Gettier and the Problem of Language

The patron of the chapter is Edmund Gettier, who almost by accident, due to the circumstances of the creation of the groundbreaking article, presents a critique of the definition of knowledge given by Plato and valid until modern times. This attack provokes a discussion that continues, which is understandable because Plato’s definition has shaped the understanding of knowledge for millennia. The chapter contains a description and analysis of the reasoning used by Gettier, and which similar themes also appeared in other philosophers, e.g. Bertrand Russell. The chapter proposes to rely on the concept of Alfred Tarski, which concerns a certain essential property of natural language. Natural language combines levels of utterance without distinguishing direct predication of the world from predication of this predication, which leads to paradoxes. The distinction between these levels allows one to understand the essence of Gettier’s allegations. In the case of the Gettier article, the language is realized as text. The rest of the chapter describes the specificity of the latter phenomenon, based on the concept of Umberto Eco, which emphasizes its contextual, systemic determination of a very complex nature. In this way, the knowledge contained in this text is also determined. This thread was extensively analyzed by Jacques Derrida, who went back to the phenomenon of writing in order to understand the cognitive dynamics and epistemic circumstances of writing, i.e. this mode of existence of language, which is the basis of modern civilization, as well as—let us remind—digital technologies. The chapter provides an extensive description of Derrida’s reasoning, which extends the previously introduced meta descriptive mode of understanding language and its implementation.