Author’s note: Part of this essay comes from a paper written for a college class, and I’ve taken that topic and worked it into a newer form. Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper had a sheep problem, but in my own paper, I reworked it to make it a bit more palatable to modern eyes and brains, and my professor said that he felt Gettier would approve. Thanks to Edmund Gettier, I find myself considering sheep (or sheepdogs, as the case may be) a lot, as you will see, and thanks to my long-suffering professor(s) that last year of my undergraduate work, who helped me to feel confident enough to build on the shoulders of an epistemological giant. The following amalgam is also somewhat dependent on Malcolm Gladwell’s recent Revisionist History podcast episode called The RFK Jr. Problem.
Generally speaking, I trust science to provide better answers about the world than anything else. There’s a place for intuition, supposition, hypotheticals, educated guesses, of course, but science does the hard work of having to prove its positions and show its work. This doesn’t make science omniscient or always perfectly true. There’s still a lot out there that we don’t fully understand. Some of those things are foundational, like how life started on this planet, or what consciousness is, or how we explain sentience, and although we might take scientific fact as being more or less the epitome of verifiable truth, we must still be skeptically confident only, remembering that science often paves over its previous work as new things are discovered and new technologies grant us access to deeper secrets.
I have long been a supporter of the idea that, where science fails, or has been unable to fill the unfilled gaps, philosophy takes over. Even philosophy cannot do all the work, but we know more now than we did when we were first spreading across the world as nomadic wanderers. And yet, we rarely stop to acknowledge what we don’t know and how those gaps are much more illustrative of our species than what we do know.
In the overarching realm of philosophy, the study of what we know is called epistemology, and within the framework of this topic, one of the most fascinating discussions was conducted by 20th-century philosopher Edmund Gettier. In a 1963 paper entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge, Gettier describes a problem of observation in which someone can be justified in thinking something is true and yet still not truly know if what they have observed is real. His several scenarios can be teased out into what are now called the Gettier Problems, where the breakdown of perception and observation is designed to point out the frailties in our system of observation and our desire to know things.
One of my favorite examples of a Gettier Problem involves a sheep and a sheep dog, though, in this case, with respect to Mr. Gettier, I’ve put my own spin on it. A father and son are driving on a rainy country road; the father is in the front seat and the son is in the back. Out of the foggy, wet windows, the green country speeds by. They pass a white object on the driver’s side of the car. The father believes that it is a sheepdog. The son believes that it is actually a sheep. Both father and son have seen the white creature, and both come to different conclusions. All the predicates for both things to be true are there, and it is reasonable to assume that both parent and child can trust their perceptive faculties. The next step would be to ask if either the father or the son was justified in believing what they thought they saw out the rainy, steamy windows. We would probably say yes.
Both are justified in believing what they saw, making this a justified true belief (JTB), but how can they know what they think they saw is factual if they keep driving? One of my classmates hilariously suggested that the father turn the car around to prove his son either right or himself wrong, or vice versa. This pragmatic suggestion got a general laugh, but also struck me with a secondary problem within the thought experiment. At what point is it the responsible thing for the father and son to sit down and decide how they want to get to the root of the problem?
I could be accused of taking Gettier’s otherwise thought-provoking problem too far by adding the moving vehicle and the rainy windows, but I couldn’t help inserting a layer of ethics into the scenario, either. In real life, we rarely know (or choose to believe) things without an aspect of ethical grounding, even if we ultimately choose to ignore it.
In the modern world, we are confronted with Gettier problems all the time; though the scenarios are more varied (and reflected upon less). Many topics within the framework of public discourse wind up being not much better than the wet, steamy windows in my version of the Gettier thought experiment, and our access to information is such that we can feel as though we are justified in believing something or thinking that it is true and yet having no real ability to ascertain effectively whether it is actually so. The human faculty for certainty without or only partial evidence has been taking performance enhancers of late. When we liberally fold this abject certainty into the admixture, doubling down on our possibly justified true belief, we become guilty of an epistemological infraction and an ethical one.
