to convince people that one's preferred terminology for abstracta ought to prevail. That time could be spent actually inquiring into the concepts or structures, regardless of what terms we use for them.
Okay, bad example. I stand by the philosophical point about “seeming” and mimicry. If part of justification is ongoing, it is antithetical for there to be something imagined to judge before that process. Someone could genuinely want to be responsible, but still not eventually be able to provide strong enough or sufficient justification, and again, they may make a mistake. The judgment we may reach is not only: genuine or mimicked?
And by demonstration, I did mean it as ongoing, not a single, independent demonstration. But, in the same manner, there is no (legitimate) way to—we should not/cannot—judge strength or weakness at the beginning, by the “surface” or “appearance”.
My larger point is that I think this issue gets us unnecessarily sucked into the morass they created, which I take as motivated by the desire to never be wrong, by projecting beforehand that we may always be fooled. The actual lesson is that justification is never certain (and our responsibility never stops), even given our best efforts. Its possibility of failure does not require there be (we create) a scapegoat.
I did, perhaps unfairly, edit my last two comments after posting them. The problem I believe (looking for confirmation @Jamal) is that following a link, from your email or notifications, takes you to the initial post, not the current version.
In other words, hinges aren’t there to prove anything metaphysical. They’re there to show where our practices of justification find their foundational footing. By drawing a structural parallel to Gödel, we see that these structural boundaries are not arbitrary; they’re intrinsic to how our epistemic language
games work, and hoow systems of belief work generally.
The takeaway being: when we talk about hinges, we’re pointing out that certain stopping points are part of the grammar of justification. They help us see why pushing certain doubts beyond those points stops being an epistemic move and becomes a different kind of game entirely. That’s the structural parallel to Gödel’s insight, and it’s what gives hinges their power.
I guess I can't get away from hinges. :grin:
Now, when we say, "I know," we can be using it in that subjective sense, expressing a personal conviction, or we can be using it in the epistemic sense, pointing to something that meets those public standards of justification. My approach tries to show how these different senses of certainty all fit together. By grounding them in hinge certainty, we can see how both the subjective expression of "I know" and the epistemic use of "I know" are part of a larger, integrated picture."
I've finished reading your paper and I think it is an excellent piece of philosophy. It's careful, insightful, and clarifies much confusion surrounding knowledge and justification. On the basis of your paper I've worked up five questions for your consideration. Some of these you've already addressed to some extent. Feel free to respond or ignore at your convenience.
1. On Justification vs. Judgment
You speak eloquently about justification within practice, but where, precisely, is judgment?
Main concern: Knowledge is not exhausted by correct use or standing; it culminates in an act of judgment that affirms being. I would argue that act cannot be replaced by grammar without loss.
2. On Fallibility and Responsible Error
Does fallibility still have a robust role in your account, or has it become merely retrospective?
Main concern: Without real fallibility, inquiry loses its ethical and rational seriousness; it becomes outcome-sensitive rather than responsibility-sensitive.
3. On Hinges and Horizon-Shift
Are your ‘bedrock certainties’ merely operative, or are they immune?
Main concern: Reason is not merely conditioned by horizons; it is capable of self-transcendence and horizon-shift.
4. On Grammar and Being
You clarify the grammar of knowing, but what grounds its authority?
Main concern: Normativity cannot be grounded solely in use; it must ultimately be grounded in being as known through inquiry.
5. On Understanding Without Insight
Is your ‘understanding’ sufficiently cognitive, or is it merely procedural?
Main concern: Understanding is not only knowing how to go on in accordance with practice; it is grasping why things are so.
I take traditional JTB to be doing something more modest than guaranteeing knowledge in any infallible sense. I treat it as a grammar for when a claim to know is responsibly made, a true belief with objective justification in the relevant practice of what justification entails within the 5 methods I describe. That’s why I say JTB “mirrors the way we distinguish between mere belief and belief that has a secure place in our shared life,” and why it remains “a natural starting point” for thinking about knowledge.
This is also where it helps to separate JTB as a definition from JTB in practice. As a definition, it gives a clean schema. In practice, justification is not a simple box-check, it’s what your claim can actually justify inside a practice that has standards for evidence, error, correction, and defeat, and that treats some challenges as relevant and some not.
Those standards of practice (justification) aren’t private feelings or inner impressions, they’re “displayed in our shared procedures of correction and agreement, in what counts as getting it right and what counts as needing revision.”
I don't claim that JTB guarantees knowledge unless you're speaking about deductive reasoning (it's absolute in a restricted way). Most of our knowledge is inductive and so it's mostly probabilistic. It really depends on your method of justification. The method I provide can do both.
I don’t want “judgment” to disappear, and I’m not trying to replace it with grammar. I’m trying to locate its role in the process.
On my view, judgment is the act of taking p to be true, the moment a person makes a commitment about belief X. Objective justification is what makes that commitment responsible, not a mere statement. So judgment and justification aren’t rivals. Judgment is the affirmation of X, justification is the warrant for that affirmation in a practice that includes standards for evidence, mistake, correction, and defeat. Without judgment, you don’t have a claim at all. Without objective justification, you have conviction, guesswork, or mere assent, even if you can produce something that looks like a justification.
That also answers the worry about collapse into conformity. My account doesn’t say “whatever a practice treats as justified is thereby knowledge.” A practice can be defective, insulated, or sloppy. That’s exactly why I make the constraints explicit, viz, the practice has to be one where error is possible, correction is intelligible, defeaters are taken seriously, and standards are answerable to failure modes. If those conditions aren’t in place, then you can have judgment and even conformity, but you don’t have objective justification in my sense.
