Sections 9 through 11 described some of the main proposals that epistemologists have made for solving the Gettier challenge directly. Those proposals accept the usual interpretation of each Gettier case as containing a justified true belief which fails to be knowledge.
Gettier problems or cases arose as a challenge to our understanding of the nature of knowledge. Initially, that challenge appeared in an article by Edmund Gettier, published in 1963.
So, the entrenchment of the Gettier challenge at the core of analytic epistemology hinged upon epistemologists’ confident assumptions that (i) JTB failed to accommodate the data provided by those intuitions — and that (ii) any analytical modification of JTB would need (and would be able) to be assessed for whether it accommodated such intuitions.
For a start, each Gettier case contains a belief which is true and well justified without — according to epistemologists as a whole — being knowledge. The following two generic features also help to constitute Gettier cases: Fallibility. The justification that is present within each case is fallible.
The Gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem concerning the understanding of descriptive knowledge. Attributed to American philosopher Edmund Gettier, Gettier-type counterexamples (called "Gettier-cases") challenge the long-held justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge.
On the face of it, Gettier cases do indeed show only that not all actual or possible justified true beliefs are knowledge — rather than that a belief's being justified and true is never enough for its being knowledge.
Edmund Gettier's argument that justified true belief is not a sufficient definition for knowledge is correct. There are many scenarios in which the conditions for justified true belief are met but cannot be said to qualify as knowledge; therefore justified true belief is not a sufficient definition for knowledge.
Gettier presented two cases in which a true belief is inferred from a justified false belief. He observed that, intuitively, such beliefs cannot be knowledge; it is merely lucky that they are true. In honour of his contribution to the literature, cases like these have come to be known as “Gettier cases”.
STUDY. The Gettier Problem. Gettier is arguing that while Justification, Truth, and Belief may all be necessary for knowledge, they are not jointly sufficient.
A Gettier problem is any example that demonstrates that an individual can satisfy the classical analysis of knowledge - justified true belief - without possessing knowledge.
Here's another Gettier case: You have a justified belief that someone in your office owns a Ford. And as it happens it's true that someone in your office owns a Ford. However, your evidence for your belief all concerns Nogot, who as it turns out owns no Ford.
Gilbert Harman's solution to the Gettier problem is that reasoning from a false belief precludes knowledge, but Gettier subjects do rea- son from false beliefs, and so do not know. 6 If we distinguish implicit assumptions from beliefs, then we might extend Harman's proposal to cover false implicit assumptions too.
If justification is required for knowledge but want to reject that certainty is required for knowledge, then we must say that fallibly justified true belief is sufficient for knowledge. F. But Gettier argues that fallibly justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge.
A Proposed Solution The widespread response to the Gettier Problem (as it has come to be known) has been to admit that justification, truth, and belief are individually necessary but jointly insufficient for knowledge and to propose some fourth condition on knowledge.
In Edmund Gettier's essay, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge,” Gettier argues that JTB (Plato's theory of Justified True Belief) does not necessarily guarantee knowledge. This means that the necessary but not the sufficient conditions for “S knows P” to be true have been met.
Gettier Problems. Gettier problems or cases are named in honor of the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who discovered them in 1963. They function as challenges to the philosophical tradition of defining knowledge of a proposition as justified true belief in that proposition. The problems are actual or possible situations in which someone has ...
Instead of accepting the standard interpretation of Gettier cases, and instead of trying to find a direct solution to the challenge that the cases are thereby taken to ground, a dissolution of the cases denies that they ground any such challenge in the first place. And one way of developing such a dissolution is to deny or weaken the usual intuition by which almost all epistemologists claim to be guided in interpreting Gettier cases.
