I can't believe that this is how I find the most pedagogical counterexample I've ever seen to true justified belief being knowledge hahaha
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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memes are the new form of how information is spread. and by new i mean 30 years old
Yea! Wasn't the classic example some convoluted story of people moving coins around pockets or something ?
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
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.
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...)
I bet this exact rebuttal appears in the southern journal of philosophy ca. 1967
Yeah exactly, every time I bring this up (yes I'm definitely fun at parties, why do you ask?) I struggle to remember the details of the story and then once I do recall it, observe how the person in telling it to is swiftly becoming more confused by the second haha
The problem here, I think, is that if 'justified true beliefs' aren't 'knowledge' then nothing is. Which is a perfectly valid stance, but not a particularly useful one.
Also, one might argue that the belief in question wasn't properly justified.
Yeah you'd be justified in questioning any background just from how easy and common it is to use facke ones. However, if after after some time (and the person moving around a bit), you see no signs of it being a fake background (like cut of hair or such), you would then be justified in assuming it is real.
Oh fuck that means you dont have to clean before a video call... now i just need to find people to video call
No because if the virtual background is different from the true background, your conversation partner will no longer have a justified true belief, because it will not be true.
If your virtual background is clean, your actualk background must also be clean.
I just take a photo of myself listening attentively. It fools half of the attendants and amuses the rest.
But knowing that zoom backgrounds exist, would a properly conscientious philosopher hold a belief on whether it is the real background?
depends, i know and work in 3d realism vfx stuff, and sometimes i get fooled if a background is real or just a render
I’m not debating whether the philosopher is fooled by the background, but whether they would decide they could properly justify holding a belief that you are using a digital background or not in the first place, knowing that digital backgrounds exist. I suppose if they had seen your room in person to know what it looks like, seen one video instance where the digital background had a door open and then you altered the render for the next meeting to have the door shut, that may convince the philosopher to believe that they are looking at actual footage of your background.
But at that point, the philosopher would have a justified false belief that they are looking at your background, rather than the unjustified true belief that it is a digital render of the same background.
This where I stop addressing you directly and start rambling about my feelings on the topic at large. Having read Gettier’s original paper as well as Elizabeth Zagzebski’s On Epistemology which discusses justified true belief (JTB) and feeling strongly enough to get a short paper published on the matter, I think people generally have an unhealthy fear of holding justified false beliefs. In Zagzebski’s book she lays out a few modern attempts to “fix” JTB, and I can’t remember the term for any of them because they all boil down to JTB, but with an extra word affixed to the front that means making sure you really justify your belief. But any attempt to justify your justification is really just a form of justification and therefore already part of the J of JTB. Sometimes you can do everything right and still end up wrong.
i do agree with the later, people do be kinda too fixated on making sure they aren't holding justified false beliefs. my personal belief is that everyone (including me) are scared of uncertainty. trying to live with the idea that u cant be certain about ur beliefs is scary
Yeah, that all lines up with what I’ve read. The philosopher William Clifford argued that we should ensure certainty of all beliefs, his example being ensuring you have a JTB that a sailing ship is seaworthy before putting it out to sea. William James later argued that, while justification is important, the passion for truth should outweigh the fear of being wrong.
Reading On Epistemology, I learned the term conscientious belief, or a belief that one holds while acknowledging the possibility of it being wrong. In practice, I think that translates belief to mean something you act on or live your life as though it is true until finding a reason to reconsider. It still requires accepting that fear of uncertainty though.
Whoa.
I did this on work calls, except I flipped it upside down.
how did people react
Usually it felt like no one noticed until someone would kind of cautiously ask about it.
lmao i can imagine that
Is this like .self in Python?
i just use a clock set to the meeting time.
Well hello there Mr. Baudrillard. Are we drawing 1:1 scale maps again?
u must elaborate
It's a nod to something the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his essay The Precession of the Simulacra.
His entire work revolves around Simulacra, copies of real things that end up replacing reality until eventually the copy is the reality, with no original that it is derived from.
One of his inspirations in the aforementioned essay is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a king who orders his mapmakers to draw him the most accurate map ever, which ends up being in 1:1 scale. An obviously nonsensical exercise, much like Mr. Rashed's endeavor to replace his actual background with an identical copy just to prove a point.
interesting
That's not true, though. It's just a trick. If tricks are all it takes, then most magic tricks are justified and true in their intended implications. At least ones that do not need misdirection to distract from sleight of hand.
Not quite. Tricks are intended to make you believe something that is not true; in OP's situation, the other people in the meeting believe that OP is sitting in the location that the background picture is taken from. They can't actually see the background, however; instead they can see the photo of the background. Their assumption is correct, but the fact that they're looking at a fake background means it COULD be false.
The room is misrepresented. If it's dirty, a clean image isn't true.
Just because something could be false does not magically make it true not-knowledge.
And if the screenshot was taken just before the meeting?
Then it's true that happens to also be unconfirmed knowledge. Until it is confirmed, it is never actually knowledge, which makes the whole premise stupid.
It is absolutely in no way what so ever unique to have something that is presented as knowledge that happens to be false in reality.
Otherwise EVERY food advertisement would count in the same boat: "true", but not accurately true.
and we all know that shit is false as fuck.
Of course it's not unusual to have something presented as knowledge that is false. That's just lying.
The distinction here is that the conclusion is true, but it is based off of inaccurate information. The conclusion that advertisements are trying to steer you towards is false.
But the cited example is not the same as advertisement. At all. Period. What so ever.
Advertisement is based on false presentation in addition to an outright lie in the reality of the situation at hand.
What is literally pictured in modern advertisement is often not even edible product. It's literally, within the picture, glue or other non-edible lies.
So by bringing advertisement into this, you're actually bringing in something even less honest than what I'm talking about...
My dude, I am not the one who brought advertisement into it.
No because in the case of the advert, you would not be justified in believing it is true.
The whole meme is about a very specific question in epistemology. If I flip a coin and ask you "heads or tails?", if you guess correctly, you still have no knowledge of the true side of the coin. You guess heads, and it is actually heads but you do not " know" it is heads.
However if I showed you the coin is weighted and after a million throws it only ever came up heads, you would be justified in your belief and would "know" it came up heads.
The meme is a subversion, because the philosophers have every reason to believe the background is real, every statement them make about the room OP is in based on the background they see will be true. If they see a book in a shelf in the background, it will also be in the exact same position in the real room. They will "know" the book is there, but that knowledge is based on a deception.
It is an actively debated topic in philosophy called the Gettier Problem