To better illustrate this, I will further maim Gettier’s original sheep/sheepdog problem and morph it to fit modern epistemological problems. Instead of a car on a rainy day, though, we will take a slightly more nefarious topic and a slightly more dangerous scenario than a wet country drive through sheep country.
A few weeks ago, someone I know posted a meme on social media. The topic of this post made them quite angry, and they shared it not only on their feed but also sent it to the direct message platforms of their friends. In this post, the creator (who was not the person who shared it) claimed that a rotavirus vaccine called RotaTeq was killing way more infants than the public knew about. Almost all newborns get the RotaTeq vaccine, and infant mortality rates due to the rotavirus have decreased drastically since then. All the person sharing online saw was that a vaccine was killing babies, and they became incensed enough to share it vigorously.
Immediately, I was dubious. Not only because this post came from the Internet, but also because here was an example of a carefully wrapped but still overtly anti-vax propaganda. I knew, for example, that the RotaTeq vaccine for infants has been in the sights of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for years, mainly because he believed that the doctor who created the vaccine stood to get kickbacks if the CDC found the vaccine efficacious in stopping a deadly infant virus. Although the post did not explicitly invoke RFK Jr., I could see that whoever created the meme that this person was sharing was probably in the pipeline of information promoted by Kennedy and his league of anti-vaccine supporters.
Checking back across the rest of their posts for the last few years, it seemed to me that the person who shared this post was an otherwise reasonable and rational human, not usually prone to conspiracy theories or propaganda. They had taken this idea at face value and got upset by its claims. They saw a situation where blind faith in medicine and science was killing babies while the pharmaceutical companies raked in dough. What the meme was claiming could seem possible, even reasonable, in our nation today. For us, with a young granddaughter, it might be downright terrifying to think that a big corporation would allow a dangerous or deadly vaccine to be put on the market and get the government to legally require it, thus putting our little one in harm’s way. I also know, as most people do, that things are rarely this simple or clear-cut.
The Internet and social media platforms are very much like the steamy and rain-drenched windows in my version of a Gettier problem. We see something that appears real, true, and we might even say justified, based on the limited information that we get, and feel certain about it at first glance. Reading this post might even justify believing it because it feels true. In the modern day, we cannot, like our father and son duo, simply take these things without further analysis and drive on. Too much is at stake in the Internet Age. We owe it to ourselves and to society to take much more care in getting to actual knowledge.
Despite what the post claimed, RotaTeq has saved millions of babies worldwide from the devastating dehydration of diarrhea from infant rotavirus. Before its invention, babies were regularly dying, and medical officials were powerless to stop it. Just one vaccine has saved countless lives. Multiple vaccines are required for infants today, all of which prevent otherwise devastating diseases and death. As I mentioned, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is against the RotaTeq vaccine and has recently accepted a cabinet post as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services.
In his book, called The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. falsely inflated the number of children who died as a result of taking the RotaTeq vaccine, but he also claims that vaccines generally aren’t necessary or are dangerous or cause other horrible diseases. Famously, he claims that childhood vaccines cause autism, which isn’t even a disease. In Texas, where RFK’s anti-vaccine ideology has taken hold—dare I say become contagious—we are currently watching a potent strain of measles reach nearly epidemic proportions, killing people who refused to get the measles vaccine or have their kids vaccinated, likely because of RFK’s influence and stance, assuredly because someone so prominent is feeding the ideology.
This is where the breakdown between a justified true belief and verifiable facts can cause serious and deadly issues. The person who posted this nonsense online might have been reasonable to assume that there are dangerous side effects for some vaccines. They missed an essential step in their process when they shared the meme without checking the facts first.
When we claim certainty without verification, we can very quickly cause serious trouble for others who are equally unlikely to check the facts before sharing. To strain the viral metaphor further, when we spread nonsense online without verifying it first, we become a vector for a virulent strain of credulity and ignorance that has actually reached pandemic levels in our nation. The nature of social media is to get us to spread things without verification, but even before social media, this wasn’t a new problem.
