Academic literature on the topic 'Edmund L Is justified true belief knowledge?'

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a short paper in the journal Analysis. That paper, entitled “Is Justifi ed True Belief Knowledge?,” purported to demonstrate that even though a person is justified in believing a true proposition p, having that justified true belief (JTB) is not sufficient for the person knowing that p (Gettier, 1963). In particular, Gettier presented examples purporting to show that a person may have a justified true belief, but the belief is, in one way or another, a “lucky belief,” and so the person having the justified true belief that p does not know that p. In what follows, I argue that justified, but luckily true beliefs do count as knowledge. What is important is that there is a limited ability to generalize from such cases, suggesting that many, if not most of what we count as instances of knowledge are, to a greater or lesser extent, localized.

Abstract This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once.

This work, “The Nothingness” of the Gettier Problem is an attempt to deconstruct the popularly held view that a fourth condition may be necessary for the Traditional Account of Knowledge otherwise known as JTB. Plato, it was who championed the traditional account of knowledge as justified Belief in response to the agitation of the skeptics notably Georgias and Protagoras. This tripartite account held sway until Edmund Gettier Challenged the position with his article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Since this challenge, scholars have tried to solve what has become known as the Gettier Problem by trying to fashion out a fourth condition to JTB. This work argues that the celebrated Gettier counter-examples in the challenge of the tripartite account is a "nothingness". The traditional account is rather fundamental in knowledge claim, hence any new vista in form of additional information on JTB should not invalidate it. The textual analysis was adopted as a method for this research.

Abstract Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. The correctness of Gettier’s argument is questioned by showing that Smith of his famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified and true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification and evidential support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. Although the author’s argument does not save the JTB-account, it explains why subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge.

This paper attempts to provide an account of Gadamer’s conception of truth. Due to this, I attempt to venture in a path that has not been fully explored. I argue that Gadamer’s conception of truth has an anamnetic character for the following reasons: First, Gadamer views truth as an event – a disclosure or uncealment of what is hidden within the being- is part of the structure of understanding without such truth happening will not occur. Second, I will show that Gadamer’s view of truth is inseparable from his view of dialectic and understanding as these are necessary conditions of the possibility of conversation primarily characterized by his account on the hermeneutic experience, language, and tradition. Third, by looking at other salient Gadamerian concepts such as the four guiding concepts of humanism, language, understanding, and conversation, the link between truth and anamnesis is fully completed. These concepts are necessary to substantiate and support my view that indeed truth has an anamnetic character. However, I should be clear that my attempt to elucidate the anamnetic character of truth is not tantamount to trying to provide an account of the nature of truth for it is one thing to give an account of the nature of truth and another to simply provide a characterization of it. The paper will be divided into three sections. The first section will discuss Plato’s view of anamnesis and his influence to Gadamer’s thought. The second section will be on Gadamer’s conception of truth and lastly, the concluding remarks. References Ackrill, John L. Essays on Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cooper, John M. (ed). Collected Works of Plato. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings. Edited by Richard E. Palmer. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007. ____________________. Truth and Method, 2nd edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998. ____________________. “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection.” Continuum 8, 1 & 2 (1970). ____________________. “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Ed. Gayle L. Ormiston. New York:SUNY Press, 1989. ____________________. Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary. Edited by Richard Palmer. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003. Scott, Dominic. Plato’s Meno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Vlastos, Gregory. Studies in Greek Philosophy, vol. II. Edited by Daniel W. Graham. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995. Secondary Sources Alcoff, Linda. “The Case for Coherence.” In The Nature of Truth. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. Ambrosio, Francis J. “Dawn and Dusk: Gadamer and Heidegger on Truth.” Man and World, 19 (1986): 21-53. Barthold, Lauren Swayne. “The Truth of Hermeneutics: The Self and Other in Dialogue in the Thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer.” Ph.D. Diss., Graduate Faculty of Political Science of the New School of Social Research, 2002. Brickhouse, Thomas C. and Nicholas D. Smith. “Socrates’ Elenctic Mission.” In OxfordStudies in Ancient Philosophy vol. IX. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Chiurazzi, Gaetano. “Truth is More than Reality: Gadamer’s Transformational Concept of Truth.” Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011): 60-71. Di Cesare, Donatella. Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait. Translated by Niall Keane Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Frede, Michael. “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Methods in Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues. Edited by James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Gerson, Lloyd P. Ancient Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gettier, Edmund. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis vol. 23, no. 6 (June 1963): 121-123. Glendinning, Simon. The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994. _____________. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Translated by Kathryn Plant. Chesham: Acumen Publishing, 2003. _____________. “Gadamer’s Basic Understanding of Understanding.” In Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler. Maiden Lane, New York: Continuum, 2002. Inwood, Michael. “ Truth and Untruth in Plato and Heidegger.” In Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue. Edited by Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005. Kahn, Charles. “ Plato on Recollection.” In A Companion to Plato. Edited by Hugh H. Benson. Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Kraut, Richard. “Introduction to the Study of Plato”. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Edited by Richard Kraut. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ______________. “Plato.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2017 Edition. Accessed December 2, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=plato. Kidder, Paulette. “Gadamer and the Platonic Eidos.” Philosophy Today 39 no. 1 (1995): 83-92. Kirkham, Richard L. Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001. Leibniz, G.W. Discourse on Metaphysics, XXVI. Translated by P.G. Lucas and L. Grint. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953. Lynch Michael (ed.). The Nature of Truth. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. Müller, Anja. “The Rediscovery of Truth.” M.A. Thesis. University of Glasgow, 1998. Palmer, Richard E. Hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. Rosen, Stanley. “Heidegger’s Interpretation of Plato.” In Essays in Metaphysics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970. Rowe, Christopher. “Interpreting Plato.” In A Companion to Plato. Edited by Hugh H. Benson. Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Schmidt, Lawrence K. Understanding Hermeneutics. Durham: Acumen, 2006. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. Young, Charles M. “The Socratic Elenchus.” in A Companion to Plato, Edited by Hugh H. Benson. Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Let us not doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” (C. S. Peirce) Introduction Doubting has always had a somewhat bad name. A “doubting Thomas” is a pejorative term for one who doubts what he or she has not witnessed first-hand, a saying which derives originally from Thomas the Apostle’s doubting of the resurrected Christ. That doubt is the opposite of faith or conviction seems to cast doubt in a bad light. There is also the saying “He has the strength of his convictions” which seems to imply we ought correspondingly to say, “He has the weakness of his doubts”. One might recall that Socrates was likened to an electric eel because his peculiar form of questioning had the power to stun his interlocutors by crushing their pet convictions and cherished beliefs under the weight of the wise man’s reasonable doubts. Despite this bad press, however, doubting is a rational activity motivated by a vitally important concern for the truth, for getting things right. And our capacity to nurture reasonable doubts and to take them seriously is now more important than ever. Consider these examples: 1) In the modern world we are relying more and more on the veracity of the Internet’s enormous and growing mass of data often without much thought about its epistemic credentials or provenance. But who or what underwrites its status as information, its presumption of truth? 2) The global financial crisis depended upon the fact that economists and bank analysts placed unbounded confidence in being able to give mathematically precise models for risk, chance and decision-making under conditions of unavoidable ignorance and uncertainty. Why weren’t these models doubted before the crisis? 3) The CIA helped build the case for war in Iraq by not taking properly into account the scant and often contradictory evidence that Saddam Hussain’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. The neat alignment of US neo-conservative policy and CIA “intelligence” ought to have raised serious doubts that might have derailed the justification for war and its inevitable casualties and costs. (See Burns in this issue — Eds.) 4) On the other hand, it is quite likely that corporations that stand to lose large sums of money are fuelling unreasonable doubts about climate change—to what extent we are responsible for it, what the chances are of mitigating its effects, etc.—through misinformation and misdirection. In this paper I want to go a step beyond these specific instances of the value of appropriate doubt. Learning how to doubt, when to doubt and what to doubt is at the heart of a powerful pragmatist approach to philosophy—understood as reflective thinking at its best. After considering two ways of thinking about doubt, I shall outline the pragmatist approach and then briefly consider its bearing on the problems of dogmatism and bullshit in contemporary society. Two Notions of Doubt It is important to distinguish doubts about beliefs from doubts about certainty. That is, in everyday parlance the term “doubt” seems to have two connotations depending on which of these notions it is contrasted with. First of all, doubt can be contrasted with belief. To doubt a belief is to be in “twosome twiminds” as James Joyce aptly put it: a state of neither believing nor disbelieving but hovering between the two, without committing oneself, undecided. To doubt in this sense is to sit on the fence, to vacillate over a truth commitment, to remain detached. In this context doubt is not disbelief but, rather, un-belief. Secondly, doubt can be contrasted with certainty, the absence of doubt. To doubt something that we thought was certain is not to doubt whether it is true or reasonable to believe. If someone asks what the colour of my car is and I say it’s painted blue they might then say, “How do you know that someone has not painted it red in your absence?” This is, of course, possible but it is not at all likely. Even if it causes me to be very slightly doubtful—and, as we shall see, pragmatism offers reasons to block this step—it would not lead me to actually doubt what the colour of my car is. To be less than fully certain is consistent with continuing to believe and doing so for good (even overwhelming) reasons. Of course, some forms of belief such as religious faith may require certainty, in which case to doubt them at all is tantamount to undermining the required attitude. There is also a notion of absolute certainty, meaning the impossibility of doubt. Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy by employing a method of extreme and radical doubting in order to discover absolutely certain (i.e. indubitable) truths. His Meditations involves solipsistic doubts about whether there is an external world, including one’s own body and other people, since perhaps its all a myriad of one’s own subjective experiences. Clearly such philosophical doubt concerns matters that are not ordinarily doubted or even seen as open to doubt. As we shall see, pragmatism sides with common sense here. A Pragmatist Perspective on Doubt With this preliminary distinction in place we can now list four pragmatist insights about doubt that help to reveal its fruitfulness and importance for critical reflection in any field, including philosophy itself: 1) Genuine doubts require reasons. Genuine doubts, doubts we are required to take seriously, arise from particular problematic situations for definite reasons. One does not doubt at will just as one does not believe at will. I cannot believe that I am the Wimbledon tennis champion just by willing to believe it. So, too, I cannot doubt what I believe just by willing to doubt it. I cannot doubt that it is a sunny day if everything speaks in favour of its being so: I’m outside, seeing the sun and clear blue skies etc. Some philosophers think that the mere conceivability or possibility of error is enough to generate a live doubt but pragmatists contest this. For example, is knowledge of what I see before me now undermined because I am not able to rule out the possibility that my brain is being artificially stimulated to induce experiences, as seen in The Matrix? Such brain-in-a-vat doubts are not genuine for the pragmatist because they do not constitute a legitimate reason to doubt. Why? For one thing we have no actual machine that can create an artificial temporally extended “world image” through brain stimulation. These are merely conceivable or “paper” doubts, unliveable paradoxes that we think about in the study but do not take seriously in everyday life. Of course, if we did have such a machine—and it is not clear that this is even technically possible today—this situation would no doubt change. 2) There are no absolute certainties (guaranteed indubitable truths). As we have seen, ordinarily the term “certainty” stands for the actual absence of doubt. That is what we might call subjective certainty since where I am free of doubt another might be doubtful. Subjective certainty is the common state of most people most of the time about many things such as what their name is, where they live, who their family and friends are, what they like to eat etc. There is also Descartes’s notion of what cannot be doubted under any circumstances, which we might call absolute certainty. Traditional philosophy believed it could discover absolute certainties by means of reason alone, these truths being called a priori. At the heart of pragmatism are doubts about all propositions that were previously regarded as absolute certainties. That is, there are no a priori truths in the traditional sense according to the pragmatist. Nothing is guaranteed to be true come what may, even the truths of logic or mathematics which we currently cannot imagine being false. It was at one time thought to be a necessary truth that two straight lines both perpendicular to another straight line never meet… that was, until the nineteenth century discovery of Riemannian geometry. What was supposedly a necessary a priori truth turned out to be false in this context. That anything can be doubted does not mean that everything can be doubted all at once. The attempt to doubt all one’s worldly beliefs presumably includes doubting that one knows the meaning of the words one uses in raising this very doubt (since one doubts the meaning of the term “doubt” itself)—or doubting whether one knows the contents of one’s thoughts—in which case one would undermine the sense of one’s doubts in the very attempt to doubt. But that makes no sense. The moral is that if doubt is to make sense then it might be wide-reaching but it cannot be fully universal. The human desire for absolute certainty is probably inescapable so the lessons of fallibilism need to be hard won again and again. Anything can be doubted—in so far as it makes sense to do so. This is the pragmatist doctrine of fallibilism. It is the position one gets by making room for doubt in one’s system of beliefs without lapsing into complete skepticism. 3) Inquiry is the fallibilistic removal of doubt. Doubt is an unsettled state of mind and “the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion” (Peirce, "Fixation" 375). We are, by nature, epistemically conservative and retain our body of beliefs, or as many of them as possible, in the face of positive reasons for doubt. A doubt stimulates us to an inquiry, which ends by dissolving the doubt and, perhaps, a slight readjustment of our network of beliefs. Since this inquiry is a fallible one nothing is guaranteed to be held fast: there are no eternal truths or indispensable methods. Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics developed techniques for doubting whether we have any reason to believe one thing rather than another. A famous argument-form they explored is called Agrippa’s Trilemma. If we ask why we should believe any given belief then we must give another belief to serve as a reason. But then the same question arises for it in turn and so on. If we are to avoid the looming infinite regress of reasons for reasons we seem to only have two unpalatable options: either to argue viciously in a circle; or to simply stop at some arbitrary point. The argument thus seems to show that nothing we believe is justified. Pragmatism blocks this trilemma at its origin by arguing that our beliefs conform to a default-and-challenge structure. Current beliefs have the status of default entitlements unless or until specific challenges to them (real doubts) are legitimately raised. On this conception we can be entitled to the beliefs we actually have without requiring reasons for them simply because we have them and lack any good reason for doubt. In an image owed to Otto Neurath, we rebuild our wooden ship of beliefs whilst at sea, replacing planks as need be but, since we must stay afloat, never all planks at once (Quine). Inquiry demands the removal of all actual doubt, not all possible doubt. A belief is, as Charles Peirce conceives it, a habit of action. To doubt a belief, then, is to undermine one’s capacity to act in the relevant respect. The ancient philosopher, Pyrrho, was reputed to need handlers to stop him putting his hands into fire or walking off cliffs because, as a radical skeptic, he lacked the relevant beliefs about fire and falling to make him aware of any danger. The pragmatist, oriented towards action and human practices, does not rest content with his doubts but overcomes them in favour of settled beliefs by way of “a continual process of re-experimenting and re-creating” (Dewey 220) 4) Inquiry requires a democratic ethics. The pragmatist conception of inquiry rehabilitates Plato’s analogy between self and society: the norms of how one is to conduct one’s inquiries are the norms of democratic society. Inquiry is a cooperative human interaction with an environment not, as in the Cartesian tradition, a private activity of solitary a priori reflection. It depends on a social conception of (fallible) reason—understood as intelligent action— which conforms to the democratic ethical principles of the fair and equal right of all to be heard, an invitation and openness to criticism, the toleration of dissenting voices, and instituting methods to help cooperatively resolve disagreements, etc. We inquire in medias res (in the middle of things)—that is, from the midst of our current beliefs and convictions within a community of inquirers. There is no need for a Cartesian propaedeutic doubt to weed out any trace of falsity at the start of inquiry. From the pragmatist point of view we must learn to live with the ineliminable possibility of error and doubt, and of inevitable shortcomings in both our answers and methods. Problems can be overcome as they arise through a self-correcting experimental method of inquiry in which nothing is sacred. A key feature of this conception of inquiry is that it places reasonable doubt at its centre: 1) a sustained doubting of old “certainties” of traditional authorities (e.g. religious, political) or of traditional a priori reason (philosophy); 2) a constant need to distinguish genuine or live doubts from philosophical or paper doubts; 3) and the idea that genuine doubts are both the stimulant to a new inquiry and, when dissolved, signal its end. Dogmatism The importance of the pragmatist conceptions of inquiry and doubt can be appreciated by seeing that various pathologies of believing—pathologies of how to form and maintain beliefs that—are natural to us. Of particular note are dogmatism and fanaticism, which are forms of fixed believing unhinged from rational criticism and sustained without regard to such matters as evidential support, reasonableness and plausibility within the wider community of informed inquirers. Since they divide the world into us and them, fellow-believers and the rest, they inevitably lead to disagreements and hostility. Dogmatists and fanatics loom large in the contemporary world as evidenced by the widespread and malevolent influence of religious, ideological and political dogmas, confrontational forms of nationalism, and fanatical “true believers” in all shapes and forms from die-hard conspiracy theorists to adherents of fad diets and the followers of self-appointed gurus and cult-leaders. The great problem with such forms of believing is that they leave no room for reasonable doubts, which history tells us inevitably arise in matters of human social life and our place in the world. And as history also tells us we go to war and put each other to death over matters of belief and disbelief; of conviction and its lack. Think of Socrates, Jesus, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero to name only a small few who have been killed for their beliefs. A great virtue of pragmatism is its anti-authoritarian stance, which is achieved by building doubt into its very methodology and by embracing a democratic ethos that makes each person equally answerable to reasonable doubt. From this perspective dogmatists and fanatical believers are ostracised as retaining an outmoded authoritarian conception of believing that has been superseded in the most successful branches of human inquiry—such as the natural sciences. Bullshit To bullshit is to talk without knowing what one is talking about. Harry Frankfurt has observed, “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” (117); and he goes on to argue that bullshitters are “a greater enemy of truth than liars are” (132). Liars care about the truth since they are trying to deceive others into believing what is not true. Bullshitters may say what is true but more often exaggerate, embellish and window-dress. Their purposes lies elsewhere than getting things right so they do not really care whether what they say is true or false or a mixture of the two. Politicians, advertising agents, salesmen and drug company representatives are notorious for bullshitting. Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a famous example of political bullshit. He said it for purely political reasons and when he was found to have lied (the evidence being the infamous unwashed dress of Monica Lewinsky) he changed the lie into a truth by redefining the word “sex”—another example of bullshit. The bullshitter can speak the truth but what matters is always the spin. The bullshitter need not (contra Frankfurt) hide his own lack of concern for the truth. He plays at truth-telling but he can do this more or less openly. The so-called bullshit artist may even try to make a virtue out of revealing his bullshit as the bullshit it is, thereby making his audience complicit. But the great danger of bullshit is not so much to others, as to oneself. Inveterate bullshitters are inevitably tempted to believe their own bullshit leading to a situation in which they do not know their own minds. Only one who knows his own mind is aware of what he is committed to, and what he takes responsibility for in the wider community of inquirers who rely on each other for information and reasonable criticism. Doubting provides a defence against bullshitters since it blocks their means: the doubter reaffirms a concern for the truth including the truth about oneself, which the bullshitter is wilfully avoiding. To doubt is to withhold a commitment to the truth through a demand not to commit too hastily or for the wrong reasons. A concern for the truth, for getting things right, is thus central to the practice of reasonable doubting. And reasonably doubting, in turn, depends on knowing one’s own mind, what truths one is committed to, and what epistemic responsibilities one thus incurs to justify and defend truths and to criticise falsehood. Democracy and fallibilist inquiry were borne of doubts about the benevolence, wisdom and authority of tyrants, dictators, priests and kings. Their continued vitality depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism about the beliefs of others and about whether we know our own minds. Only so can we sustain our vital concern for the truth in the face of the pervasive challenges of dogmatists and bullshitters. References Descartes, R. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vols. I-III. J. Cottingham et. al., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985/1641. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 12. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 14. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Frankfurt, H. “On Bullshit.” The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988. Joyce, J. Finnegan’s Wake. Penguin: London, 1999/1939. Peirce, C.S. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” 1868. In The Essential Peirce.———. “The Fixation of Belief.” 1877. In The Essential Peirce. ———. