Platoboy and the Solipsist Excavate the World’s Oldest Gettier Case
Dramatis Personae
Platoboy: an enthusiastic believer in Enlightenment values.
Solipsist: a sardonic, captious, humorous nihilist.
Solipsist: [affecting a Greek Cypriot accent] Hey, Platoboy! What do you think of Platon?
Platoboy: Good question, Solly. Platon? Platon? I’m sorry; I don’t know who that is.
Solipsist: [still affecting the accent] Platon? You don’t know Platon? Sowcratays?
Platoboy: Sowcratays? Oh, you mean Socrates! Plato! I’d have a better chance if you’d say the names right.
Solipsist: Oh, Platoboy! Please tell me you know that “Plato” is not that individual’s actual name; that the world knows him as “Platon”; and that that’s not even his actual name. His real name is Aristocles; “Platon” means something like “thick” or “broad.” It was his nickname, apparently referring to his big shoulders. He was, I think, a formidable wrestler. It makes me smile to think that the world’s most revered philosophical writer actually seems to have been known to his buddies more for his wrestling prowess.
Platoboy: Gee, Solly, I bet that would be very interesting…to somebody; though I can’t think of anyone specific right at the moment.
Solipsist: All of which reminds me, P.B., how did you come by your name?
Platoboy: Oh, very funny, Solly. You’re a real laugh riot sometimes.
Solipsist: Alright, but I really did want to ask you something rather personal. So personal, in fact, that I feel I should work up to it with an anecdote from my university years.
Platoboy: Ask away, and anecdotes be damned!
Solipsist: Now, P.B.; everyone should either have an anecdote or be one.
Platoboy: How does one be an anecdote?
Solipsist: I thought you’d never ask. Buckle up! Back when I was studying literature at Brown; you know; waaay into history back; around 1979. I was at some kind of tea party, for god’s sake. I had on my funkily-frayed bluejean jacket with Grateful Dead patches. And I had my lizardskin Justins with my tornup Levi’s. I fit right in with the Ivy Leaguers in their bucks and houndstooth jackets; especially since I was half drunk and doing my best James Dean angry/enigmatic young man thing.
Anyway this preppie-looking popinjay comes up to me and says, “You’re in Charles Nichols’s American Naturalism seminar, aren’t you?” I said that I was, and he asked me what we were reading. I said we were reading McTeague, but that we had started off with Sinclair’s The Jungle. At that point the popinjay turned a completely unprecedented shade of yellowish green, wretched slightly, and scampered away without a further syllable.
Of course, I muttered to myself, “What an asshole!” and this woman, whom I hadn’t previously noticed, snickered and asked me, “Do you know who he was, just now?” I said, “No, I don’t, and I don’t give a shit.”
It turned out his name was Armour. You know, like Armour Hotdogs. His family’s excesses in the meat packing industry are what Sinclair’s little bit of muckraking fiction is all about. That’s the kind of people I found myself in classes with.
In fact, JFK, Jr. was there when I was as well. I used to see him in the library sometimes. I was always trying to identify Secret Service guys near him, but he often seemed to be completely alone.
He was in some kind of drama group, and they would put on a play every semester. Jackie used to come see the plays, and when she was in town, the whole campus talked of nothing else. Everywhere you went, people were saying, “I saw her walking across the quad,” or “She was in the Registrar’s office, where I work, but I was too intimidated to say anything to her.” This was decades after being in the White House. She was a much bigger star than John John. As I said, when she was town, nothing else mattered. I never really understood why, but she was as big a celebrity as there was.
Platoboy: Solly, what in the contumacious hell are you babbling about?
Solipsist: It’s an anecdote, P.B. Some people, apparently not you, use them to relate to other humans by relaying a shared experience. In this case it was the title The Jungle, which acted like a sort of magic spell or curse word on the poor popinjay because of his family connections.
Platoboy: I repeat, Solly, what in the contumacious hell are you going on about?
Solipsist: Okay. You asked for it! GETTIER!
Platoboy: Ooh! That hurt! GETTIER? What the F_ _ _, Solly? Have you been chewing Silly Putty again?
Solipsist: No. I cut that out during COVID. You know; EDMUND GETTIER? The man who shot Jesse James?
