“Lycan”:http://www.unc.edu/%7Eujanel/Gettier.htm makes four complaints about my paper, and I think they’re all basically fair. But I do think I’ve got more that I can say by way of expanding on one point.
bq. Third, I believe intuitions have enough authority that if we want to reject one, we ought to explain it away. I think Weatherson agrees, and of course he is well aware that this happens often in philosophy. Why, then, is there so widespread instant agreement that Gettier victims do not know? As noted above, Hetherington put in some work on this, however plausible or implausible we think his explanations are; but unless I have missed it, Weatherson does not offer anything comparable.
That’s right – in the paper I don’t say anything at all about this. I wasn’t trying to explain why people have Gettier intuitions, and it’s an interesting and relevant issue. As it turns out, I do have an explanation for this. The people who have Gettier intuitions are (on the whole) basically sceptics who have (perhaps) talked themselves out of their most sceptical intuitions but not this one. More carefully, people who have Gettier intuitions are disposed to intuitively apply KNOW in very few cases where possibilities of error are salient. Some of them may have convinced themselves that we KNOW we are not brains in vats, or that a mule is not a very cleverly disguised football official, but the underlying sceptical intuitions are still doing too much work.
I have two pieces of evidence for this. The first is the quite striking correlation across groups between the answers to the Gettier questions and the answer to the (not) painted zebra question in the “Weinberg, Nichols and Stich experiments”:http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research%20Group/Publications/NEI/NEIPT.html. The second is that all the kind of arguments/considerations that usually promote KNOWLEDGE-scepticism are triggered in Gettier cases. The possibility of falsehood is salient, and the belief is not Nozick-sensitive. The third is that to generate Gettier intuitions, it *really* helps to use verbs like KNOW rather than verbs like know. So consider the following situation.
The Beatles tour plans have recently been changed. They will be starting the tour in New Zealand rather than Australia. John and Paul decided this, so they know it is happening. Ringo has a Gettiered justified true belief that they are starting in New Zealand. And X knows, though she knows Y does not, that John just told George about the plans. X also knows all of the above. Now consider this dialogue.
Y: Do _all_ the Beatles know they’re starting in New Zealand?
X: Yep. John just told George.
I think X’s utterance here is perfectly acceptable. As far as I can tell it is true. Maybe if Y had asked a different question, such as
Y: Do all the Beatles _know_ they’re starting in New Zealand?
X’s answer would be wrong. (I can sort of see why it would be inappropriate, I don’t think this is because it isn’t true however.) So I think Gettier intuitions, like many sceptical intuitions, are the result of the odd effects of focal stress. My guess is that they are the effects of mistaking the changes stress causes to speaker meanings for changes to truth-conditional content. But maybe they are correct that know and KNOW are semantically different. (That is, maybe sceptics were right about KNOW but wrong about the verb we usually use in knowledge ascriptions. I’d like to think that isn’t true, but I don’t have a ton of actual _arguments_ against it.) In any case, the same kinds of considerations that drive KNOWLEDGE-scepticism seem to drive Gettier intuitions when the core verb is KNOW.