Department of Psychology, 2 Hillhouse Ave., New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Cognition. 2012 Sep;124(3):272-83. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.05.017. Epub 2012 Jun 16.
How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed "Gettier cases") in which a person's justified belief is true, but only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and "Gettiering" on people's knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent's belief is based on "apparent" evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers.
人们如何决定哪些主张应该被视为单纯的信仰，而哪些主张可以被视为知识？尽管人们对他人如何归因于知识知之甚少，但关于知识本质的哲学争论可能提供了一个起点。传统上，被认为是知识的信念必须是真实的且有正当理由的。然而，哲学家们现在一致认为，这种说法是不充分的，主要是由于一类反例（称为“盖梯尔案例”），在这些案例中，一个人的正当信念是真实的，但仅仅是因为运气。我们报告了四项实验，研究了真理、正当理由和“盖梯尔化”对人们知识归因的影响。这些实验表明：（1）只有当一个人的信念是真实且有正当理由时，人们才会将知识归因于他人；（2）与当代哲学家不同，人们在盖梯尔情境中也会将知识归因于他人；（3）在一类盖梯尔案例中不会归因于知识，只是因为代理人的信念是基于“表面”证据。这些发现表明，知识的常识概念大致与知识作为正当真实信念的传统概念一致，并且还指出了普通人的认知直觉与哲学家的认知直觉之间的一个主要区别。