Platoboy: Oh God, Solly, I begged you to get counselling.
Solipsist: Edmund Gettier, Platoboy. That name means nothing to you?
Platoboy: Of course it does. Gettier’s little paper acted on the justified-true-belief definition of knowledge the way the iceberg acted on the Titanic.
Solipsist: That’s why I thought you might be a little sensitive on that subject, being Platoboy and all. That was the point of the anecdote: to set up an analogy. The Jungle is to the Armours as “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” is to all things Plato (presumably including Platoboy).
Platoboy: Ah, Solly, now you come near me. Plato’s broad shoulders notwithstanding, he is, and always was, his own most perspicacious and effective critic, and that is true in this case as well.
Solipsist: So, you didn’t wretch even a little bit upon hearing the dreaded cognomen Gettier?
Platoboy: Of course not. Why would I?
Solipsist: Because it was Gettier’s 1963 paper that sounded the death knell for justified true belief as the definition of knowledge that had been operational since Plato.
Platoboy: Well, if that were true, I might react as your preppie friend did all those years ago when you mentioned The Jungle, but in fact, the JTB definition while associated with Plato because of the statues of the Daedalus analogy in Meno, never sat well with him. Actually, he rejected it in Theaetetus and even had Socrates describe the first-ever Gettier case.
Solipsist: I have to beg your pardon, P.B.; I’ve been misbehaving. I have been talking and even taunting you in ways that must lead to the conclusion that I actually understand Gettier’s paper and know what a Gettier case is. But I don’t really know those things at all; I’m a sordid fraud.
Platoboy: Oh, there, there, Solly! You’re not that bad [Aside] But a little bad, methinks. I can help you with a Gettier case. A Gettier case is a scenario in which a proposition is asserted that is true, believed by the asserter to be true, and is believed to be true with good reason, but does not seem sufficient to express knowledge of its truth.
Solipsist: That’s what you call help, P.B.?
Platoboy: Darn tootin’, Solly! That’s help if ever there was any in this sweet old world.
Solipsist: Help, schmelp! Try it again with an example.
Platoboy: Well, Solly, if you were to read Euthyphro, Meno, or Theaetetus, you would see that offering examples where definitions are required leads to circularity in reasoning rendered even more worser by an inherent prolixity.
Solipsist: “More worser,” P.B.? Didn’t I just mention that I once studied in the English Department at Brown University? At Brown, we wince, cringe, and even wretch slightly on any occasion when “more worser” rears its doubly comparative head.
Platoboy: Wretch away, Solly! Chaucer once wrote, “He never yet no vileinye ne sayde.” That’s got three negatives. The great thing is that there is no confusion about what the writer means, once you deal with the Middle English.
Solipsist: Okay, P.B., get more worser if you think that will be better.
Platoboy: More worser coming up, Solly! Here is the example that people give when they are convinced that whoever they are confabulating with has only the most pilulous chance of grokking the situation: Suppose I have a battery-powered watch that keeps excellent time, and a passerby asks me if I know the time. I look at my watch, and I say, “Yes, I do know the time. It is ten fifteen.”
However, unknown to me, my watch’s battery has gone dead, and my watch has stopped working. Coincidentally, when I announce the time, it really is ten fifteen, so I have given a true report.
Now, I have asserted that it is ten fifteen, I believed when I made the assertion that it was ten fifteen, I had good reason to believe that my assertion was true because my watch has always been accurate, and it really was ten fifteen. So, my proposition expressed a justified, true belief about the time of day, but it was only accidentally true because I happened to look at my watch at one of the only two moments in the day when it would display the correct time. No one would say that I knew my proposition to be true. That is a Gettier case.
But wait! There’s more! Plato, Platon, Mr. Broad and Thick already gave a Gettier case in Theaetetus two millennia before Edmund Gettier was born.
Solipsist: Outstanding, P.B.! Plato was not only a good wrestler and a fair hand at writing philosophy, but a time traveler as well.
Platoboy: So it appears, Solly. “Boats against the current,” you know; “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Solipsist: Nifty line, P.B. You should publish it.
Platoboy: I think somebody already has.
Solipsist: Go Platon! Huzzah!
