Gettier Intuition

What is truth? How do people reach conclusions and evaluate facts? What counts as knowledge, and how do we know? Hold up before you give up on this post, which I realize might seem to be getting into the type of heady esotericism humanists are sometimes criticized for. For Edouard Machery, director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, these questions about how people understand what it means to know something or how people make knowledge come down to very real-world issues, including the replication crisis that has for the past several years caused hand-wringing among scientists, who acknowledge that the causes of the so-called crisis have to do with entrenched publishing incentives but also disagree about ways to correct it. Machery spoke to the University of Pittsburgh’s Information Ecosystems Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Feb. 21, having presented a public talk entitled “Why are Good Data so Hard to Get? Lessons from the Replication Crisis” the previous day. For his part, Machery was one of dozens of researchers who co-authored a Comment piece in Nature Human Behaviour in January of 2018, calling for a change to the threshold for “statistical significance,” the point at which a study’s results could not be the result of mere chance. Currently, statistical significance can be expressed as P<0.05, but the article, “Redefine Statistical Significance,” argued the threshold should be changed to P<0.005. This change, they argue, “would immediately improve the reproducibility of scientific research in many fields.” The replication crisis has real-world implications: this is not a case of cloistered academics splitting hairs Read More