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This brings us to the most famous puzzle cases in epistemology, possibly the most famous puzzle cases in the whole of philosophy.

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The getaway case is a fantastically well known, probably because they're so clear and decisive against the justified,

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true belief analysis of knowledge, or at least they seem to be.

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So let's suppose that P is something that I'm justified in believing.

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And let's suppose that P clearly implies Q There is no doubt whatever that P implies.

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Q. So I believe that P I have a justified belief that p we're assuming that.

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And I then infer. Q. Where Q obviously follows from P.

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Does it follow that I'm justified in believing que? Would you agree that's how it sounds very plausible.

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If I'm justified in believing P and Q obviously follows from P, surely I must be justified in believing.

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Q That's how you get the getaway cases. So here's one example.

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Suppose I'm in the desert. I see what is, in fact a mirage.

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I think I'm justified in believing. Let us suppose that I'm seeing an oasis.

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I infer that there's no racist over there. And so I turned to my companion and I point and I say, there's an oasis over there.

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Now, in fact, there is an oasis over there, but it's hidden behind a sand dune.

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What I'm seeing is a mirage. But coincidentally, there is an oasis in that direction.

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So I believe that there's an oasis over there. It's true that there's no wasis over there.

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I'm justified in believing that I see an oasis.

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And I've inferred from the supposition that I see an oasis to there actually being an oasis over there.

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It looks like I've got a justified, true belief, but we don't want to say it's a case of knowledge.

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Another example, which I think is slightly more plausible, a case of the kind of example that Gettinger himself gives is this.

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Suppose we have a load of applicants for a job. Just two of them are men.

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One of the men is very well qualified. One of the men is very poorly qualified.

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All the rest are women. And they're much, much better qualified than the badly qualified man.

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Now, suppose I have it on good authority that the well qualified man is going to get the job.

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So I believe that a man is going to get the job. And I've got a justified belief that a man is going to get the job.

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Unbeknown to me, however, there's some funny business going on. I don't know, maybe involving the Masons or bribery or blackmail or what have you.

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And actually the other man gets the job. In this situation, I have a justified belief that a man would get the job.

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It's true that a man did get the job, but I certainly didn't know that a man would get the job because there's a kind of accident.

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My justification led me to the belief that the well qualified man would get the job.

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But in fact, that a man would get the job has turned out to be true by some quite different route.

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Now, these sorts of cases do seem to refute, refute the standard, justified, true belief account of knowledge.

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So it's tempting to add a fourth condition. Maybe we should say that s knows that P if and only if P is true.

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S believes that P and S is justified in believing that P in a way that doesn't depend on any falsehood.

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That's a way of trying to evade the getting counterexamples,

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where somebody infers a truth from a falsehood and thus achieves a justified belief that isn't knowledge.

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Now, back in the days when I was a student,

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this sort of thing trying to patch up the traditional analysis of knowledge to avoid the getting counterexamples was quite a major industry.

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Lots of papers came out with people trying to invent conditions that would get around the counterexamples.

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It's a rather sad history because all this effort failed to produce any convincing resolution of the problem.

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Here's an example of the sort of problem we face. Suppose I'm organising some event and I want to know how many people were there.

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Maybe the reason I want to know how many people were there is because I want

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to make a judgement as to which room to use for a future event of that kind.

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So somebody comes to me and they say, oh, they were exactly 78 people there.

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What interests me is whether there were more than 40. If there were more than 40, then I have to use a big room rather than a small room next time.

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So they tell me there were exactly 78 people there. I inferred that there were more than 40.

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Arguably, I know that there were more than 40.

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But let's suppose the reporter actually got it wrong, there weren't Seventy-eight, there were 77.

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I'm still inclined to say I know that there are more than 40.

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So I've inferred a truth from a falsehood that hasn't undermined its claim to being knowledge.

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Now, you might want to get around that, you might want to say no,

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what you did was infer that there were more than 40 people from the fact that he believes that there were 78.

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And you have the knowledge that people can go wrong in little ways. But there's an implicit probability judgement there.

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You're making the judgement that if somebody says there were 78 and says it sincerely and they've got good faculties and that kind of thing,

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it's overwhelmingly probable that there were more than 40. It's not overwhelmingly probable that there were exactly 78.

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So maybe that gets you out of it. Let us out of fifth condition. But there's a general problem with heading in the direction of probabilities.

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The so-called lottery paradox. It's very tempting to try to get round of these these kinds of problems by saying in order to have knowledge,

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you've got to have a sufficiently high probability. That's the key thing.

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It's not whether you've inferred something from a falsehood. It's having a sufficiently high probability of truth.

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But suppose we've got a billion tickets in a lottery? Well, I believe that the ticket with zeros in every place won't win.

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Indeed, I'm pretty sure it it won't win. There's only a one in a billion chance that it's going to win.

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I believe that the next ticket after that won't win either. In fact, I believe apparently quite reasonably.

