The Southport Riots Were A Gettier Case

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An hour and a half ago, the Fake Nous substack took a break from tirelessly defending liberalism and open borders; in the spirit of even-handedness, philosophers Jonathan Anomaly and Filipe Nobre Faria were invited to publish a short guest-post, which takes a swing at mass migration and argues that liberalism is unsustainable.

I won’t comment on their argument, but the first two paragraphs tickled my funny bone:

Revolutions are hard to predict. Place a box of matches near a flame and eventually one of them will catch fire. With enough tinder the fire will spread, even if it spreads in unpredictable ways. Mass migration in the West is a potent form of tinder.

In August of 2024 spontaneous riots erupted in England and Ireland in response to the murder of children by African migrants. Violent crime has become commonplace in the capitals of Europe, and everyone knows why. But sometimes the brutality of the crime, the dishonesty of the media, and the apathy of the government strikes a nerve. A critical mass of people notice patterns, and they react.

What could be funny about that?

Well, for ages and ages, since your mother was at school with Plato, philosophers thought the essence of knowledge was justified true belief. To know something, the conventional wisdom went, you have to believe it, it has to be true, and the belief has to be justified—and that’s all.

In 1973, Edmund Gettier murdered the “justified true belief” analysis of knowledge, though thankfully he was never deported. He did this by offering two incredibly boring counterexamples, the form of which is now known as the “Gettier case”.

For a Gettier case that might be more relevant to your life than the original two from Gettier, imagine that, below this paragraph, you perceive an alluring pink “subscribe” button, which beckons in your dreams and whispers softy in your nightmares.

With the enthusiasm of a roided woodpecker, you button-mash the glowing rectangle and form the belief that—for the rest of your life, when you’re all alone and your kids have stopped communicating—your inbox will never be barren, because you will always get emails from me.

As it happens, your belief is true: Going Awol is a blog that cares, and I will always send you emails, even if you might not want them. Nevertheless, your belief was true by accident. Up above you (don’t look or a fairy dies), there’s a Going Awol fanatic named Oak who likes to project Going Awol “subscribe” buttons onto people’s phones as part of an unauthorised marketing campaign. As luck would have it, her projection perfectly overlapped with the real thing, meaning you’d have seen—or seemed to have seen—the button no matter what.

So while your belief that you’ll be delighted and enlightened forevermore was true and perceptually justified, it didn’t amount to knowledge, since your the truth of your belief was only accidental to your justification for it.

The same thing is going here, in less explicit terms:

In August of 2024 spontaneous riots erupted in England and Ireland in response to the murder of children by African migrants. […] A critical mass of people notice patterns, and they react.

While it’s true that the murderer was the child of African migrants, and the UK protesters did form the true belief that the murder’s parents weren’t born in the UK, their justification for this belief was a fake news story claiming that the murderer was an Asylum Seeker named Ali al-Shakati, which is in fact not true.

Just as the protestors didn’t “know” the murderer’s parents weren’t born in the UK, they didn’t “notice” that the murders were part of a pattern of migrant crime, either, since “notice”, like “know”, is a factive verb, meaning the thing you “notice” has to be real for you to have really noticed it.

The moral is to stay vigilant: Gettier cases can show up anywhere (even the blog of a world-renowned epistemologist!).