Week 5 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 5 — What Knowledge Needs: Testing a Definition with a Lucky Case — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 5 of the term — test the justified true belief definition against a lucky case, put the challenge in standard form, weigh three answers to the regress problem, and explain Gettier's point to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned justified true belief, the Gettier cases, a priori and a posteriori knowledge, and foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism. In Week 1 you tested definitions with counterexamples, in Week 2 you learned standard form and denying the consequent, and in Week 4 you met Descartes' search for certainty. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's pinned facts and the course's own definitions. The case below was written for this assignment on the shape of Edmund Gettier's 1963 cases; it is a variation, not one of Gettier's own, and it describes no real person or place. Every argument you reconstruct is illustrative, and the course keys validity only, never soundness, when a premise is an open question.

Part A — test the definition. A night-shift security guard glances at a camera monitor that shows the loading dock empty, and believes the dock is empty. The guard does not know that the monitor froze an hour ago on an old image. By chance, the dock really is empty right now. Do three things:

Check the conditions. Take the guard's belief through the three conditions of justified true belief, (1) truth, (2) belief, and (3) justification, one at a time, with a reason for each. Then name what justifies the belief and what makes it true.
Reconstruct the challenge. Put a challenge to the definition in standard form (P1, P2, then C introduced by "So"), using the guard's case. Name its form and say whether it is valid, with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity. Then name the premise a critic of the challenge would press, and say why the course does not key the argument for soundness.
Explain the count. In two or three sentences, explain why a single case like this one is enough to defeat the definition as stated, using the terms necessary condition and sufficient condition.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy date from 1641, and Edmund Gettier's paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" from 1963. How many years separate them?

Part B — weigh three answers to the regress. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding dates from 1748, and Gettier's paper from 1963. How many years separate them?

Then do three things:

State the problem. In your own words, state the regress problem and say what the skeptic concludes from it.
State all three answers at their strongest. State foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism each as its best defenders would, give the strongest objection to each, and give a reply from each theory's own side.
Name the disagreement. End with one plain sentence naming exactly where the three theories disagree.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who has never taken philosophy says, "If you believed something, you had a good reason, and you were right, then you knew it. End of story." Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what Gettier's cases are meant to show, using a lucky case of your own, and names one honest limit of what the cases show. Explain any term your friend might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who asks how an argument can be valid and still have a false conclusion. Model answer: "Valid only means the conclusion would have to be true if the starting claims were true. It says nothing about whether those starting claims really are true. So if one of them is false, a valid argument can still land on a false conclusion. One limit: knowing an argument is valid tells you to check its starting claims, but it does not check them for you."

Use that pattern for your message to your friend, with your own explanation of Gettier's point.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 5. For the condition check, confirm you took truth, belief, and justification one at a time and named what justifies the belief and what makes it true; for the reconstruction, check the form's name against Week 2's list and underline the premise a critic would press; for each theory, ask whether its best defender would sign your statement of it; and check that your friend message says what the cases suggest without claiming they prove more. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your condition check or your reconstruction more exact, and which definition showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of one theory of justification stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A condition check, your reconstruction, your count explanation, and your first year gap;
your Part B year gap, the regress problem, the three theories with objections and replies, and your plain sentence;
your message to your friend;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the condition check, the reconstruction, the evaluation, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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