On your last line, “an act of judgment that affirms being,” I’d put it a bit differently. Judgment can be oriented toward what is the case, and in that sense, it aims at reality (the facts), but epistemology can’t guarantee that orientation by introspection alone. That’s why I keep the paper aimed at epistemic certainty, objective justification, not at Cartesian absolute certainty. Judgment is irreducible as a human act, but the epistemic status of the judgment depends on whether it is governed by the right standards of practice rather than merely produced with confidence.
I haven’t read everything yet, but I think looking into this is essential, because a big part of what makes justification important to us, is its need to find an end (or not).
Quoting Sam26
Another very important point. Not only is the claimant (and claim) subject to judgment, but there are intelligible bounds, requirements, and mechanics of what is appropriate on the part of the one doing the judging.
I would conjecture there is some interplay not only with defeating a justification, but—in what I would think was essential—also acknowledging the sufficiency of the claim along logical criteria. The point at which questions about a justification slow and there’s less and less pushing further on responses, perhaps have something to do with coming to an end.
Separately, I would also note that bringing in the idea of justification as a practice shows the necessity of there being a claimant, which introduces the involvement of individual participation and judgment (not “seeing”) but as representative of our culture and practices
Thank you for these clarifying remarks. I have one additional follow-up question: in your account, is objective justification sufficient for knowledge, or is it a necessary but fallible condition whose success still depends on the independent fulfillment of conditions?
You say, quite reasonably, that epistemology cannot guarantee orientation toward reality by introspection alone, and I agree entirely. But I would be similarly reluctant to say that orientation toward reality is guaranteed by practice instead.
The residual worry here is this: practices can be corrigible, sensitive to defeat, and historically successful, and yet still fail to deliver truth in particular cases. It seems that at some point we must appeal to ‘being’ (what-is-the-case) in order to explain how a judgement can fully satisfy the norms of well-governed practice and yet still fail to be true. Practice can regulate responsibility, but success still depends on how things are. I'm not saying that you are refusing to make such an appeal, only that I didn't see it stated explicitly anywhere in your paper.
Objective justification is necessary for knowledge, but it’s not a guarantee, because truth is the success condition. For example, I say in the paper “Truth remains the success condition for knowledge. To say that a belief is true is to say that the world is as the proposition represents it.”
However, even a well-governed practice is subject to failure: a belief can meet the standards and still turn out false. That’s not a defect in the idea of objective justification; it’s part the fallible character of our justificatory system.
What objective justification does secure is the right to claim "I know..." the right to treat the belief as knowledge, given our best efforts. That’s why I point to the guardrails: they don’t make truth automatic; they discipline the way justification can fail. “No False Grounds excludes cases in which the support is defective… Practice Safety excludes cases in which truth is reached only by luck… Defeater Screening excludes cases in which the belief cannot retain standing under relevant challenge.”
This is also why I keep insisting that the target is epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty: “much of what we count as knowledge is not secured by absolute certainty,” and JTB+U clarifies “how fallibility and knowledge coexist.”
If you want one line: objective justification governs responsibility and standing, truth governs success, and my claim is that we can have real knowledge without infallibility because our practice of justification aims at disciplined, defeater-resistant stability, while still understanding that “how things are” can definitely surprise us.
Conversion is real, and it’s actually a good test of what I believe Wittgenstein means by hinges. Some hinges that stand fast for us are local and revisable (like the rules of chess), and when they shift the whole field of inquiry gets reorganized. But not everything that stands fast is like that. There are also deeper certainties (I'm an object separate from other objects) that function as conditions of intelligibility for doubt and checking in the first place, and those don’t shift in the same way, because if they did the activity of inquiry would collapse.
My answer is: hinges aren’t all on one level (some are foundational, but others are bedrock). Some are provisional horizons within a practice, the ones that can change as inquiry advances. Others are grammatical boundaries in the strict sense, the background without which “evidence,” “error,” “correction,” and “defeater” stop having any role. Intellectual conversion is usually a reorganization among the first kind, a shift in what was taken for granted within the system.
This is why I call (and others) hinge certainty arational. It’s not that a hinge is sacred or immune by decree. It’s that hinges typically aren’t the kind of things that are decided by the ordinary routes of objective justification. When they genuinely change, it’s less like refuting a claim and more like adopting a new framework.
From what I can tell, the Ten Coins situation does not have “features” at all, to even make explicit.
Quoting Sam26
This case doesn’t even have any criteria, or mechanics, or judgments (what you might call “linguistic training”) for the relation between coins and jobs. It is obviously philosophy trying to shoehorn formal logic onto a situation without any viable alternative. The fact that it is an imagined world actually does not matter. Wittgenstein creates simple situations (like picking a color of flower) but it is to show the consequences of imposing forced criteria by contrasting that with what we would need of a wider context of criteria and mechanics (even imagined) for a situation. Now the criteria for justification are all well and good, but this doesn’t even get off the ground; it just seems like a lot of work to say correlation is not causation. What remains unsettled for me is not some problem of “surface” justification, but a superficial understanding of how justification even works. It is a failure of the questioner.
The Ten Coins case is thin, and that is part of the point. Gettier creates a situation where the justification is basically a detachable bit of formal support that can be preserved while the world shifts underneath it. That’s exactly why I say Gettier is trading on an impoverished picture of justification: the case is set up so that there are no real practice-level mechanics for what counts as competent justification, no standards for error and correction, and no disciplined way to track mistakes. It isn’t exposing a flaw in JTB, it’s exposing what happens when we treat justification as some free-floating relation between propositions rather than as objective justification inside the practice of epistemology.