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 1878. In The Essential Peirce. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Trans. J. Barnes & J. Annas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash ABSTRACT Medical futility judgments for patients in prolonged disorders of consciousness (PDOC) frequently lead to withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment (LST), which is the leading cause of death for patients with traumatic brain injuries. The field of disorders of consciousness is pervaded by much uncertainty due to limitations on our current diagnostic tools, treatments, and outcome measures. In contrast, futility judgments are made in empirically tenuous confidence in the patient’s inability to survive or recover meaningfully. Despite emerging empirical evidence of PDOC patients’ potential for long-term recovery, an increasing sense of clinical nihilism leads to earlier and more frequent withdrawal of LST. In this paper, I argue against two kinds of futility judgments that may be used to justify the withdrawal of LST for PDOC patients: overly pessimistic predictions about the patient’s likelihood for meaningful recovery and rationing decisions that redirect hospital resources to patients who are more likely to recover. INTRODUCTION Brain injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability among children, young adults, and adults over the age of 75 years in the United States.[1] Yet we remain far from successfully diagnosing and treating brain injury patients who stay in states of prolonged disorders of consciousness. For this paper, the term “prolonged disorders of consciousness” means a vegetative state or a minimally conscious state, characterized by minimal to no signs of awareness up to and potentially exceeding five years.[2] Inadequate outcome measures and lack of empirical data for accurately predicting prolonged disorders of consciousness often force clinicians to assess patients based on their medical experience, knowledge of the medical literature, and clinical intuitions.[3] Futility judgments are clinical judgments made by healthcare providers about their patient’s health that can lead them to discontinue life-sustaining treatment. Dan Brock describes two different types of futility judgments. The first is a “true” futility judgment due to the perceived lack of expected benefit in treating the patient. The second is a hidden rationing decision in which the minor or unlikely benefit of treatment for the patient is not worth the cost in scarce hospital resources.[4] In this paper, I will critique the use of either kind of futility judgments to support the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. l. Futility Judgments about Likelihood Futility judgments reflect pessimism about the likelihood of a patient’s survival or recovery of consciousness. One of the most common reasons for withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from traumatic brain injury patients is the medical team’s perception of the patient’s poor chance of survival.[5] However, in a field characterized by much uncertainty, it seems imprudent to make futility judgments that project certainty or make the patient’s prospects of recovery or survival seem impossible. The unreliability of current bedside methods to determine consciousness and the inconsistent clinical trajectory of prolonged disorders of consciousness create considerable room for error in making predictions about the patient’s course of recovery. Despite such uncertainty, clinicians often end patients’ lives based on empirically tenuous beliefs regarding the patient’s inability to recover.[6] The grounds for futility judgments are further undermined by emerging data about the likelihood of long-term functional recovery in many patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. For example, a recent study demonstrated that patients who failed to emerge from traumatic disorders of consciousness within 28 days, the minimum standard timeframe for prolonged disorders of consciousness, could still recover various target behaviors underpinning functional independence after four weeks.[7] The potential for patients to recover beyond this limited timeframe should motivate clinicians to sustain their patients’ lives to better understand the entire course of prolonged disorders of consciousness as it evolves. Even if clinicians remain unconvinced by the empirical evidence, prevailing judgments about futility can lead to increasingly premature withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. For example, one multicenter study on level one trauma centers in Canada found that 70 percent of traumatic brain injury deaths were attributable to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, and more than half of them occurred within the first 72 hours of injury.[8] When clinicians use futility to justify decisions to withdraw life-sustaining treatment, they risk ending the lives of individuals who may have survived and recovered. This, in turn, inflates mortality rates for prolonged disorders of consciousness and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces the notion of very low odds of recovery.[9] Clinicians do not remove life-sustaining treatment without any evidence. But futility is not absolute. For example, suppose it is defined too broadly and includes cases where survival rates are low, but survival is possible. In that case, futility should not justify the removal of life-sustaining treatment. In those cases, other ethical justifications would be necessary. ll. Futility Judgments about Benefit Futility judgments also arise from pessimism about the actual benefit of the potential treatments. Another common reason for withdrawing life-sustaining treatment for traumatic brain injury patients is the clinical team’s belief in a poor long-term prognosis.[10] Based on their experience and data, clinicians who harbor pessimistic thoughts about the prognosis for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness may inform the family members that the patients would not achieve meaningful recovery. They argue that continuing life-sustaining treatment would bring about no benefit to their wellbeing. However, these beliefs can be predicated on prejudiced perceptions about the quality of life of individuals with disabilities or chronic illnesses, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the disability paradox.[11] The paradox describes the discrepancy between patients with disabilities who report a quality of life much higher than non-disabled individuals would predict their ratings. Therefore, withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from populations with prolonged disorders of consciousness based on unjustified perceptions about what their quality of life might look like perpetuates ableist assumptions about what outcomes are acceptable to them. Some clinicians might respond that if they simply defer to the patient’s perspectives on being kept in a state of prolonged disorders of consciousness, perhaps through prior consultations with the patient or a family member’s knowledge, they can satisfy the patient’s subjective notion of wellbeing. In cases where the patient’s wishes are documented, the clinician’s judgment about the benefits (or lack thereof) of life-sustaining treatment would not matter as much. The decision can be based on the patient’s expressed preferences. However, studies demonstrate that a significant proportion of people who initially rated prolonged disorders of consciousness as a fate “worse than death” also wanted to receive life-sustaining treatment. After a discussion with a researcher about this contradiction, they increased their health rating of prolonged disorders of consciousness.[12] This change demonstrates a psychological discordance between people’s pessimistic perception of prolonged disorders of consciousness versus their preferences for being kept alive despite this perception. Clinicians should conscientiously navigate this discrepancy rather than act upon their initial prejudices against prolonged disorders of consciousness. By being mindful of their ableist biases and their patients, physicians can prevent pessimism from influencing their judgments about the benefits of continuing life-sustaining treatments. Discussions would ensure that patients are well informed when they create health directives or assign proxies for their care. In addition, the patient’s values and advance care decisions should be reassessed over time in conversation with the family, if possible, to ensure that treatment decisions reflect a more accurate and up-to-date understanding of the prognostic outcomes. lll. Hidden Rationing Decisions Some judgments about futility are hidden rationing decisions. “True” futility judgments evaluate the prospective benefit of treating a patient regardless of the resource costs, while rationing decisions evaluate treatments in the context of limited resources for other patients. A physician who determines the futility of continuing life-sustaining treatment might decide that the treatment would not be worth the cost to other patients who are more likely to benefit from the same resources. If healthcare resources ought to be distributed to maximize health utility for the highest number of patients, futility judgments for prolonged disorders of consciousness patients are justified. Life-sustaining treatments would be “wasted” on those patients compared to healthier patients.