Gettier does not overturn JTB; it signals the need to make explicit features of justification that the classical formulation left implicit.
— Sam26

From what I can tell, the Ten Coins situation does not have “features” at all, to even make explicit.

It is a standing within a practice, fixed by public criteria that settle what counts as competent support in the context.
— Sam26

This case doesn’t even have any criteria, or mechanics, or judgments (what you might call “linguistic training”) for the relation between coins and jobs. It is obviously philosophy trying to shoehorn formal logic onto a situation without any viable alternative. The fact that it is an imagined world actually does not matter. Wittgenstein creates simple situations (like picking a color of flower) but it is to show the consequences of imposing forced criteria by contrasting that with what we would need of a wider context of criteria and mechanics (even imagined) for a situation. Now the criteria for justification are all well and good, but this doesn’t even get off the ground; it just seems like a lot of work to say correlation is not causation. — Antony Nickles

The Ten Coins case is thin, and that is part of the point. Gettier creates a situation where the justification is basically a detachable bit of formal support that can be preserved while the world shifts underneath it. That’s exactly why I say Gettier is trading on an impoverished picture of justification: the case is set up so that there are no real practice-level mechanics for what counts as competent justification, no standards for error and correction, and no disciplined way to track mistakes. It isn’t exposing a flaw in JTB, it’s exposing what happens when we treat justification as some free-floating relation between propositions rather than as objective justification inside the practice of epistemology.

That also answers your “correlation is not causation” point. The moral isn’t merely “don’t confuse correlation and causation.” The moral is that the classical JTB slogan can be misread as if J were satisfied by any arguable support, even if the support is structurally incapable of carrying the conclusion across relevant mistake-conditions. I claim that once you make objective justification explicit as practice-governed, with defeater sensitivity and correction built into it, the Ten Coins style justification is revealed as too thin to count as knowledge. I’m not doing extra work to rescue JTB from Gettier. I’m saying Gettier only lands if we let justification be that thin in the first place.

I claim that once you make objective justification explicit as practice-governed, with defeater sensitivity and correction built into it, the Ten Coins style justification is revealed as too thin to count as knowledge. I’m not doing extra work to rescue JTB from Gettier. I’m saying Gettier only lands if we let justification be that thin in the first place. — Sam26

This is exactly right. Your effort is towards laying out a conception of justification that is recognizable and plausible, and supported by practice; the Gettier cases aren't compatible with such a robust conception.

I never thought Gettier had something important to say about JTB, but it took a while to figure out exactly how the problem manifested itself.

I've read your paper. It's a real advance on the topic, and should certainly be published. Where are you thinking of sending it?

A couple of comments:

- I noticed that the term "practice" is used a bit equivocally. Sometimes you're talking about our entire practice of epistemic justification, while other times you seem to be referring to more limited, specific practices or sub-disciplines. It matters because the former can't be queried for further justification, whereas the latter can. Perhaps devote a paragraph to this, showing why someone who asks for justification of how science is done, for instance, isn't slipping into the demand for absolute justification? A sub-practice can be questioned at its roots, from a standpoint that remains within the practice of epistemic justificaion. An entire discipline can be found to have a questionable "grammar." I think you agree with this?

- " . . . our practices of justification are complex and that the stability of knowledge depends on more than the production of arguments. When we recognize this, we are less tempted to treat disagreement as evidence of irrationality, and more able to locate what is actually at issue." This is a very important point. I'd like to see more about it. The ethics of doing philosophy are worth calling out whenever possible.

Quite apart from your paper, you’ve caused me to think more about the particular use of “grammar” here and elsewhere in Witt-related phil. I believe there are some important issues to understand about how the term functions – broadly, the degree to which it must remain metaphorical -- but I’ll save them for a possible OP of my own. I don’t think they affect the cogency of what you’re saying here.

I’ll keep following the thread with interest. Nice work!

The paper needs some revisions, but I think it could be submitted to...

1) Episteme (Cambridge), which is a general epistemology journal.

2) Synthese (Springer), which is another good match.

3) Ergo (Open Access, no author fees)

Your comment about "practice" is something I've been thinking about, so it's something to consider.

