Carl Ginet

The Conditional Analysis of Freedom

This is well said. But many philosophers do not see it that way. It is an uncomfortable view to take. It means that a fundamental assumption of our practical life — that we are continually free to determine which of several alternative courses events will take — is not known to be true, since determinism — the thesis that the entire state of the universe at any given time can be deduced from its state at any earlier time and the laws of nature — is not known to be false. It is not surprising that many philosophers believe that this assumption must be compatible with determinism. Many of them have hoped to make a convincing case for this compatibility by giving an analysis of what it means to say that a person could have brought about what in fact that person did not bring about. At least they have hoped to spell out a proposition that will necessarily be the same in truth-value as this one and also be clearly compatible with determinism.

The Fourth Condition

Ed Gettier showed that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge.1 Not all epistemologists these days will agree that justified true belief is necessary for knowledge but I hope that most will agree with the following more modest proposal: at least one minimally sufficient condition for knowledge has justified true belief as a necessary part. At any rate, I will assume that this is so in what follows. The problem of the fourth condition (also widely and appropriately known as the Gettier problem) can then be stated as follows: What must be added to justified true belief to make a minimally sufficient condition for knowledge? Of course, we want a minimally sufficient condition that is non-trivial, informative.

The General Conditions of Knowledge: Justification

To know that p it is not enough to be sure that p and happen to be right. One’s confidence must be justified and that justification must be disinterested.

Voluntary Exertion of the Body: A Volitional Account

The action of opening a door consists in the agent’s voluntarily exerting parts of her body — her arm and hand, let us suppose — in such a way that that action (the voluntary exertion of the body) causes the door to open. (By “voluntary” here I mean simply the opposite of “involuntary”: an exertion of the body is voluntary if and only if it is not involuntary. It is an exertion that occurs in the familiar way exertions do when they are experienced as directly controlled, whether or not they are deliberated ox freely willed or even intentional.) It is possible in principle to open a door without using any voluntary exertion to do so — conceivably a person’s brain could be so wired to a door that by merely saying mentally, “Open sesame!”, and without any exertion of her body, she could cause the door to open. There actually do occur other ways in which one can act on or with one’s body and thereby act on the surrounding world without engaging in any voluntary exertion. (For example, sexual arousal can be produced by forming appropriate mental images.) And our lives are filled with mental actions — mentally saying things, forming mental images, and the like — which, though they may affect the body, do not in themselves and in virtue of their very notion include any bodily event, whether voluntary exertion or other.

The General Conditions of Knowledge: Truth and Confidence

The general definition of propositional knowledge that I propose to defend is along traditional lines and can be expressed as follows:

When and Why to Trust One’s Senses and Memory

One’s knowledge of a fact is either inferential or non-inferential, and either fallible or infallible, depending on the sort of externally conclusive justification one has for claiming to know it. All one’s inferential knowledge of contingent facts in the world outside one’s current state of consciousness is justified ultimately by one’s non-inferential knowledge. Although infallible knowledge (of necessary truths and of one’s current states of consciousness) comes into it, the principal part of this non-inferential basis of one’s knowledge of the `external’ world is formed by one’s fallible non-inferential knowledge. This fallible non-inferential knowledge consists of one’s non-inferential knowledge of one’s current perceptions of directly specifiable appearances of things around one (direct perceptions, let us call them) and of one’s memory knowledge (retained and original, of previous perceptions and of other sorts of facts, including general facts).

The General Conditions of Knowledge: External Conclusiveness

If all justification of confidence had to be infallible then conditions (1), (2), and (3) of our general definition would be sufficient for knowing that something is the case. But the possibility of fallible justification for a claim to know brings with it the possibility that conditions (1)–(3) should be satisfied and yet S fail to know that p, because the facts giving him his fallible justification do so only because they are protected by his ignorance of, or false but justified beliefs about, certain other facts, ones such that were he to learn of them the question of whether or not p would be entirely reopened for him (if he were being reasonable), his justification for being confident that p would be wiped out. Condition (4) must rule out just all such possible circumstances in which (1) and (2) are satisfied and (3) is satisfied by a fallible justification for claiming to know that p and yet S does not in virtue of that justification know that p. Let us speak of a circumstance that falsifies condition (4) with respect to a particular justification for claiming to know that p as defeating that justification for claiming to know that p. Let us consider first kinds of circumstance that can defeat non-inferential justifications and then kinds that can defeat inferential ones.

Wittgenstein's Argument that one cannot Obey a Rule Privately

These premisses do validly yield the conclusion that it is not possible to obey a rule privately. (II) seems to be asserted as if it were obvious without argument. But it has been doubted by reasonable people, by Judith Jarvis Thomson [31 and H.-N. Castafieda [21, for instance, who have offered rules that they regard as counter-examples to the principle that for any rule it must be possible that a person should think he is following it and not in fact be following it. My principal aim in this paper is to demonstrate (II) and deal with these alleged counter-examples. But first I want to say enough