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Of every single ticket that won't win. Nevertheless, one of them will win.

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And because of this, we're reluctant to call my belief about any of these tickets knowledge.

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So if I go and buy a ticket in a billion ticket lottery and then I say, well, I know it won't win, I think you'd probably say, no, you don't know.

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You've got a very probable belief, an extremely probable belief that it won't win, but you don't know that it won't win.

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Because there's a chance that it will, even if that chance is tiny. Now, if that's right.

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Then the lottery paradox involves real problems for any attempt to explain knowledge in terms of sufficiently high probabilities.

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Because however high the probability is, you can make it a trillion ticket, lottery or whatever.

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You can always get a lottery in which your belief that this ticket won't win will have as high or higher probability than any belief,

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which isn't 100 percent certain. And yet we're not going to want to call it knowledge.

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OK, so maybe we want to say it's not exactly a matter of probability. It's a matter of ruling out accidents.

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What we don't want is to allow as knowledge a belief that accidentally happens to be true.

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I thought I knew that one person was going to get the job and it's a kind of accident,

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as far as my knowledge was concerned, that somebody else got it.

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That's what rules it out. It's a kind of accident that there's an oasis over there in the same direction as the Mirage, so forth.

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Factually, it's extremely difficult to pin this down. Suppose I have a car whose speedometer gradually corrodes.

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Let's say that a particular time, it just happens to be accurate enough to ensure that I'm complying with the law.

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Let's say I always drive at what I think is 38 miles an hour along a road with a speed limit of 40 miles an hour.

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Fortunately,

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the corrosion of my speedometer is such that it just keeps me within plus or minus two miles of an hour and at an hour of the actual speed.

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So I'm safe. Is it an accident that I'm safe?

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In a sense, yes, in a sense, no. Given the speedometer has corroded, I'm very lucky that it's keeping me within that margin.

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But given that it's keeping me within that margin, it's no accident that I'm safe.

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Again, if I occasionally hallucinate things, does that mean it's just a matter of chance that my current belief isn't an hallucination?

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It's very difficult to pin these things down in a way that will give us a of satisfactory account of knowledge.

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Another problem is known as Ken Textualism. Suppose you want to get a train up north and I say I know that the train is scheduled to leave at 1736.

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It's a train I regularly take. So I can assure you it's scheduled to leave at 1736.

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But maybe you've got a really important appointment and you're not content with my saying that.

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So you say, do you really know that it leaves then? I absolutely need to make that appointment.

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OK. I say I'll cheque on the web. And you can imagine this going even further.

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I know you're familiar with the timetable and you've checked the Web. But do you really, really know?

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I really, absolutely have to be there. OK, I'll ring up the station and you can imagine a sequence of cheques each more stringent than the last,

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which suggests that the threshold we require to count something as knowledge can be variable.

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We put a higher and higher hurdle depending on the importance of the task.

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And that suggests that maybe knowledge isn't an absolute category.

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Maybe it's dependent on our particular purposes. Let's also consider the context in which we use the word knowledge within ordinary life.

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So consider this contrast. Does she know that her husband is cheating on her?

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Imagine that being said in a soap opera or something like that.

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Now that probably means something like does she believe he's cheating on her like we all do?

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You could imagine it being said in a context where there's some uncertainty as to whether he's a cheat.

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Maybe there's all sorts of circumstantial evidence. A Mac question.

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Does she know? It's not really a question about her epistemological state.

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It's a question about her belief. Contrast that with the following case, somebody alleges that her husband is cheating.

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And I say, yes, but do you know her husband is cheating?

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In which case, I'm asking about what is the case rather than about the belief.

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Or you can imagine a case where some train accident is reported and my son was on the train.

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And I say, do you know that my son is all right? And I don't actually give a damn about your epistemological state.

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The only thing I'm interested in is, is he OK? So it's arguable that when we talk about knowledge in a practical situation,

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normally we're interested either in somebody's state of belief or we're interested in the actual facts.

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It's very, very unusual for us to ask in ordinary life whether something is a case of knowledge when

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we already know that somebody believes something and we already know that it's true.

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It's the kind of question only philosophers ask.

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And you might wonder in that context whether we're actually likely to get any single consistent account of knowledge.

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Why should we assume that if the word knowledge has these different roles in language,

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that there really must be some single unitary essence of what knowledge is, which will give the answer to all of these questions?

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Maybe we'll find that the concept of knowledge as we use it in ordinary language varies depending on our purposes.

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Now, this is the kind of message that's very much associated with the later work of Vic and Stein in his book Philosophical Investigations.

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We shouldn't just assume that because we've got a word knowledge, which seems to be a noun for a certain kind of state,

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that there really is some sort of essential state that it picks out.

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Well, of course, however, we choose to use the word knowledge. We can still ask in any particular case whether P is true.

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And this brings us back to Gillmore and his hands.