That also answers your “correlation is not causation” point. The moral isn’t merely “don’t confuse correlation and causation.” The moral is that the classical JTB slogan can be misread as if J were satisfied by any arguable support, even if the support is structurally incapable of carrying the conclusion across relevant mistake-conditions. I claim that once you make objective justification explicit as practice-governed, with defeater sensitivity and correction built into it, the Ten Coins style justification is revealed as too thin to count as knowledge. I’m not doing extra work to rescue JTB from Gettier. I’m saying Gettier only lands if we let justification be that thin in the first place.
This is exactly right. Your effort is towards laying out a conception of justification that is recognizable and plausible, and supported by practice; the Gettier cases aren't compatible with such a robust conception.
I've read your paper. It's a real advance on the topic, and should certainly be published. Where are you thinking of sending it?
A couple of comments:
- I noticed that the term "practice" is used a bit equivocally. Sometimes you're talking about our entire practice of epistemic justification, while other times you seem to be referring to more limited, specific practices or sub-disciplines. It matters because the former can't be queried for further justification, whereas the latter can. Perhaps devote a paragraph to this, showing why someone who asks for justification of how science is done, for instance, isn't slipping into the demand for absolute justification? A sub-practice can be questioned at its roots, from a standpoint that remains within the practice of epistemic justificaion. An entire discipline can be found to have a questionable "grammar." I think you agree with this?
- " . . . our practices of justification are complex and that the stability of knowledge depends on more than the production of arguments. When we recognize this, we are less tempted to treat disagreement as evidence of irrationality, and more able to locate what is actually at issue." This is a very important point. I'd like to see more about it. The ethics of doing philosophy are worth calling out whenever possible.
Quite apart from your paper, you’ve caused me to think more about the particular use of “grammar” here and elsewhere in Witt-related phil. I believe there are some important issues to understand about how the term functions – broadly, the degree to which it must remain metaphorical -- but I’ll save them for a possible OP of my own. I don’t think they affect the cogency of what you’re saying here.
I’ll keep following the thread with interest. Nice work!
1) Episteme (Cambridge), which is a general epistemology journal.
2) Synthese (Springer), which is another good match.
3) Ergo (Open Access, no author fees)
Your comment about "practice" is something I've been thinking about, so it's something to consider.
Nicely stated. I think this answers the question quite well.
Quoting Sam26
I see what you are getting at, but I'm inclined to characterize "framework adoption" as a rational achievement in its own right, even if not one that proceeds directly from refutation or evidential accumulation. My worry is that this understates the capacity of reason for meta-level self-appropriation and horizon-shift.
With regard to hinges, I take it we agree that inquiry always proceeds from what stands fast; the remaining question for me is whether what stands fast is merely an arational background, or is meta-rational in the sense that the subject can come to reflectively understand why such commitments are unavoidable given the structure of knowing. If the latter, then such background hinges can themselves be appropriated into the game of giving and asking for reasons.
Calling hinges arational doesn’t mean they’re irrational, blind, or immune to ideas. It means they don’t operate as moves in our justificatory practices. In chess, the rule bishops move diagonally isn’t something you conclude from evidence or defend against objections inside the game. It’s what makes the game playable. You can explain it, even justify why we adopt it, but none of that turns the rule into a move you play on the board.
The sense of arational I’m using, viz., is that hinges are arational because they are conditions of intelligibility for ordinary epistemic assessment, not candidates for it. You can give a perfectly rational, clarifying account about why they have to be in place, but the hinge itself isn’t “supported by reasons” in the same way that an empirical claim is, because reasons already presuppose the background that makes support, defeat, check, and correction doable.
I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework (here I mean within the framework I've constructed in the paper).
In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the rules, I don’t think this distinction holds for rational inquiry. To explain and justify the rules of rational inquiry is not to step outside of the game, but to deepen one’s understanding of the game itself, since inquiry includes the capacity for self-reflection on its own conditions. To place meta-level reflection entirely outside of epistemic normativity is to acquiesce to conventionalism. The claim that hinges can be appropriated by reason as necessary conditions of inquiry is not a claim about how we happen to play the game, but about what must be the case for judgment, error, and correction to be possible at all, and that is much something stronger than the chess analogy suggests.
I don’t think the chess analogy breaks down; I think it exposes the exact pressure point, viz., what counts as staying in the same game.
Inquiry does include self-reflection, but self-reflection doesn’t automatically remain within the same normativity. In chess, you reflect while you play, and you can revise your strategy, you can even decide to adopt a different opening. None of that touches the rules. Once you start asking what has to be in place for terms like move, illegal, mistake, and correction to apply at all, you’re not improving your play within the game. You’re spelling out the background rules that make what counts as a move in the first place. That’s not a conventionalist retreat, it’s a category distinction, which are the standards that govern ordinary epistemic claims, and they're not the same as the standards that govern clarifications of the conditions of those standards.
The worry about “acquiescing to conventionalism” only has standing if “outside the game” means “arbitrary social choice.” But that’s not what I mean. A hinge can be arational in role and still non optional. The point of the hinge diagnosis is precisely that these commitments are not mere conventions we could swap out at will, they are what gives judgment, error, and correction their force. A transcendental claim like “these are necessary conditions of inquiry” may be true in a structural sense, but it still doesn’t follow that the hinge has been appropriated into the ordinary space of reasons as a claim supported by evidence, alternatives, and defeaters. It has been explained as a condition of that inquiry.