If you want one line: objective justification governs responsibility and standing, truth governs success, and my claim is that we can have real knowledge without infallibility because our practice of justification aims at disciplined, defeater-resistant stability, while still understanding that “how things are” can definitely surprise us. — Sam26

Nicely stated. I think this answers the question quite well.

This is why I call (and others) hinge certainty arational. It’s not that a hinge is sacred or immune by decree. It’s that hinges typically aren’t the kind of things that are decided by the ordinary routes of objective justification. When they genuinely change, it’s less like refuting a claim and more like adopting a new framework. — Sam26

I see what you are getting at, but I'm inclined to characterize "framework adoption" as a rational achievement in its own right, even if not one that proceeds directly from refutation or evidential accumulation. My worry is that this understates the capacity of reason for meta-level self-appropriation and horizon-shift.

With regard to hinges, I take it we agree that inquiry always proceeds from what stands fast; the remaining question for me is whether what stands fast is merely an arational background, or is meta-rational in the sense that the subject can come to reflectively understand why such commitments are unavoidable given the structure of knowing. If the latter, then such background hinges can themselves be appropriated into the game of giving and asking for reasons.

With regard to hinges, I take it we agree that inquiry always proceeds from what stands fast; the remaining question for me is whether what stands fast is merely an arational background, or is meta-rational in the sense that the subject can come to reflectively understand why such commitments are unavoidable given the structure of knowing. If the latter, then such background hinges can themselves be appropriated into the game of giving and asking for reasons. — Esse Quam Videri

.

Calling hinges arational doesn’t mean they’re irrational, blind, or immune to ideas. It means they don’t operate as moves in our justificatory practices. In chess, the rule bishops move diagonally isn’t something you conclude from evidence or defend against objections inside the game. It’s what makes the game playable. You can explain it, even justify why we adopt it, but none of that turns the rule into a move you play on the board.

The sense of arational I’m using, viz., is that hinges are arational because they are conditions of intelligibility for ordinary epistemic assessment, not candidates for it. You can give a perfectly rational, clarifying account about why they have to be in place, but the hinge itself isn’t “supported by reasons” in the same way that an empirical claim is, because reasons already presuppose the background that makes support, defeat, check, and correction doable.

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework (here I mean within the framework I've constructed in the paper).

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework (here I mean within the framework I've constructed in the paper). — Sam26

In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the rules, I don’t think this distinction holds for rational inquiry. To explain and justify the rules of rational inquiry is not to step outside of the game, but to deepen one’s understanding of the game itself, since inquiry includes the capacity for self-reflection on its own conditions. To place meta-level reflection entirely outside of epistemic normativity is to acquiesce to conventionalism. The claim that hinges can be appropriated by reason as necessary conditions of inquiry is not a claim about how we happen to play the game, but about what must be the case for judgment, error, and correction to be possible at all, and that is much something stronger than the chess analogy suggests.

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework (here I mean within the framework I've constructed in the paper).
— Sam26

In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the rules, I don’t think this distinction holds for rational inquiry. To explain and justify the rules of rational inquiry is not to step outside of the game, but to deepen one’s understanding of the game itself, since inquiry includes the capacity for self-reflection on its own conditions. To place meta-level reflection entirely outside of epistemic normativity is to acquiesce to conventionalism. The claim that hinges can be appropriated by reason as necessary conditions of inquiry is not a claim about how we happen to play the game, but about what must be the case for judgment, error, and correction to be possible at all, and that is much something stronger than the chess analogy suggests. — Esse Quam Videri

I don’t think the chess analogy breaks down; I think it exposes the exact pressure point, viz., what counts as staying in the same game.

Inquiry does include self-reflection, but self-reflection doesn’t automatically remain within the same normativity. In chess, you reflect while you play, and you can revise your strategy, you can even decide to adopt a different opening. None of that touches the rules. Once you start asking what has to be in place for terms like move, illegal, mistake, and correction to apply at all, you’re not improving your play within the game. You’re spelling out the background rules that make what counts as a move in the first place. That’s not a conventionalist retreat, it’s a category distinction, which are the standards that govern ordinary epistemic claims, and they're not the same as the standards that govern clarifications of the conditions of those standards.