[13] However, prioritizing treatment for patients with a greater likelihood of survival based on the principle of utility maximization creates a healthcare system that is unwilling to take necessary risks to advance future therapies and build medical knowledge. Medical progress cannot be made if we pursue only treatments for those with the highest chances of survival or recovery. By providing life-sustaining treatment to facilitate the entire clinical course for prolonged disorders of consciousness, we can devote resources to improving the care, rehabilitation, and outcomes for those patients. Therefore, resource allocation is morally justified by its potential to benefit future populations of patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness, even if many individual cases will not result in a successful recovery.[14] Some physicians may respond that their role requires them to make clinical decisions that account for other patients since they must work within the practical reality of limited resources. They might argue that the physician’s duties are not bound to a single patient but to a network of societal constraints that require them to consider elements of distributive justice in their clinical care. Almost every medical decision is performed within the context of contractual obligations to a democratic society that expects a just distribution of healthcare resources.[15] Withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness to direct those resources to other patients may be morally justified and obligatory for physicians to fulfill their societal duties properly. Although the physician’s obligations might extend to such societal duties, simply allocating resources to those most likely to benefit from treatment seems contrary to the principles of justice that undergird democratic society. We protect the most vulnerable members of our community, such as older adults and children, based on a principle of social solidarity that demands respect for all persons regardless of their weaknesses or dependence.[16] Withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness based on beliefs about their lack of deservedness of medical treatment violates the respect we ought to accord them as vulnerable persons in need of social assistance. The principle of non-abandonment should apply. Rationing decisions do not justify “futility” judgments for prolonged disorders of consciousness patients since they contravene principles of social justice and impede medical progress for patient populations with lower rates of recovery. CONCLUSION Futility judgments presume a lack of likely benefit of treatment. They lead to frequent and premature withdrawals of life-sustaining treatment. The prevalence of prognostic uncertainty in the case of prolonged disorders of consciousness should incentivize clinicians to sustain rather than end their patients’ lives. By doing so, they can prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy from inflating mortality rates. Clinicians’ pessimism about the patients’ quality of life can also distort how they communicate the “benefits” of treatment to the patient, and they ought to conscientiously mitigate ableist biases. In addition, hidden rationing decisions disguised as futility judgments can fail to recognize the protections we grant to the most vulnerable members of society. Although physicians should be mindful of their societal obligations for resource allocation, those obligations should not displace their primary duty to their patients. Timothy Quill’s defense of the patient’s right to medical non-abandonment demonstrates “a world of difference between facing an uncertain future alone and facing it with a committed, caring, knowledgeable partner who will not shy away from difficult decisions when the path is unclear.”[17] As such, by advocating for their patients’ rights to life-sustaining treatment and refraining from making hasty futility judgments, clinicians can honor their enduring commitment to each patient’s wellbeing as they navigate the uncertain terrain of prolonged disorders of consciousness together. - [1] “Report to Congress: Traumatic Brain Injury in the United States | Concussion | Traumatic Brain Injury | CDC Injury Center.” 2019. January 31, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/pubs/tbi_report_to_congress.html. [2] Foster, Charles. 2019. “It Is Never Lawful or Ethical to Withdraw Life-Sustaining Treatment from Patients with Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness.” Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (4): 265–70. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2018-105250. [3] Hemphill, J. Claude, and Douglas B. White. 2009. “Clinical Nihilism in Neuro-Emergencies.” Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America 27 (1): 27–viii. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emc.2008.08.009. [4] Brock, Dan. 2021. “Health Care Resource Prioritization and Rationing: Why Is It So Difficult?,” 25. [5] Turgeon, Alexis F., François Lauzier, Jean-François Simard, Damon C. Scales, Karen E.A. Burns, Lynne Moore, David A. Zygun, et al. 2011. “Mortality Associated with Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy for Patients with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Canadian Multicentre Cohort Study.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 183 (14): 1581–88. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.101786. [6] Schneiderman, Lawrence J. 1990. “Medical Futility: Its Meaning and Ethical Implications.” Annals of Internal Medicine 112 (12): 949. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-112-12-949. [7] Giacino, Joseph T., Mark Sherer, Andrea Christoforou, Petra Maurer-Karattup, Flora M. Hammond, David Long, and Emilia Bagiella. 2020. “Behavioral Recovery and Early Decision Making in Patients with Prolonged Disturbance in Consciousness after Traumatic Brain Injury.” Journal of Neurotrauma 37 (2): 357–65. https://doi.org/10.1089/neu.2019.6429. [8] Turgeon, Alexis F., François Lauzier, Jean-François Simard, Damon C. Scales, Karen E.A. Burns, Lynne Moore, David A. Zygun, et al. 2011. “Mortality Associated with Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy for Patients with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Canadian Multicentre Cohort Study.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 183 (14): 1581–88. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.101786. [9] Hemphill, J. Claude, and Douglas B. White. 2009. “Clinical Nihilism in Neuro-Emergencies.” Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America 27 (1): 27–viii. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emc.2008.08.009. [10] Turgeon, Alexis F., François Lauzier, Jean-François Simard, Damon C. Scales, Karen E.A. Burns, Lynne Moore, David A. Zygun, et al. 2011. “Mortality Associated with Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy for Patients with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Canadian Multicentre Cohort Study.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 183 (14): 1581–88. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.101786. [11] Albrecht, G. L., and P. J. Devlieger. 1999. “The Disability Paradox: High Quality of Life against All Odds.” Social Science & Medicine (1982) 48 (8): 977–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-9536(98)00411-0. [12] Golan, Ofra G., and Esther-Lee Marcus. 2012. “Should We Provide Life-Sustaining Treatments to Patients with Permanent Loss of Cognitive Capacities?” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 3 (3): e0018. https://doi.org/10.5041/RMMJ.10081. [13] Brock, Dan. 2021. “Health Care Resource Prioritization and Rationing: Why Is It So Difficult?25. [14] Giacino, Joseph T., Yelena G. Bodien, David Zuckerman, Jaimie Henderson, Nicholas D. Schiff, and Joseph J. Fins. 2021. “Empiricism and Rights Justify the Allocation of Health Care Resources to Persons with Disorders of Consciousness.” AJOB Neuroscience 12 (2–3): 169–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/21507740.2021.1904055. [15] Misak, Cheryl J., Douglas B. White, and Robert D. Truog. 2014. “Medical Futility.” Chest 146 (6): 1667–72. https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.14-0513. [16] Golan, Ofra G., and Esther-Lee Marcus. 2012. “Should We Provide Life-Sustaining Treatments to Patients with Permanent Loss of Cognitive Capacities?” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 3 (3): e0018. https://doi.org/10.5041/RMMJ.10081. [17] Quill, Timothy E., Christine K. Cassel, and Ann Intern Med. 1995. “Nonabandonment: A Central Obligation for Physicians.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 368–74.

