The Solution to the Gettier Problem
Science has the goal of tracking the facts (distinguishing between true and false judgments of particular existences) like whether or not there is a tree in front of me (for our purposes, there is). In a Gettier case, such as when my judgment about the tree's existence is overdetermined as true because there is a hologram of a tree projected at the real tree, I would have judged that a tree is there even if it really were not there, since the hologram would deceive me. So even if I have an experience-justified, true judgment that there is a tree, I am not thereby able to validly judge whether or not there is a tree. This is a problem for the possibility of science. Gettier cases show that something more than the actual tree (together with my compatible faculties for valid experience and judgment in general) is needed to ensure that science, or valid judgment, is possible.
In distinguishing between principles of experience and the principles of valid judgment we have stumbled on the clue to the discovery of the grounds of a possible science. While all valid judgments are tautologically in conformity with the principles of experience and its subjective validity, misjudgments testify to the fact that these subjective principles only determine the possibility of objects, not their reality. That is to say, subjective principles of experience only provide us with the activity of unifying the parts of objects given to experience, whereas we can then expect that objective principles (of judgment) provide us with the activity of unifying something else, our reflections upon given experience. So despite the problem posed by Gettier cases, science can be shown to be possible if we have an activity for making our judgments commensurable with one another.
Another way to state this whole business is that the way out of the Gettier problems for science will be to switch from the theoretical view, which views fact-tracking as a category of a reified valid faculty, to the practical view, which views tracking as something that we do to validate spontaneous judgments of existence, i.e. when testing or experimenting. Gettier cases aren’t problematic for tracking the facts because nothing about them prohibits the diegetic actor from running experiments. Accordingly I say that principles of testing (i.e. the scientific method) may validly determine objects [testing may validly determine objects, in principle], though the principles of experience cannot validly determine objects [experience cannot validly determine objects, in principle]. Objects are not possible to experience, but only to judge about, and so objects may only inhabit experience not as content but as a limit, i.e. that towards which the commensurability of judgments tends.
In distinguishing between principles of experience and the principles of valid judgment we have stumbled on the clue to the discovery of the grounds of a possible science. While all valid judgments are tautologically in conformity with the principles of experience and its subjective validity, misjudgments testify to the fact that these subjective principles only determine the possibility of objects, not their reality. That is to say, subjective principles of experience only provide us with the activity of unifying the parts of objects given to experience, whereas we can then expect that objective principles (of judgment) provide us with the activity of unifying something else, our reflections upon given experience. So despite the problem posed by Gettier cases, science can be shown to be possible if we have an activity for making our judgments commensurable with one another.
Another way to state this whole business is that the way out of the Gettier problems for science will be to switch from the theoretical view, which views fact-tracking as a category of a reified valid faculty, to the practical view, which views tracking as something that we do to validate spontaneous judgments of existence, i.e. when testing or experimenting. Gettier cases aren’t problematic for tracking the facts because nothing about them prohibits the diegetic actor from running experiments. Accordingly I say that principles of testing (i.e. the scientific method) may validly determine objects [testing may validly determine objects, in principle], though the principles of experience cannot validly determine objects [experience cannot validly determine objects, in principle]. Objects are not possible to experience, but only to judge about, and so objects may only inhabit experience not as content but as a limit, i.e. that towards which the commensurability of judgments tends.