The worry about “acquiescing to conventionalism” only has standing if “outside the game” means “arbitrary social choice.” But that’s not what I mean. A hinge can be arational in role and still non optional. The point of the hinge diagnosis is precisely that these commitments are not mere conventions we could swap out at will, they are what gives judgment, error, and correction their force. A transcendental claim like “these are necessary conditions of inquiry” may be true in a structural sense, but it still doesn’t follow that the hinge has been appropriated into the ordinary space of reasons as a claim supported by evidence, alternatives, and defeaters. It has been explained as a condition of that inquiry.

I’d put it this way: meta reflection can deepen inquiry, but it can do so in two different modes. One mode stays inside the practice and improves our assessments, better evidence, sharper defeater handling, more precise concepts. The other mode articulates the background conditions without which assessment can’t gain a foothold. That second mode is not conventionalism, it’s not “how we happen to play,” but neither is it ordinary epistemic justification. It’s an explanation of possibility conditions, not a move competing with other moves.

— We’re mostly on the same page here. I think the only remaining divergence concerns whether meta-reflection counts as part of the game of rational inquiry itself. I agree that hinges are not subject to the same standards of correction as empirical claims, but I maintain that their articulation and defense still belong to rational inquiry as such, of which empirical inquiry is only a subset.

One way to highlight the issue might be to ask: Can a game be improved? If so, what criteria should be used? Are there ways of evaluating a "better game" outside the rules of a particular game? This is the "rational vs empirical" issue.

—That’s a nice way of putting pressure on the issue, and I think it helps clarify what’s at stake.

From within a game, “better” is defined by the rules already in place (better play, fewer mistakes, more elegant strategies). But there is also a broader sense in which a game can be evaluated as a game: whether it is coherent, playable, learnable, or capable of sustaining meaningful distinctions like success and failure. That second kind of evaluation does not proceed by making another move under the existing rules; it reflects on the conditions that make any such rule-governed activity possible or worthwhile.

Translating this back to inquiry: empirical inquiry evaluates claims within an established framework of evidence and correction, while rational (or transcendental) inquiry evaluates the framework itself in terms of whether it can support judgment, error, and correction at all. The point of contention isn’t whether these evaluations use the same criteria—they clearly don’t—but whether the latter counts as part of rational inquiry as such or must be classified as merely explanatory and outside epistemic normativity altogether. That’s where the rational vs. empirical distinction really bites, and where reasonable disagreement can persist without anyone talking past anyone else.

Yes, you understand my point exactly. Sticking with actual games, there are cases where game rules have in fact been changed to improve the game, or at least change it in a way that pleases its players better. (Money in Free Parking, in "Monopoly"!). Could a game like chess -- our chosen analogy -- be improved through rule changes? I frankly have no idea, but the point is that the question isn't incoherent or meaningless. It's perfectly possible to inquire of chess players, and by extension of the game of chess itself, whether improvement is possible. And if we do that, we aren't asking whether there's a way to make the bishop move "better" along the diagonal. The criteria for "better" are outside any particular rule. We might ask, Should there be only 7 pawns? That would change the rules, not clarify them.

How might we try to answer? What would this "should" mean? This is where it gets interesting, and moves us into the whole issue of rational inquiry. There are surely aspects of entire games that can be evaluated in terms of cleverness, enjoyment, a kind of artistic unity. Where do those criteria come from? That's unclear, but we know they aren't internal to any game as such. There is no rule in chess that specifies how to increase enjoyment, or even whether enjoyment is part of the game.

So the person who claims that the chess analogy holds for empirical inquiry appears to be saying that all these extra-chess questions can't be asked. We're urged to see the empirical practice of seeking justifications as the game, or the same as rational inquiry, such that to ask for reasons why we perform the practice as we do is to "ask for reasons for being reasonable," which is incoherent.

Now I'm not saying this is wrong. @Sam26 makes a strong argument for how hinges operate in our epistemic practices, and I think we all agree that justification must stop somewhere, otherwise we do fall into incoherence. But what I am saying is that I don't think the (literal) game analogy shows us the right picture of what is going on. We need a better image or explanation for the shape of epistemic practice that would make clear why it is identical with rational practice itself. A game analogy doesn't show this -- unless you really do believe that to ask "Could chess be improved?" is a meaningless question.