Over the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to consider people’s attitudes to sharks and how these are formed, investigating the representation of sharks (Peschak; Ostrovski et al.) in films (Le Busque and Litchfield; Neff; Schwanebeck), newspaper reports (Muter et al.), and social media (Le Busque et al., “An Analysis”). My own research into representations of surfing and sharks in Australian writing (Brien) has, however, revealed that, although reporting of shark sightings and human-shark interactions are prominent in the news, and sharks function as vivid and commanding images and metaphors in art and writing (Ellis; Westbrook et al.), little scholarship has investigated their representation in Australian books published for a general readership. While recognising representations of sharks in other book-length narrative forms in Australia, including Australian fiction, poetry, and film (Ryan and Ellison), this enquiry is focussed on non-fiction books for general readers, to provide an initial review. Sampling holdings of non-fiction books in the National Library of Australia, crosschecked with Google Books, in early 2021, this investigation identified 50 Australian books for general readers that are principally about sharks, or that feature attitudes to them, published from 1911 to 2021. Although not seeking to capture all Australian non-fiction books for general readers that feature sharks, the sampling attempted to locate a wide range of representations and genres across the time frame from the earliest identified text until the time of the survey. The books located include works of natural and popular history, travel writing, memoir, biography, humour, and other long-form non-fiction for adult and younger readers, including hybrid works. A thematic analysis (Guest et al.) of the representation of sharks in these texts identified five themes that moved from understanding sharks as fishes to seeing them as monsters, then prey, and finally to endangered species needing conservation. Many books contained more than one theme, and not all examples identified have been quoted in the discussion of the themes below. Sharks as Part of the Natural Environment Drawing on oral histories passed through generations, two memoirs (Bradley et al.; Fossa) narrate Indigenous stories in which sharks play a central role. These reveal that sharks are part of both the world and a wider cosmology for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Clua and Guiart). In these representations, sharks are integrated with, and integral to, Indigenous life, with one writer suggesting they are “creator beings, ancestors, totems. Their lifecycles reflect the seasons, the landscape and sea country. They are seen in the movement of the stars” (Allam). A series of natural history narratives focus on zoological studies of Australian sharks, describing shark species and their anatomy and physiology, as well as discussing shark genetics, behaviour, habitats, and distribution. A foundational and relatively early Australian example is Gilbert P. Whitley’s The Fishes of Australia: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1940. Ichthyologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney from the early 1920s to 1964, Whitley authored several books which furthered scientific thought on sharks. Four editions of his Australian Sharks were published between 1983 and 1991 in English, and the book is still held in many libraries and other collections worldwide. In this text, Whitley described a wide variety of sharks, noting shared as well as individual features. Beautiful drawings contribute information on shape, colouring, markings, and other recognisable features to assist with correct identification. Although a scientist and a Fellow and then President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Whitley recognised it was important to communicate with general readers and his books are accessible, the prose crisp and clear. Books published after this text (Aiken; Ayling; Last and Stevens; Tricas and Carwardine) share Whitley’s regard for the diversity of sharks as well as his desire to educate a general readership. By 2002, the CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.) also featured numerous striking photographs of these creatures. Titles such as Australia’s Amazing Sharks (Australian Geographic) emphasise sharks’ unique qualities, including their agility and speed in the water, sensitive sight and smell, and ability to detect changes in water pressure around them, heal rapidly, and replace their teeth. These books also emphasise the central role that sharks play in the marine ecosystem. There are also such field guides to sharks in specific parts of Australia (Allen). This attention to disseminating accurate zoological information about sharks is also evident in books written for younger readers including very young children (Berkes; Kear; Parker and Parker). In these and other similar books, sharks are imaged as a central and vital component of the ocean environment, and the narratives focus on their features and qualities as wondrous rather than monstrous. Sharks as Predatory Monsters A number of books for general readers do, however, image sharks as monsters. In 1911, in his travel narrative Peeps at Many Lands: Australia, Frank Fox describes sharks as “the most dangerous foes of man in Australia” (23) and many books have reinforced this view over the following century. This can be seen in titles that refer to sharks as dangerous predatory killers (Fox and Ruhen; Goadby; Reid; Riley; Sharpe; Taylor and Taylor). The covers of a large proportion of such books feature sharks emerging from the water, jaws wide open in explicit homage to the imaging of the monster shark in the film Jaws (Spielberg). Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Reid) is characteristic of books that portray encounters with sharks as terrifying and dramatic, using emotive language and stories that describe sharks as “the world’s most feared sea creature” (47) because they are such “highly efficient killing machines” (iv, see also 127, 129). This representation of sharks is also common in several books for younger readers (Moriarty; Rohr). Although the risk of being injured by an unprovoked shark is extremely low (Chapman; Fletcher et al.), fear of sharks is prevalent and real (Le Busque et al., “People’s Fear”) and described in a number of these texts. Several of the memoirs located describe surfers’ fear of sharks (Muirhead; Orgias), as do those of swimmers, divers, and other frequent users of the sea (Denness; de Gelder; McAloon), even if the author has never encountered a shark in the wild. In these texts, this fear of sharks is often traced to viewing Jaws, and especially to how the film’s huge, bloodthirsty great white shark persistently and determinedly attacks its human hunters. Pioneer Australian shark expert Valerie Taylor describes such great white sharks as “very big, powerful … and amazingly beautiful” but accurately notes that “revenge is not part of their thought process” (Kindle version). Two books explicitly seek to map and explain Australians’ fear of sharks. In Sharks: A History of Fear in Australia, Callum Denness charts this fear across time, beginning with his own “shark story”: a panicked, terror-filled evacuation from the sea, following the sighting of a shadow which turned out not to be a shark. Blake Chapman’s Shark Attacks: Myths, Misunderstandings and Human Fears explains commonly held fearful perceptions of sharks. Acknowledging that sharks are a “highly emotive topic”, the author of this text does not deny “the terror [that] they invoke in our psyche” but makes a case that this is “only