Edminster wrote:Yoo-jin wrote:"The man with 10 coins will get the job" is not the same as "the cat will steal my lunch" [...] If you wanted to make them more equivalent, it would be "the cat that steals my lunch will have stripes"
No, if you wanted to make it more equivalent it would be "The cat with stripes will steal my lunch" or "The man who gets the job will have ten coins" which are both very different concepts.
Yoo-jin wrote: "the man" is a more general, abstract concept which could be applied to several different people whereas "the cat" would refer to a singular cat that one is thinking about.
No, "a man" is a general abstract concept. The whole usage of "the" makes it clear he was thinking about a singular man. It's a flawed hypothesis from the get-go because there isn't even considered the possibility of more than one man possessing ten coins. Then to add insult to injury, Smith ignores the flaw in the hypothesis and focusses on the 'ten coins' aspect. "
A man with ten coins will get the job" would have been at least a little more scientific.
Yes, if we want to be totally equivalent, it would be "The cat with stripes will steal my lunch".
And it seems that I do have to concede the argument. By the look of it, I failed to see that Zach had worded the problem incorrectly. The actual quotation thought should have been "the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket". In that case, it is "the man who will get the job" rather than simply "the man". The former being dependent on who gets the job whereas the latter being the one referring to a single entity that one has thought of.
But, anyway, this is beside the point. The whole point of the Gettier problem is to show how the idea of "justified, true belief" somewhat fails to capture the idea of "knowledge". Seeing knowledge as simply a fulfillment of necessary, sufficient conditions of having to be justified, true, and being a belief, falls short of how the Gettier problem fails to be knowledge. It's a case where the belief is justified, the belief is true, and the belief is a belief and yet is believed for the wrong reasons. Of course, there have been critiques of this critique and there have also been attempts to modify the definition of knowledge as JTB. I think the most important fact illuminated by this point is that the concept of necessary, sufficient conditions having to be fulfilled before it is considered X might be flawed.
