Post #2504769

2026-05-12 13:47 UTC

the one I’ve heard is, a farmer can’t see his cow anywhere. his neighbor comes to visit, and on the way she walks past the farmer’s field and sees the cow behind (from the house’s perspective) a small patch of trees and brush. she doesn’t notice that on the other side of the trees (toward the house) there is a bedsheet caught in the low branches that was blown off of someone’s clothesline and fell in mud along the way. when she reaches the house the farmer asks if she’s seen the cow, she says yes, it’s over by the trees. the farmer looks out and sees the sheet in the distance, mistakes it for the cow, which he has not actually seen, and thus believes the neighbor. so the cow is by the trees, he believes the cow is by the trees, and he has good reason to believe, and yet based on the evidence actually available to him, he should not be certain

Replies (2)

@tar@lemmy.zip 2026-05-14 02:30

gettier made his whole career on his version (the coin thing) and responding to academic articles disputing it. I’m sure he or one of his acolytes used the cow story as an alternative example.

Open ##2504768
@BenLeMan@lemmy.world 2026-05-14 07:38

The sheet is not the only thing that has been muddied in this questionable example. The cow is NOT where he thinks it is and therefore he does NOT have knowledge of it being there. It’s near where he thinks it is but that distinction makes all the difference in the world. Also there’s a whole slew of problems arising from the way our cognition interprets sensory information. For instance, our eyes enable us to see light in various colors and intensities but they arguably don’t see objects (or subjects). In that sense we cannot hold JTB about cows, anyway, because even as a farmer we cannot be sure we’ve ever seen one. (Never mind the next problem, which is that even our sensory facilities might be corrupted by color blindness, myopia, etc…)

Open ##2923593