a minor characteristic of what makes them such intriguing animals” (ix). In Death by Coconut: 50 Things More Dangerous than a Shark and Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Ocean, Ruby Ashby Orr utilises humour to educate younger readers about the real risk humans face from sharks and, as per the book’s title, why they should not be feared, listing champagne corks and falling coconuts among the many everyday activities more likely to lead to injury and death in Australia than encountering a shark. Taylor goes further in her memoir – not only describing her wonder at swimming with these creatures, but also her calm acceptance of the possibility of being injured by a shark: "if we are to be bitten, then we are to be bitten … . One must choose a life of adventure, and of mystery and discovery, but with that choice, one must also choose the attendant risks" (2019: Kindle version). Such an attitude is very rare in the books located, with even some of the most positive about these sea creatures still quite sensibly fearful of potentially dangerous encounters with them. Sharks as Prey There is a long history of sharks being fished in Australia (Clark). The killing of sharks for sport is detailed in An American Angler in Australia, which describes popular adventure writer Zane Grey’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s to fish ‘big game’. This text includes many bloody accounts of killing sharks, which are justified with explanations about how sharks are dangerous. It is also illustrated with gruesome pictures of dead sharks. Australian fisher Alf Dean’s biography describes him as the “World’s Greatest Shark Hunter” (Thiele), this text similarly illustrated with photographs of some of the gigantic sharks he caught and killed in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from being killed during pleasure and sport fishing, sharks are also hunted by spearfishers. Valerie Taylor and her late husband, Ron Taylor, are well known in Australia and internationally as shark experts, but they began their careers as spearfishers and shark hunters (Taylor, Ron Taylor’s), with the documentary Shark Hunters gruesomely detailing their killing of many sharks. The couple have produced several books that recount their close encounters with sharks (Taylor; Taylor, Taylor and Goadby; Taylor and Taylor), charting their movement from killers to conservationists as they learned more about the ocean and its inhabitants. Now a passionate campaigner against the past butchery she participated in, Taylor’s memoir describes her shift to a more respectful relationship with sharks, driven by her desire to understand and protect them. In Australia, the culling of sharks is supposedly carried out to ensure human safety in the ocean, although this practice has long been questioned. In 1983, for instance, Whitley noted the “indiscriminate” killing of grey nurse sharks, despite this species largely being very docile and of little threat to people (Australian Sharks, 10). This is repeated by Tony Ayling twenty-five years later who adds the information that the generally harmless grey nurse sharks have been killed to the point of extinction, as it was wrongly believed they preyed on surfers and swimmers. Shark researcher and conservationist Riley Elliott, author of Shark Man: One Kiwi Man’s Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator (2014), includes an extremely critical chapter on Western Australian shark ‘management’ through culling, summing up the problems associated with this approach: it seems to me that this cull involved no science or logic, just waste and politics. It’s sickening that the people behind this cull were the Fisheries department, which prior to this was the very department responsible for setting up the world’s best acoustic tagging system for sharks. (Kindle version, Chapter 7) Describing sharks as “misunderstood creatures”, Orr is also clear in her opposition to killing sharks to ‘protect’ swimmers noting that “each year only around 10 people are killed in shark attacks worldwide, while around 73 million sharks are killed by humans”. She adds the question and answer, “sounds unfair? Of course it is, but when an attack is all over the news and the people are baying for shark blood, it’s easy to lose perspective. But culling them? Seriously?” (back cover). The condemnation of culling is also evident in David Brooks’s recent essay on the topic in his collection of essays about animal welfare, conservation and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams. This disapproval is also evident in narratives by those who have been injured by sharks. Navy diver Paul de Gelder and surfer Glen Orgias were both bitten by sharks in Sydney in 2009 and both their memoirs detail their fear of sharks and the pain they suffered from these interactions and their lengthy recoveries. However, despite their undoubted suffering – both men lost limbs due to these encounters – they also attest to their ongoing respect for these creatures and specify a shared desire not to see them culled. Orgias, instead, charts the life story of the shark who bit him alongside his own story in his memoir, musing at the end of the book, not about himself or his injury, but about the fate of the shark he had encountered: great whites are portrayed … as pathological creatures, and as malevolent. That’s rubbish … they are graceful, mighty beasts. I respect them, and fear them … [but] the thought of them fighting, dying, in a net upsets me. I hope this great white shark doesn’t end up like that. (271–271) Several of the more recent books identified in this study acknowledge that, despite growing understanding of sharks, the popular press and many policy makers continue to advocate for shark culls, these calls especially vocal after a shark-related human death or injury (Peppin-Neff). The damage to shark species involved caused by their killing – either directly by fishing, spearing, finning, or otherwise hunting them, or inadvertently as they become caught in nets or affected by human pollution of the ocean – is discussed in many of the more recent books identified in this study. Sharks as Endangered Alongside fishing, finning, and hunting, human actions and their effects such as beach netting, pollution and habitat change are killing many sharks, to the point where many shark species are threatened. Several recent books follow Orr in noting that an estimated 100 million sharks are now killed annually across the globe and that this, as well as changes to their habitats, are driving many shark species to the status of vulnerable, threatened or towards extinction (Dulvy et al.). This is detailed in texts about biodiversity and climate change in Australia (Steffen et al.) as well as in many of the zoologically focussed books discussed above under the theme of “Sharks as part of the natural environment”. The CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.), for example, emphasises not only that several shark species are under threat (and protected) (8–9) but also that sharks are, as individuals, themselves very fragile creatures. Their skeletons are made from flexible, soft cartilage rather than bone, meaning that although they are “often thought of as being incredibly tough; in reality, they need to be handled carefully to maximise their chance of survival following capture” (9). Material on this theme is included in books for younger readers on Australia’s endangered animals (Bourke; Roc and Hawke). Shark Conservation By 1991, shark conservation in Australia and overseas was a topic of serious discussion in Sydney, with an international workshop on the subject held at Taronga Zoo and the proceedings published (Pepperell