Gettier clauses can be readily understood as a response to the conventional starting point for epistemology: the position that having knowledge is a matter of having a justified belief in a true proposition (often abbreviated to JTB.) (This really only concerns propositional knowledge, as opposed to, for example, knowing how to ride a bicycle.)
To know something in this sense seems to require several things: firstly, that the relevant proposition is true, which is independent of one's state of mind (not everyone agrees, but that is another issue...) Secondly, it seems to require that one knows what the relevant proposition is, which is a state of mind. Thirdly, having a belief that it is true, which is also a state of mind.
If we left it at that, there's no clear way to find out which propositions are true, at least for those that are not clearly true a priori (and even then, 'clearly' is problematic except in trivial cases, but that is yet another issue...) Having a justification for our belief gives us confidence that what we believe to be true actually is (though it rarely gives us certainty.)
But what, then, is justification? If we take the truth of the proposition alone as its justification, we get stuck in an epistemic loop. I think you are right if you are suggesting that good justifications are often in the form of causal arguments, but by taking that position, we are casting justification as being something like knowledge: having a belief that an argument about causes (or anything else, for that matter) is sound, rather than a belief that a proposition states a fact - but having a justified belief in an argument involves knowing that its premises are correct...
It is beginning to look like tortoises all the way down (as in Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles".)
To know something in this sense seems to require several things: firstly, that the relevant proposition is true, which is independent of one's state of mind (not everyone agrees, but that is another issue...) Secondly, it seems to require that one knows what the relevant proposition is, which is a state of mind. Thirdly, having a belief that it is true, which is also a state of mind.
If we left it at that, there's no clear way to find out which propositions are true, at least for those that are not clearly true a priori (and even then, 'clearly' is problematic except in trivial cases, but that is yet another issue...) Having a justification for our belief gives us confidence that what we believe to be true actually is (though it rarely gives us certainty.)
But what, then, is justification? If we take the truth of the proposition alone as its justification, we get stuck in an epistemic loop. I think you are right if you are suggesting that good justifications are often in the form of causal arguments, but by taking that position, we are casting justification as being something like knowledge: having a belief that an argument about causes (or anything else, for that matter) is sound, rather than a belief that a proposition states a fact - but having a justified belief in an argument involves knowing that its premises are correct...
It is beginning to look like tortoises all the way down (as in Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...