Contrarily to LukeProg, knowledge of the Gettier Problem improves one's epistemology because it shows that knowledge equals justified true belief is not a viable stance.
Consider two agents who are communicating with each other in an attempt to reach Aumann Agreement. These agents will certainly need precise words for the following concepts:
Reality: "Is statement A true?"
Belief: "Does agent M believe that statement A is true?" and "With what probability does Agent M believe that statement A is true?"
Map/Territory correspondence: "Does Agent M's belief that Statement A is true correspond to reality?"
Calibration: "Are Agent M's beliefs well calibrated?"
Epistemic process: "What method did agent M use to generate his posterior beliefs?" "Is that method reliable?"
Gettier problems show that you won't be able to project these five dimensions onto a single binary. Which is true but not very insightful. Moreover, I can't imagine that the ability to reach Aumann agreement will ever depend on the definition of "knowledge". Therefore, this is mostly an empty semantics discussion.
It's not very insightful if you already know that knowledge isn't a primitive construct, but justified true belief held sway for an incredibly long time and most people don't realise that there isn't a straightforward definition for knowledge until exposed to the Gettier problem.
How did that realisation change the way you interact with knowledge? As you claim your epistemology is improved, what kind of mistakes did you do in the past that you don't do anymore?
justified true belief held sway for an incredibly long time
What does that mean? Philosophers proclaimed for a long time that knowledge is about justified true belief? I think over my life I have been exposed to many different ways of dealing with knowledge and I don't think one of them was knowledge is primarily justified true belief.
Justified true belief held sway over philosophers, but it is also what most people would come up if you asked them and they thought about it for enough. People understand that knowledge is about having particular beliefs, that these beliefs have to be true and that people have beliefs that are true, but which they don't actually know to be true (justified element). I bought this definition until I was exposed to the Gettier problem.
but it is also what most people would come up if you asked them and they thought about it for enough
There an easy way to check whether that might be true. Look at the producers of dictionaries.
Webster:information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or educationawareness of something : the state of being aware of something
Maybe the guys at that dictionary are an expection. Let's look at the Cambridge dictionary:understanding of or information about a subject that you get by experience or study, either known by one person or by people generally:the state of knowing about or being familiar with something
Studying philosophy mislead you. Neither of those definitions speaks about justification or truth.
I don't think saying that knowledge is information that's due to experience of education is giving a synonym.
But even if someone defines a term via synonym they are still defining the term. It's worthwhile to note that different people interact with language differently.
At the moment where you accept the framing of the question as the only way to look at the issue, you miss a lot of real world usage of the concept in question by people who don't use the same framing as you do.
LukeProg considers philosophy a diseased discipline
Four years ago! Probably a good idea mention that or check if he still thinks this.
I don't thing there's a conflict between your post saying that there's a lot of value in up to a few hundred hours of scholarship and thought on a topic and LukeProg saying the leading edge of the topic is broken and it's not worth devoting significant portions of a career on current academic practices.
Both are likely quite true.
The one and only philosophy class I've taken was an Ethics course. My instructor was excellent at helping us engage with the core of hypotheticals. While it annoyed me at the time, I appreciate the girl who bit the bullet for moral relativism; she was my first exposure to committing fully to an ethical system.
I suppose I agree with you, that philosophy isn't useless, but the Sequences and the dialogues with other rationalists have been pretty effective, too.
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, what you should do if someone talks metaphysics is point out that they haven't given signification to some of their words. Although he says that philosophy should only care about reality (and if it's reality, it's physics, biology, etc and not philosophy), he also says that philosophy is here to clarify our thoughts, and I can't help but agree.
The "kind of crazy" of the postmodern though aren't the minority, they kinda all lack rigor and fail to give signification to their words (but use them nonetheless) - and moreover have what we'll call the "disease of the metaphor", doing many unnecessary or even obscuring metaphors.
I also agree that there is value in studying philosophy - but having the rationality to question it should come first. (Kinda obvious that I do side with the so called anti-philosophy huh)
There was an episode of the podcast 'the infinite monkey cage' which was more or less science versus philosophy. The guest scientists spoke at length and in detail what science had accomplished. The guest philosophers... sputtered for the whole show. But at the end the host said this...
In all of philosophy there is a small subset named logic. In all of logic there is a small subset named mathematics. In all of mathematics there is a small subset named statistics. If science would like to proceed without statistics, which is a shard of a shard of a shard of philosophy, then science is welcome to do so.