n o i s e i s a r t

Wow. Woken up this morning by a phone call asking for a counterexample to the claim ‘Knowledge is Justified belief’.

Seriously – when you’re an undergraduate philosophy major, they never really tell you that you may actually need to know this stuff.

I think I mentioned Gettier, but didn’t really explain what he did, since my friend was talking about I guess a prior stage of epistemology. Instead I think I had some weird ramble about unjustified true beliefs – thinking all black people are robots, and all robots are good cooks, then inadvertently pointing to a chef and saying ‘that guy’s a good cook’. (I did just wake up, remember).

But then I remembered what seemed like the perfect counterexample. The Titus-Bode Law was an astronomical law in the 1700s that governed the placement of the planets in orbit around the sun.

It correctly predicted the existence of the asteroid belt, and of Uranus. But then it turned out to have just been a coincidence, as the remaining planets aren’t even close to their predicted positions.

So the example works for the asteroid belt & for uranus (I know there is a planet orbiting the sun at whatever AUs distance – Hey, look! A new planet. I knew it!) – since the new planets were correctly predicted via an incorrect assumption.

And now I have this strange drive to read about Twin Earth, H2X, and ‘Twater’…