Yes, I think this gets exactly to the heart of the matter, and it helps show why the game analogy is doing double duty in a way that may ultimately mislead.

As you say, the question *“Could chess be improved?”* is not incoherent, even though it is not a question that can be answered by making better moves under the existing rules. It invokes criteria—playability, depth, elegance, enjoyment—that are not internal to the rules of chess as such. Those criteria are not arbitrary, but neither are they codified by the game itself. They arise from a broader rational perspective on what a game is for and what makes it successful as a game.

That’s the sense in which I think the analogy breaks down when it is applied to inquiry. Empirical inquiry clearly functions like a game in some respects: it has rules, stopping points, standards of correction, and conditions under which “this counts as a mistake” or “that counts as evidence.” But rational inquiry *as such* seems to include the capacity to step back and ask whether those rules and stopping points are doing the job they are supposed to do—namely, making judgment, error, and correction intelligible in the first place.

So the issue isn’t whether justification must stop somewhere—we all agree that it must. The issue is whether asking *why* it stops where it does, or whether it could stop differently under changed conditions, is still part of rational inquiry or already a category mistake. The chess analogy suggests the latter; the phenomenon of evaluating and even revising games suggests the former.

That’s why I’m inclined to say that empirical justificatory practice is a *subset* of rational inquiry, not identical with it. Rational inquiry includes both playing the game well and understanding what makes the game playable, meaningful, or worth playing at all. If that’s right, then asking whether the “rules” of inquiry could be improved or reconfigured isn’t asking for reasons for being reasonable; it’s exercising reason at a higher level of reflection.

At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions. The chess analogy, by itself, can’t decide that question—and that’s exactly why your example is so helpful.

That's how I see it, thanks for the elaboration.

That said, I'd love to hear from @Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice.

At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions — Esse Quam Videri

I'd love to hear from Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice — J

Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage.

Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage. — Joshs

Right -- essentially the two options that @Esse Quam Videri laid out. But I'll emphasize again, we can be unsure which option we like better, while separately maintaining that the game analogy is doing more harm than good at this point. In other words, I don't think @Sam26 needs to abandon any ground, necessarily, just abandon the metaphor. Which, given its prevalence in Witt-related phil, may be difficult.

I'll reply soon.

:up: I'll look forward to it.

es, you understand my point exactly. Sticking with actual games, there are cases where game rules have in fact been changed to improve the game, or at least change it in a way that pleases its players better. (Money in Free Parking, in "Monopoly"!). Could a game like chess -- our chosen analogy -- be improved through rule changes? I frankly have no idea, but the point is that the question isn't incoherent or meaningless. It's perfectly possible to inquire of chess players, and by extension of the game of chess itself, whether improvement is possible. And if we do that, we aren't asking whether there's a way to make the bishop move "better" along the diagonal. The criteria for "better" are outside any particular rule. We might ask, Should there be only 7 pawns? That would change the rules, not clarify them.

How might we try to answer? What would this "should" mean? This is where it gets interesting, and moves us into the whole issue of rational inquiry. There are surely aspects of entire games that can be evaluated in terms of cleverness, enjoyment, a kind of artistic unity. Where do those criteria come from? That's unclear, but we know they aren't internal to any game as such. There is no rule in chess that specifies how to increase enjoyment, or even whether enjoyment is part of the game.

So the person who claims that the chess analogy holds for empirical inquiry appears to be saying that all these extra-chess questions can't be asked. We're urged to see the empirical practice of seeking justifications as the game, or the same as rational inquiry, such that to ask for reasons why we perform the practice as we do is to "ask for reasons for being reasonable," which is incoherent.

Now I'm not saying this is wrong. Sam26 makes a strong argument for how hinges operate in our epistemic practices, and I think we all agree that justification must stop somewhere, otherwise we do fall into incoherence. But what I am saying is that I don't think the (literal) game analogy shows us the right picture of what is going on. We need a better image or explanation for the shape of epistemic practice that would make clear why it is identical with rational practice itself. A game analogy doesn't show this -- unless you really do believe that to ask "Could chess be improved?" is a meaningless question. — J

I agree that the question “Could chess be improved?” isn’t meaningless, and I’m not committed to the view that every extra-game question is nonsense (some are some aren't). The misunderstanding is where that point is misunderstood, as if hinge talk were meant to forbid reflection or redesign.

