Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

> true, because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood

That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

> That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

I think the philosophical claim is that, when we think we know something, and the thing that we turns out to be false, what has happened isn't that we knew something false, but rather that we didn't actually know the thing in the first place. That is, not our knowledge, but our belief that we had knowledge, was mistaken.

(Of course, one can say that we did after all know it in any conventional sense of the word, and that such a distinction is at the very best hair splitting. But philosophy is willing to split hairs however finely reason can split them ….)

The problem with the hair splitting is that it requires differentiating between different brain states over time where the only difference is the content.

On Jan 1 2024 I "know" X. Time passes. On Jan 1 2028, I "know" !X. In both cases, there is

(a) something it is like to "know" either X or !X

(b) discernible brain states the correspond to "knowing" either X or !X and that are distinct from "knowing" neither

Thus, even if you don't want to call "knowing X" actually "knowing", it is in just about every sense indistinguishable from "knowing !X".

Also, a belief that we had the knowledge that relates to X is indistinguishable from a belief that we had the knowledge that relates to !X. In both cases, we possess knowledge which may be true or false. The knowledge we have at different times alters; at all times we have a belief that we have the knowledge that justifies X or !X, and we are correct in that belief - it is only the knowledge itself that is false.

Maybe the people who use "know" in the way you don't are talking about something other than brain states or qualia. There are lots of propositions like this; if I say, "I fathered Alston", that may be true or false for reasons that are independent of my brain state. Similarly with "I will get home tomorrow before sunset". It may be true or false; I can't actually tell. The same is true of the proposition "I know there are coins in the pocket of the fellow who will get the job", if by "know" we mean something other than a brain state, something we can't directly observe.

You evidently want to use the word "know" exclusively to describe a brain state, but many people use it to mean a different thing. Those people are the ones who are having this debate. It's true that you can render this debate, like any debate, into nonsense by redefining the terms they are using, but that in itself doesn't mean that it's inherently nonsense.

Maybe you're making the ontological claim that your beliefs about X don't actually become definitely true or false until you have a way to tell the difference? A sort of solipsistic or idealistic worldview? But you seem to reject that claim in your last sentence, saying, "it is only the knowledge itself that is false."

"I know I fathered Alston" .. the reasons it may be true or false are indeed independent of brain state. But "knowing" is not about whether it is true or false, otherwise this whole question becomes tautological.

If someone is just going to say "It is not possible to know false things", then sure, by that definition of "know" any brain state that involves a justified belief in a thing that is false is not "knowing".

But I consider that a more or less useless definition of "knowing" in context of both Gettier and TFA.