I’d put it this way: meta reflection can deepen inquiry, but it can do so in two different modes. One mode stays inside the practice and improves our assessments, better evidence, sharper defeater handling, more precise concepts. The other mode articulates the background conditions without which assessment can’t gain a foothold. That second mode is not conventionalism, it’s not “how we happen to play,” but neither is it ordinary epistemic justification. It’s an explanation of possibility conditions, not a move competing with other moves.
From within a game, “better” is defined by the rules already in place (better play, fewer mistakes, more elegant strategies). But there is also a broader sense in which a game can be evaluated as a game: whether it is coherent, playable, learnable, or capable of sustaining meaningful distinctions like success and failure. That second kind of evaluation does not proceed by making another move under the existing rules; it reflects on the conditions that make any such rule-governed activity possible or worthwhile.
Translating this back to inquiry: empirical inquiry evaluates claims within an established framework of evidence and correction, while rational (or transcendental) inquiry evaluates the framework itself in terms of whether it can support judgment, error, and correction at all. The point of contention isn’t whether these evaluations use the same criteria—they clearly don’t—but whether the latter counts as part of rational inquiry as such or must be classified as merely explanatory and outside epistemic normativity altogether. That’s where the rational vs. empirical distinction really bites, and where reasonable disagreement can persist without anyone talking past anyone else.
How might we try to answer? What would this "should" mean? This is where it gets interesting, and moves us into the whole issue of rational inquiry. There are surely aspects of entire games that can be evaluated in terms of cleverness, enjoyment, a kind of artistic unity. Where do those criteria come from? That's unclear, but we know they aren't internal to any game as such. There is no rule in chess that specifies how to increase enjoyment, or even whether enjoyment is part of the game.
So the person who claims that the chess analogy holds for empirical inquiry appears to be saying that all these extra-chess questions can't be asked. We're urged to see the empirical practice of seeking justifications as the game, or the same as rational inquiry, such that to ask for reasons why we perform the practice as we do is to "ask for reasons for being reasonable," which is incoherent.
Now I'm not saying this is wrong. @Sam26 makes a strong argument for how hinges operate in our epistemic practices, and I think we all agree that justification must stop somewhere, otherwise we do fall into incoherence. But what I am saying is that I don't think the (literal) game analogy shows us the right picture of what is going on. We need a better image or explanation for the shape of epistemic practice that would make clear why it is identical with rational practice itself. A game analogy doesn't show this -- unless you really do believe that to ask "Could chess be improved?" is a meaningless question.
Yes, I think this gets exactly to the heart of the matter, and it helps show why the game analogy is doing double duty in a way that may ultimately mislead.
As you say, the question *“Could chess be improved?”* is not incoherent, even though it is not a question that can be answered by making better moves under the existing rules. It invokes criteria—playability, depth, elegance, enjoyment—that are not internal to the rules of chess as such. Those criteria are not arbitrary, but neither are they codified by the game itself. They arise from a broader rational perspective on what a game is for and what makes it successful as a game.
That’s the sense in which I think the analogy breaks down when it is applied to inquiry. Empirical inquiry clearly functions like a game in some respects: it has rules, stopping points, standards of correction, and conditions under which “this counts as a mistake” or “that counts as evidence.” But rational inquiry *as such* seems to include the capacity to step back and ask whether those rules and stopping points are doing the job they are supposed to do—namely, making judgment, error, and correction intelligible in the first place.
So the issue isn’t whether justification must stop somewhere—we all agree that it must. The issue is whether asking *why* it stops where it does, or whether it could stop differently under changed conditions, is still part of rational inquiry or already a category mistake. The chess analogy suggests the latter; the phenomenon of evaluating and even revising games suggests the former.
That’s why I’m inclined to say that empirical justificatory practice is a *subset* of rational inquiry, not identical with it. Rational inquiry includes both playing the game well and understanding what makes the game playable, meaningful, or worth playing at all. If that’s right, then asking whether the “rules” of inquiry could be improved or reconfigured isn’t asking for reasons for being reasonable; it’s exercising reason at a higher level of reflection.
At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions. The chess analogy, by itself, can’t decide that question—and that’s exactly why your example is so helpful.
That said, I'd love to hear from @Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice.
Quoting J
Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage.
Right -- essentially the two options that @Esse Quam Videri laid out. But I'll emphasize again, we can be unsure which option we like better, while separately maintaining that the game analogy is doing more harm than good at this point. In other words, I don't think @Sam26 needs to abandon any ground, necessarily, just abandon the metaphor. Which, given its prevalence in Witt-related phil, may be difficult.
I agree that the question “Could chess be improved?” isn’t meaningless, and I’m not committed to the view that every extra-game question is nonsense (some are some aren't). The misunderstanding is where that point is misunderstood, as if hinge talk were meant to forbid reflection or redesign.
First, it helps to clarify types of hinges. Some are what I’d call foundational hinges; they can shift over time as a framework changes. Others are bedrock hinges, the sort that don't show up as a candidate for epistemic assessment at all, for example: I am an object among objects, objects persist, there is a world in which checking and correction make sense. When these change, it’s not like discovering a counterexample. It’s more like losing the stage on which counterexamples could even count as counterexamples. That difference is significant because your “could the rules be improved?” question is mainly about the first kind, the revisable, upper-level foundational hinges.