First, it helps to clarify types of hinges. Some are what I’d call foundational hinges; they can shift over time as a framework changes. Others are bedrock hinges, the sort that don't show up as a candidate for epistemic assessment at all, for example: I am an object among objects, objects persist, there is a world in which checking and correction make sense. When these change, it’s not like discovering a counterexample. It’s more like losing the stage on which counterexamples could even count as counterexamples. That difference is significant because your “could the rules be improved?” question is mainly about the first kind, the revisable, upper-level foundational hinges.

Second, even in literal games, rules can change, but note how they change: you can redesign chess, or create variants, but for any given game the rules stand fast while you’re playing. They aren’t propositions being assessed move by move, they are what make it possible for a move to be legal or illegal. And when someone says, “we should change the rules,” it’s often not clear what “improvement” even means without importing standards that aren’t internal to chess at all, enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, and so on. That doesn’t make the question incoherent. It just shows that redesign and rule following are different activities.

Now bring that back to epistemic practice. The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place.

The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. — Sam26

Yes.

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework — Sam26

In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the rules, I don’t think this distinction holds for rational inquiry. — Esse Quam Videri

even in literal games, rules can change, but note how they change: you can redesign chess, or create variants, but for any given game the rules stand fast while you’re playing. They aren’t propositions being assessed move by move, they are what make it possible for a move to be legal or illegal. And when someone says, “we should change the rules,” it’s often not clear what “improvement” even means without importing standards that aren’t internal to chess at all, enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, and so on. That doesn’t make the question incoherent. It just shows that redesign and rule following are different activities. — Sam26

If we group these quotes together, I think we get a good picture of the issue. It reinforces my notion that there's nothing wrong with the case you make in your paper. The question of whether a game is a good analogy or metaphor is quite separate from the question of whether you've provided a more perspicacious understanding of JTB. I believe you have.

As to games . . . If a game is something whose rules can be questioned and/or improved (from a standpoint outside the game, of course), then it is not a good analogy for a practice governed by "bedrock hinges." I think all three of us would agree with this. Improvement or inquiry outside a set of rules is presumably governed by a further set of rules; otherwise the idea of "improvement" would be hard to explain. So I think you want to avoid suggesting that our ordinary epistemic practice is like a game with rules. Up to a point -- the point of foundational hinges -- it is; we usually play within those rules. But we can readily move to a different level at which the idea of improvement can't get a grip, since we'd be asking for "reasons to improve" that put into question what it would mean to improve. We've struck a bedrock hinge. But there is no literal game like that; the analogy does break down at that level. If chess were such a game, for instance, we'd be forced to say that a suggestion to improve chess can't be made because "improvement" only has meaning within the rules of chess.

So the main point I would press you on is the final, bolded sentence in your quote above. Why is redesign not a rule-following activity? It doesn't follow (all of) the rules of the practice being redesigned, but surely there are rules nonetheless, even for using concepts like enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, et al. Again, think of your own paper: In the name of a set of rules you carefully employ (and could no doubt explain if asked), you offer changes to the (subset of) rules that seemed to characterize JTB. But this "redesign" of JTB absolutely is a rule-following activity. If it weren't, we readers would get pretty impatient with you! If someone challenged you to lay out your justification for the improvements, you'd do it. You'd strongly resist the idea that such a challenge was incoherent, that it called into question the very idea of justification.

In a sentence, then: There is no game whose rules cannot be candidates for improvement; therefore rational discourse as a whole is not a game.

The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place — Sam26

I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rather than having to decide which questions are “allowed” or “forbidden,” to map hinges once and for all, to discard a bad analogy in favor of the right one, we need only look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification are actually used in our lives. There is no answer in advance to whether the question “Could our epistemic practices be improved?” is coherent. Sometimes it is coherent, sometimes it is idle, sometimes it is revolutionary, sometimes it is nonsense, and which it is depends entirely on the language-game being played. In actual life, rules are sometimes followed blindly, sometimes revised, sometimes ignored, sometimes negotiated. There is no sharp line between playing a game and redesigning it; there are just different activities with different criteria.