If we take a closer look at his work, we see that one of RFK’s articles about vaccines had to be retracted, largely because fact-checkers were able to prove that his work was based not on the efficacy of the vaccines, but on conflict of interest and corruption at the pharmaceutical level and on information that he either willfully or mistakenly got wrong. This hasn’t stopped him from making similar claims about other vaccines, like the COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, the measles vaccine, and others on podcasts, at the podium of his official role, or in his many books.
I’m not inoculated against RFK Jr. and his anti-vax nonsense, of course. I could just as easily be one of the millions who take his word for golden truths because he appears to be an expert (even though he is undoubtedly not one). Rather, my own position is a simple but very effective one developed over the years: I don’t believe a thing that RFK Jr. says about anything. I don’t believe a thing any “expert” says about anything until I look up whether or not their claims are verified. This isn’t a universal position, of course. Some people are more believable, whose work is verified and vetted long before it ever reaches my eyes and ears. Some people actually do the work before they put things out there. Generally, though, if it elicits a strong emotion, comes with a heavy dose of political or religious ideology, or participates in any number of logical fallacies, I ignore it.
I am immune to RFK Jr’s attempts to drag people into fear of vaccines because the man is a lawyer, not an epidemiologist, and because most of the things he says are patently false. If Rolling Stone has to retract an article, it’s not likely that the facts are being sought in the composition. This is my position for almost everything that comes from the current administration, but also from the Internet. If we take the position that all of it is false until proven factual, we might not actually be so quick to share it just because it seems true, or because we are cynical, overwhelmed, afraid, having an emotional response, or because something is intentionally composed to agree with our biases. I tend to doubt something because I might feel tempted to agree with it when I see it online.
Perhaps ironically, when family or friends would approach me about things that they “read online” about the previous administration which flipped them into a rage of righteous indignation and I didn’t lose my mind with them, they would give me odd looks. When the same or worse things occur in this new administration and they aren’t equally upset, I have to wonder if the main point of the Internet Age is to get us all to be willingly stupid and moral relativists.
My position is considered unreasonable by the people who believe RFK Jr. (et. al.). Maybe they are motivated to accept his claims because of his lineage, or because he is the nation’s top health officer, or because he is aligned with a particularly virulent strain of ignorance and moral imbecility that seems to appeal to the American political realm.
When I wrote my final paper for the epistemology class about the Gettier Problems, I added the bit about the moral necessity of finding facts to justify our beliefs. My point was that until the father and son go back and test their justified true beliefs, the thing they see can only exist in a kind of paradoxical unity where the object is both and neither a sheep or sheepdog. I got an A.
I find that the problems that Edmund Gettier published in his paper are much more practical and realistic than just the interesting and diverting discussions about what we think we know. A potent parasitic code has crept into our critical faculties and caused us to believe things not because they are true, but because they agree with our political or religious affiliations or stir up strong emotions (or all of the above). We assume that because someone is on “our side” of the chasm of civil debate and social culture that we must believe in them no matter how ridiculous their claims are. This mindset has polarized our nation and is the equivalent of the father and son stopping the car and having a knife fight to decide who was right about what they thought they saw. Except in that case, neither of them was right, making the fight all the more useless and tragic, and hopeless.
There are many known unknowns and much that we have left to learn about the world. There are some things that we can never know. This is the nature of epistemology and of human experience. However, we have a moral responsibility to make sure that the information we put out into the world is not only verifiable but also more than just a justified true belief. We have to do the work, or else people who cannot tell the difference will get the wrong end of the stick and cause way more than just a polite argument about what’s knowable; it will be the thing that tears our society and our world apart.
Author’s Further Note: Because this is an essay about citing one’s sources, I’ve compiled a bibliography of sorts on the topics discussed herein. You may find them below.
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