Second, even in literal games, rules can change, but note how they change: you can redesign chess, or create variants, but for any given game the rules stand fast while you’re playing. They aren’t propositions being assessed move by move, they are what make it possible for a move to be legal or illegal. And when someone says, “we should change the rules,” it’s often not clear what “improvement” even means without importing standards that aren’t internal to chess at all, enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, and so on. That doesn’t make the question incoherent. It just shows that redesign and rule following are different activities.
Now bring that back to epistemic practice. The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.
So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place.
Yes.
Quoting Sam26
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Quoting Sam26
If we group these quotes together, I think we get a good picture of the issue. It reinforces my notion that there's nothing wrong with the case you make in your paper. The question of whether a game is a good analogy or metaphor is quite separate from the question of whether you've provided a more perspicacious understanding of JTB. I believe you have.
As to games . . . If a game is something whose rules can be questioned and/or improved (from a standpoint outside the game, of course), then it is not a good analogy for a practice governed by "bedrock hinges." I think all three of us would agree with this. Improvement or inquiry outside a set of rules is presumably governed by a further set of rules; otherwise the idea of "improvement" would be hard to explain. So I think you want to avoid suggesting that our ordinary epistemic practice is like a game with rules. Up to a point -- the point of foundational hinges -- it is; we usually play within those rules. But we can readily move to a different level at which the idea of improvement can't get a grip, since we'd be asking for "reasons to improve" that put into question what it would mean to improve. We've struck a bedrock hinge. But there is no literal game like that; the analogy does break down at that level. If chess were such a game, for instance, we'd be forced to say that a suggestion to improve chess can't be made because "improvement" only has meaning within the rules of chess.
So the main point I would press you on is the final, bolded sentence in your quote above. Why is redesign not a rule-following activity? It doesn't follow (all of) the rules of the practice being redesigned, but surely there are rules nonetheless, even for using concepts like enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, et al. Again, think of your own paper: In the name of a set of rules you carefully employ (and could no doubt explain if asked), you offer changes to the (subset of) rules that seemed to characterize JTB. But this "redesign" of JTB absolutely is a rule-following activity. If it weren't, we readers would get pretty impatient with you! If someone challenged you to lay out your justification for the improvements, you'd do it. You'd strongly resist the idea that such a challenge was incoherent, that it called into question the very idea of justification.
In a sentence, then: There is no game whose rules cannot be candidates for improvement; therefore rational discourse as a whole is not a game.
I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rather than having to decide which questions are “allowed” or “forbidden,” to map hinges once and for all, to discard a bad analogy in favor of the right one, we need only look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification are actually used in our lives. There is no answer in advance to whether the question “Could our epistemic practices be improved?” is coherent. Sometimes it is coherent, sometimes it is idle, sometimes it is revolutionary, sometimes it is nonsense, and which it is depends entirely on the language-game being played. In actual life, rules are sometimes followed blindly, sometimes revised, sometimes ignored, sometimes negotiated. There is no sharp line between playing a game and redesigning it; there are just different activities with different criteria.
You’re mixing three different things and then acting as though the mix refutes my point. It doesn’t.
I would say Redesign is rule-following is a dodge.
Of course, redesign has norms, consistency, coherence, non-contradiction, etc. I didn't deny that. The point is whether redesign is rule-following in the same sense as the practice being redesigned. It's not. When you change chess you may use things like good game design, but you aren't making another legal chess move. You’ve shifted your activities. Saying “there are still rules” doesn’t answer the point, it changes the subject. If your objection is merely “there are norms at the meta-level,” then congratulations, everybody agrees, and nothing I said changes.
Second, you’re equivocating on “inside rational discourse.”
You keep saying, “rational inquiry includes self-reflection, so meta-level reflection is still inside inquiry.” Fine, but that’s just a slogan unless you say what makes it the same kind of inquiry. Here’s the problem as I see it. If every rule is always a candidate for improvement by demanding a further justification, you’ve just built another infinite escalation. At some point, you either stop, or you pretend you don’t stop while relying on what you refuse to acknowledge. That’s exactly what hinge talk is diagnosing. Not “don’t reflect,” but you can’t keep demanding a justification for the conditions of justification without smuggling those conditions in again.
Your JTB point is a category mistake. My paper redesigns JTB only at the level of how we handle justification in practice. That's all within the space of epistemic assessment. It isn’t an attempt to justify the possibility of justification from nowhere. So, your line “you’d strongly resist the idea that such a challenge was incoherent” misses the mark. I resist some challenges as incoherent, specifically those that cancel the very criteria by which the challenge could be evaluated. That’s not being evasive. That’s basic logic.
Now the sentence that really gives the game away is the following:
“There is no game whose rules cannot be candidates for improvement; therefore rational discourse as a whole is not a game.”
It's just assertion, and it’s wrong in an im0portant sense. The hinge point isn't “no rules can ever be discussed.” It’s that the norms that make discussion, mistake, correction, and improvement intelligible cannot all be put on trial at once without emptying those words of useful content. You can always say you’re challenging everything. But if you’re still using better, worse, reason, defeat, and correction as if they have some traction, then you’re relying on what you claim to suspend.
So no, the chess analogy isn’t claiming rational discourse is literally a game. It’s forcing a distinction you keep trying to blur, viz. that clarifying the conditions of intelligibility isn't the same thing as arguing for a claim within those conditions or parameters. You can have meta-level norms without turning bedrock conditions into ordinary premises. And pretending otherwise is exactly how the issue of global doubt and endless “improvement” talk becomes performative rather than really answerable.