et al.). Since then, the movement to protect sharks has grown, with marine scientists, high-profile figures and other writers promoting shark conservation, especially through attempts to educate the general public about sharks. De Gelder’s memoir, for instance, describes how he now champions sharks, promoting shark conservation in his work as a public speaker. Peter Benchley, who (with Carl Gottlieb) recast his novel Jaws for the film’s screenplay, later attested to regretting his portrayal of sharks as aggressive and became a prominent spokesperson for shark conservation. In explaining his change of heart, he stated that when he wrote the novel, he was reflecting the general belief that sharks would both seek out human prey and attack boats, but he later discovered this to be untrue (Benchley, “Without Malice”). Many recent books about sharks for younger readers convey a conservation message, underscoring how, instead of fearing or killing sharks, or doing nothing, humans need to actively assist these vulnerable creatures to survive. In the children’s book series featuring Bindi Irwin and her “wildlife adventures”, there is a volume where Bindi and a friend are on a diving holiday when they find a dead shark whose fin has been removed. The book not only describes how shark finning is illegal, but also how Bindi and friend are “determined to bring the culprits to justice” (Browne). This narrative, like the other books in this series, has a dual focus; highlighting the beauty of wildlife and its value, but also how the creatures described need protection and assistance. Concluding Discussion This study was prompted by the understanding that the Earth is currently in the epoch known as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have significantly altered, and continue to alter, the Earth by our activities (Myers), resulting in numerous species becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct. It acknowledges the pressing need for not only natural science research on these actions and their effects, but also for such scientists to publish their findings in more accessible ways (see, Paulin and Green). It specifically responds to demands for scholarship outside the relevant areas of science and conservation to encourage widespread thinking and action (Mascia et al.; Bennett et al.). As understanding public perceptions and overcoming widely held fear of sharks can facilitate their conservation (Panoch and Pearson), the way sharks are imaged is integral to their survival. The five themes identified in this study reveal vastly different ways of viewing and writing about sharks. These range from seeing sharks as nothing more than large fishes to be killed for pleasure, to viewing them as terrifying monsters, to finally understanding that they are amazing creatures who play an important role in the world’s environment and are in urgent need of conservation. This range of representation is important, for if sharks are understood as demon monsters which hunt humans, then it is much more ‘reasonable’ to not care about their future than if they are understood to be fascinating and fragile creatures suffering from their interactions with humans and our effect on the environment. Further research could conduct a textual analysis of these books. In this context, it is interesting to note that, although in 1949 C. Bede Maxwell suggested describing human deaths and injuries from sharks as “accidents” (182) and in 2013 Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter proposed using “sightings, encounters, bites, and the rare cases of fatal bites” (70) to accurately represent “the true risk posed by sharks” to humans (70), the majority of the books in this study, like mass media reports, continue to use the ubiquitous and more dramatic terminology of “shark attack”. The books identified in this analysis could also be compared with international texts to reveal and investigate global similarities and differences. While the focus of this discussion has been on non-fiction texts, a companion analysis of representation of sharks in Australian fiction, poetry, films, and other narratives could also be undertaken, in the hope that such investigations contribute to more nuanced understandings of these majestic sea creatures. 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Gettiered beliefs are beliefs that fall short of knowledge in the way illustrated by Gettier cases: cases like those Edmund Gettier employed to show that justified true belief doesn’t suffice for knowledge. What has happened to a belief that falls short of knowledge in the way such cases illustrate? I focus initially on two leading substantive answers, what I call the Ease of Mistake Approach and the Lack of Credit Approach. After critically assessing and rejecting each of these approaches, I introduce and evaluate two less prominent approaches to gettiered belief. According to the view I settle on—a species of what I call the Risk of Misleading Justification Approach—a gettiered belief is one which is justified and true, yet held in such a way that the belief’s subject either actually is justified in believing many falsehoods similar to its propositional content or could well have been so justified.

‘The analysis of knowledge’ begins with Edmund Gettier who challenged the ‘classical analysis of knowledge’ that equates knowledge with justified true belief. His no-false-belief proposal had some flaws. Alvin Goldman then proposed the causal theory of knowledge: experience-based knowledge that requires the knower to be appropriately causally connected to a fact. Goldman went on to launch a fresh analysis of knowledge, focused on reliability. Reliabilism is when knowledge is true belief that is produced by a mechanism likely to produce true belief. But can knowing be analysed at all? The relationship between knowing and believing is considered in the knowledge-first and belief-first movements of epistemology.

After Edmund Gettier’s “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, epistemology was dominated by attempts to explain what is needed in order to make justified true belief knowledge. The post-Gettier literature contained many views that tried to solve the Gettier problem by appealing to the notion of defeat. Unfortunately, all of these views are false. The failure of these views greatly contributed to a general distrust of reasons in epistemology. However, reasons are making a comeback in epistemology, both in general and in the context of the Gettier problem. There are two main aims of this chapter. First, I will argue against a natural defeat-based resolution of the Gettier problem. Second, I will defend my own defeat-based solution. This solution appeals to a modal anti-luck condition. I will argue that this condition captures anti-luck intuitions, and has virtues that rival modal anti-luck conditions lack.

This chapter considers accounts of identifying what has to be added to true belief in order to get knowledge. One tradition says that what is needed is something like an argument in defense of the belief, a justification to use the term of art. But the chapter looks further, by examining those arguments made after Edmund Gettier's influential 1963 article, which illustrated that justification on its own is not enough. Thus the chapter considers what has to be added to justified true belief in order to get knowledge. Many proposals attempting to address this assume that what needs to be added to true belief in order to get knowledge is something related to true belief but distinct from it. In contrast, this chapter suggests that whenever an individual S has a true belief P but does not know P, then S lacks important information.