Title: A grammatical source of the “Gettier” judgment
Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Date/Time: Thursday, November 15, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D831
In this talk, I will present the result of my joint experiment with Paul Marty on what kind of grammatical factors affect English native speakers’ truth-value judgment of sentences containing “know”. After Gettier’s (1963) famous examples, it is widely known that a sentence of the form “x knows that p” can be false even when x justifiably believes p and p is true, contra the traditional view that knowledge consists of justified true belief. In our experiment, we tested whether the grammatical form of the complement of “know” affects the truth-value judgment of a knowledge-sentence. According to the result of our experiment, participants judge a knowledge-sentence with a disjunction in the complement significantly less likely as true than a classically equivalent sentence without a disjunction, especially under a Gettier-like scenario. We will discuss theoretical consequences of this result on the semantics of “know” and associated verification strategies. Specifically, I will argue that the result is compatible with the semantics of “know” which is sensitive to the “alternative possibilities” induced by specific grammatical devices such as disjunction and indefinites whereas it calls for further explanation in the analysis where “know” is only sensitive to the classical semantic value of the complement.