Sure, we should look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification actually get used. But I think you’re using that point to dodge the problem.
Nobody here is trying to be the language police, deciding in advance what questions are allowed. The issue is simpler, viz., some moves stop functioning as doubt because they wipe out what would count as checking or settling anything. If you say, “Every check is suspect, every standard is illegitimate unless it’s justified by a further standard,” then you haven’t made inquiry deeper, you’ve taken away the ground where inquiry happens. At that point doubt becomes a posture, not an activity with any conditions of success.
And yes, in real life rules get followed, revised, ignored, negotiated, all of that. Fine. But revision still has to leave us with a difference between “we got it right” and “we got it wrong,” otherwise the idea of improvement doesn’t even have a target. That’s the hinge point. It’s not “mapping everything once and for all.” It’s just noticing that some philosophical questions keep the vocabulary of inquiry while canceling the thing that gives that vocabulary meaning.
I’m not saying, “it never makes sense to ask whether our practices can improve.” I’m saying: improvement talk is meaningful when it still leaves room for correction. But when the improvement proposal is really “nothing can ever settle anything,” then it’s not meaningful, it’s self-defeating.
Quoting Sam26
But is this comparable to saying “improvement talk is meaningful when we notice how the word is actually being used in a current context. A word loses its meaning when we move from noticing its use to nailing down its definition as ‘correction’ or ‘self-defeating’”?
From Wittgenstein’s vantage, improvement talk is meaningful when we can see how the word “improve” is actually doing work in a particular practice. That work might involve correction, but it need not be defined in advance as correction. Sometimes “improvement” means greater reliability, sometimes greater elegance, sometimes broader applicability, sometimes simply “this now goes on more smoothly.” What makes it meaningful is not that it satisfies a condition like “leaves room for correction,” but that we can recognize the role it plays in what people are actually doing.
The problem with defining improvement as correction and “nothing can ever settle anything,” as self-defeating is that nailing down the meaning of a word by offering a general criterion for its legitimate use isnt ‘wrong’ or self-defeating. Rather, it freezes a flexible, practice-bound grammar into an empty phrase drained of connection to actual use . It’s like repeating the same word over and over again. until it loses its original context-based sense.
I think something structurally similar is happening in the hinge discussion. Ordinary inquiry works because some things stand fast: not because we proved them in the ordinary way, but because they are what make correction intelligible. When someone asks for reasons for everything at once, they’re not just asking for a better justification inside the practice, they’re shifting to a meta demand for a standpoint that can validate the whole practice without presupposing it. You can do meta clarification, and sometimes you should, but you don’t get a final, once-and-for-all foundation that stops the question forever. Like Gödel, the attempt to force total closure tends to generate an endless “one more level” move.
The point, of course, isn’t “don’t ask meta questions.” it’s distinguish between meta work that improves our ability to detect error inside epistemic inquiry, and meta demands that try to secure inquiry from outside, by a standard that can’t itself be justified without reintroducing the very background it’s trying to suspend.
In the actual language-games where we talk about improving inquiry, “improve” is tied to things like learning, avoiding mistakes, tracking error, increasing reliability, making progress, even if the metric shifts from case to case. If someone usesimprove while also insisting that nothing could ever count as settling, correcting, or learning anything, then the word is no longer doing the work it normally does. That’s exactly the kind of grammatical diagnosis Wittgenstein makes, not a stipulative definition, but an observation that the proposed use has detached from the practice that gives it sense.
My point isn’t “here’s the essence of improve.” It’s that in our epistemic practices, improve has a role, and that role presupposes some intelligible notion of getting things right versus wrong. If you cancel that, you haven’t extended the grammar, you’ve broken it.
Quoting Sam26
Wittgenstein contrasts situations where words are
doing something with those where language goes on holiday, sits idle, like when we look to consult prior criteria to explain the meaning of current word use. You want to contrast situations where words work normally with those where they no longer do the work they ‘normally do’. Wittgenstein would respond that normativity doesn’t function by reference to any prior categories but is re-established creatively in each use.
We can’t appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, and if there were they wouldnt thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. Wittgenstein’s paradoxes about rule following block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances.
Wittgenstein’s contrast between words “doing work” and language “going on holiday” isn’t a contrast between normal uses that conform to prior norms and abnormal uses that violate them. It’s a contrast between use that is embedded in an ongoing practice and use that has been detached from any practical bearings and is now being propped up by abstract criteria. The holiday begins when we stop looking at what people are actually doing with words and start asking what must be in place, in general, for those words to count as meaningful.
That’s why Wittgenstein is so suspicious of appeals to prior criteria. When we try to explain the meaning of a present utterance by consulting a pre-existing standard, like “what ‘improve’ really requires,” “what doubt must presuppose,” “what inquiry needs in order to count as inquiry”, we are no longer describing use; we are trying to ground it. And for Wittgenstein, that grounding move is exactly what causes language to lose its grip.
You want to distinguish situations where words do the work they “normally do” from situations where they no longer do that work. But Wittgenstein would ask: normally by reference to what? If “normal use” is fixed by a prior role that the word must continue to play, such as tracking error, preserving right/wrong, or settling questions, then normativity has already been relocated from practice to an abstract template. The grammar has been reified.
For Wittgenstein, normativity is not preserved by fidelity to an inherited function; it’s re-established in each concrete use. A word works when it finds its place in an activity, when it guides what comes next, when it makes sense of responses, corrections, expectations here. When it stops doing that, we don’t discover that it has violated its essence; we notice that it no longer connects to anything fresh that we are in the midst of enacting.
Language goes on holiday not because it fails to meet the standards it “normally” must meet, but because we are asking it to do something without knowing what would count as success or failure in this fresh, actual case. The holiday consists in treating meaning as something backed by criteria rather than something enacted in use.
Outside of situations where language goes on holiday, we always already find ourselves in situations where our language is characterized by being immersed in normative
usefulness. We don’t have worry about having to do anything special in order to gain purchase of normative meaning. For Wittgenstein, outside of the special, strained cases where language “goes on holiday,” we do not first confront a neutral field of sounds and then somehow add normativity to them. We always already find ourselves inside practices where words are at work, where they guide action, invite correction, elicit agreement or disagreement, and make sense without any special philosophical underwriting. Normative usefulness is not something we have to secure; it is the background against which speaking at all is possible.
Your worry is ‘what if justification, as traditionally understood, leaves out something essential, namely, the practical grasp of standards that makes justification possible at all?’ And your proposed remedy is: make that implicit understanding explicit, so that our epistemology rests on firmer ground. But for Wittgenstein, this is exactly the kind of move that creates philosophical problems rather than resolving them.
The reason is that nothing is missing. There is no gap between justification and the practical grasp of standards that needs to be filled, named, or strengthened. That grasp is not an ingredient inside justification; it is the background condition of our being able to speak of justification at all. Trying to “add” it, even under the banner of explication rather than supplementation, reintroduces the picture that something was absent or unsecured.
Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that practices don't have any authority to correct us. His point is that the authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance. It comes from how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together. If you deny that any regularities or shared expectations can bind, you don’t get a deeper Wittgenstein, you get the complete collapse of rule following, which is precisely the kind of picture Wittgenstein is fighting against.
Also, the “language on holiday” move is being misapplied. The holiday isn’t “making a general remark about what must be in place for doubt or inquiry to make sense.” Moreover, On Certainty is full of exactly that kind of diagnosis. The holiday is when words are detached from their practical moorings and kept afloat by a philosophical picture that can’t be cashed out in the activity. So, saying “a doubt misfires if it cancels the conditions of checking and correction” isn’t grounding meaning in an abstract template, it’s describing what makes the words doubt, check, settle, and improve do any work in the first place.
Finally, “normativity is re established in each use” sounds attractive, but if you take it seriously it wipes out the very distinctions that make language games possible. A word works when it can guide what comes next and make sense of responses, challenges, and correction. That requires more than fresh enactment. It requires a stable practice for the notions of success and failure to have application.
I’m not appealing to “prior criteria” in the sense of a metaphysical essence of improve or doubt. I’m appealing to the ordinary fact that in inquiry, improvement talk is answerable to how the practice handles error, correction, and learning. If someone insists that nothing could ever count as settling anything, that isn’t a daring new use that “creatively re establishes” normativity. It’s a use that removes the success conditions of the very activity it’s pretending to describe. That’s exactly what Wittgenstein calls out, not something he licenses.
Quoting Sam26
It isnt a skepticism. It avoids skepticism by showing that, as you say, ‘authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance’. But how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together can’t then be conceived as behind us either. It comes from the always novel way in which a history of previous practices, regularities and rule following expectations are made meaningful by being changed by current use. What is actually meant in using a word or following a practice occurs into what is implied and expected. What emerges is neither just the same practice as before nor a different practice, but something more intimately tied to context. Norms continue to be the same differently.
Quoting Sam26
A word always already works as long as we don’t treat it as simply referencing a previous meaning. It doesnt require any theoretical or philosophical help from us , and to think it does is to fall back into the desire for an external grounding that Wittgenstein equated with language going on holiday. We dont impose a stable practice on a neutral terrain that is originally lacking it. We already find ourselves thrown into the midst of stable practices and forms of life.
While I can't speak for @J, I can say that it hasn't been my intention to collapse everything into one level. I take it that the distinction between levels has been explicitly granted, and that we're now disputing whether the meta-level is inside or outside of rational normativity as such. For me, it's not about arguing for system-closure, or for some Archimedean stand-point outside of inquiry. It's about acknowledging that reason can come to understand the conditions of its own operation, and that to do so is itself a rational achievement.
I suspect that what’s at stake here is, at least in relation to Wittgenstein, is to what extent we treat understanding and reason in terms of adequation and conformity vs creation, enaction and becoming.
Yes, I agree it’s probably the underlying axis. For my part I would tend to side more with . I wouldn't want to deny creation, enaction, or becoming, but my worry is that if we say “normativity is creatively re-established in each use,” we risk collapsing into “norms are whatever we now make them,” which would seem to undercut the possibility of error and the authority of correction.
[b]Knowledge as Practice-Standing: The Guardrails Framework
By Samuel L. Naccarato[/b]
Abstract
Sixty years after Gettier, epistemology remains stuck. The "JTB + X" industry keeps proposing new conditions, but the counterexamples keep coming. I argue the problem is not that justified true belief needs additional conditions, but that we've misunderstood what justification is.
Justification is standing within a practice, not merely having supporting reasons. Drawing on Wittgenstein's later philosophy, I develop a framework that makes this explicit. Three guardrails discipline epistemic standing (no false grounds, practice safety, and defeater screening), and five routes describe how justification proceeds (testimony, inference, perception, linguistic training, and logic's boundary-setting role). Standing requires conceptual competence and rests on bedrock certainties that make justification possible without themselves being justified.
This framework dissolves Gettier cases, which mistake the appearance of support for genuine standing. It also explains why artificial systems lack knowledge. They produce true statements but lack practice-standing. The result preserves JTB's core insight while articulating its grammatical structure.
Introduction
The classical account of knowledge as justified true belief captured something essential. To know is to hold a true belief that meets the criteria our practices of justification require. But something has gone wrong. Fifty years of post-Gettier epistemology has produced an industry of "JTB + X" proposals (adding causal connections, reliability conditions, defeasibility clauses), each attempting to patch the model against counterexamples. The proliferation of patches suggests we've been looking for solutions in the wrong place.
Gettier cases are not counterexamples to justified true belief. They reveal a confusion about what justification is. When we treat justification as merely having supporting reasons, we mistake the appearance of support for genuine justification. The "ten coins" case fails not because JTB is incomplete, but because the belief doesn't satisfy our epistemic criteria. It rests on false grounds, succeeds only by luck, and collapses under scrutiny. These are not missing conditions we need to add. They describe what justification requires.
Justification is standing within a practice, a status conferred when a belief meets the criteria that govern knowledge-attribution in a language-game. This status requires conceptual competence (knowing how to use concepts within a form of life, recognizing what supports what, and responding to challenges). Understanding is not added to justification from outside. It is internal to justification itself.
Moreover, justification operates against bedrock certainties that stand fast without themselves being justified. These Wittgensteinian hinges are not items of knowledge. They make knowledge possible. Doubt presupposes something not in doubt. To question everything is not to extend inquiry but to lose the standpoint from which inquiry proceeds.
I develop three guardrails that discipline epistemic assessment. No False Grounds means support cannot rest on falsehoods that undermine the inference. Practice Safety means the belief must not be true merely by luck. Defeater Screening means the belief must survive relevant challenges. I also distinguish five routes (testimony, inference, perception, linguistic training, and logic's boundary-setting role).
This framework dissolves Gettier cases and explains why AI systems lack knowledge. It provides clear criteria for epistemic assessment in an age of artificial intelligence and information overload. The result is not a new theory but the articulation of a grammar at work in our practices.
[I'm trying to make the paper shorter and more concise.]
I've only just discovered this thread, and I don't suppose for a moment that you'll want to revive it. On the other hand, I can't resist making some comments.
Gettier constructs his examples on the basis of the observation that one can be justified in believing something that turns out to be false and that if one is justified in believing P and P implies Q, then one is justified in believing Q. These two claims underlie all the examples. To bar these cases, we need to undermine those claims. No false grounds will do it, but at the cost of requiring that knowledge that is not backed by conclusive evidence is not knowledge. Which seems far too strict for ordinary use.
The requirement for conclusive evidence is also the obvious way to prevent success by luck in many, if not all, real life cases of knowledge. My guess is that a more specific requirement, close to practice safety, is required for this. My requirement would be that the belief is not simply based on evidence but on competence. So a single success is never sufficient to demonstrate knowledge, but a sustained record of success is. Hence, someone who consistently wins their bets will be credited with knowledge, , whether or not they can produce conclusive evidence based arguments. I think of this as a competence clause.
Defeater screening is also very plausible. But if this clause needs to be satisfied before knowledge is attributed, it will be too strict for ordinary use. Part of the point of the concept of defeaters is that it does not merely create a "prejudice" in favour of a belief but creates a warrant for them - a bit like a decree nisi in divorce proceedings. I can attribute knowledge on grounds that are less than conclusive. If I turn out to be wrong, then I must withdraw the claim. If I do not, then my attribution stands.
There's one factor that I don't think you have thought about, and that is the question of propositional ambiguity. "The man who will get the job..." in Gettier's example turns out to be ambiguous. It can be justified either by Smith or Jones. If we interpreted the claim as "The man who will get the job (viz. Jones)..." or "The man who will get the job (viz. Smith)....." there would be two clearly distinct propositions (beliefs) and no Gettier case. Many of these cases can be dismissed on these grounds, but I'm not sure that all of them can.
The second example in Gettier's original article is one such case. It has a different structure. It assigns two independent propositions to a single disjunction. One alternate is justifiably believed to be true, but turns out not to be. It then turns out that the second alternate is true. Again, the example depends on ambiguity about the proposition that is supposed to be known. The indeterminacy of the concept of a proposition is, imo, the source of the trouble. Sadly, I don't think there is a solution for that.
(All this is from memory, so I don't guarantee that it is accurate.)
PS Just to be clear, I really don't mean to be unhelpful. I don't accept Gettier cases, but, like everybody else, I find it very difficult to prevent them. I suspect it may not be possible to prevent all possible cases that anyone might ever come up with.
Futhermore, for the record, I think that Vogel's paradox of knowledge is a much more interesting problem, even though it has not attracted anything like the same volume of comment. I suspect that this is mainly because it does not have a solution.
This problem was devised by Jonathan Vogel.
1. Someone (call him Al) has parked his car on Avenue A (out of sight now) half an hour ago. Everything is normal, the car is still there, Al has a good memory. Does he know where his car is?
2. Every day, a certain percentage of cars gets stolen. Does Al know, right now, that his car has not been stolen and driven away since he parked it?
3. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe with a similar crime rate, Betty has parked her car on Avenue B half an hour ago. Betty is cognitively very similar to Al (just as good a memory, just as much confidence about the location of her car). Her car, unfortunately, was stolen and driven away. Does Betty, who believes that her car is on Avenue B where she parked it, know that her car is on Avenue B?
I'll dig out some references if you want them.