Those proposals accept the usual interpretation of each Gettier case as containing a justified true belief which fails to be knowledge. Each proposal then attempts to modify JTB, the traditional epistemological suggestion for what it is to know that p. What is sought by those proposals, therefore, is an analysis of knowledge which accords with the usual interpretation of Gettier cases. That analysis would be intended to cohere with the claim that knowledge is not present within Gettier cases. And why is it so important to cohere with the latter claim? The standard answer offered by epistemologists points to what they believe is their strong intuition that, within any Gettier case, knowledge is absent. Almost all epistemologists claim to have this intuition about Gettier cases. They treat this intuition with much respect. (It seems that most do so as part of a more general methodology, one which involves the respectful use of intuitions within many areas of philosophy. Frank Jackson [1998] is a prominent proponent of that methodology’s ability to aid our philosophical understanding of key concepts.)
A lot of epistemologists have been attracted to the idea that the failing within Gettier cases is the person’s including something false in her evidence. This would be a problem for her, because she is relying upon that evidence in her attempt to gain knowledge, and because knowledge is itself always true. To the extent that falsity is guiding the person’s thinking in forming the belief that p, she will be lucky to derive a belief that p which is true. And (as section 8 indicated) there are epistemologists who think that a lucky derivation of a true belief is not a way to know that truth. Let us therefore consider the No False Evidence Proposal.
On the face of it, Gettier cases do indeed show only that not all actual or possible justified true beliefs are knowledge — rather than that a belief’s being justified and true is never enough for its being knowledge. Nevertheless, epistemologists generally report the impact of Gettier cases in the latter way, describing them as showing that being justified and true is never enough to make a belief knowledge. Why do epistemologists interpret the Gettier challenge in that stronger way?
For a start, each Gettier case contains a belief which is true and well justified without — according to epistemologists as a whole — being knowledge.
But that goal is, equally, the aim of understanding what it is about most situations that constitutes their not being Gettier situations. If we do not know what, exactly, makes a situation a Gettier case and what changes to it would suffice for its no longer being a Gettier case, then we do not know how, exactly, to describe the boundary between Gettier cases and other situations.
A Gettier problem is any example that demonstrates that an individual can satisfy the classical analysis of knowledge - justified true belief - without possessing knowledge.
Ancient Greek Philosopher Plato was the first to propose the classical analysis of knowledge, which defines knowledge as a justified true belief. This is known as the JTB theory of knowledge. A belief is any claim that you accept. A true belief is any claim you accept that corresponds to how things are in the world, and a justified true belief is a true belief that has proper evidence. In terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, all of these parts are necessary for knowledge, but none of them alone is sufficient to count as knowledge. For example, you may believe that aliens are real, but until your belief is justified and true, it is not knowledge.
The issue that the Gettier problem highlights is that there are conditions, either aside from JTB or instead of JTB, which must account for knowledge. In Gettier cases, the subject who has a justified belief is right, but not because any of their justifications were necessarily accurate. While there is a relationship between the subject’s justifications and the truth, it’s a somewhat incomplete or tenuous relationship.
Gettier’s first example is pretty weird, but it does illustrate the problem he’s identified. In this example, Gettier tells us that a man named Smith is told from a reliable source that his associate Jones will get a job. For some reason, Smith also decided to count the number of coins in Jones’ pocket and found that Jones had ten coins in his pocket.
The question of what non-Western Philosophers think of Gettier cases is a bit of a misnomer as non-Western philosophers don’t know who Gettier is or have a conception of what the Gettier Problem is. That said, some great work has been done on applying non-Western conceptions of knowledge to the Gettier problem to see how non-Western approaches might make sense of the issue. In addition, the growing field of experimental philosophy has allowed philosophers to conduct studies testing both Western and non-Western cultural intuitions surrounding Gettier cases. A small, but growing body of knowledge seems to suggest that some aspects of the Gettier problem might make intuitive sense to most people, regardless of culture.
In this regard, some might reject Gettier cases because they see Gettier as having brought JTB into existence when he critiqued it. Additionally, it’s been pointed out that JTB might not exist outside of Western philosophy, though these claims aren’t without contention. Other types of rejections exist too.
Readers of this blog will likely recall that in an earlier epistemology post one of the given definitions of knowledge defined it as “justified true belief.” Well, that definition is a lie… sort of. Unfortunately, the definition of knowledge as provided by the JTB account isn’t so straightforward and is still a point of contention among philosophers today. To understand why you’ll need to know about something called the Gettier problem.
It also turns out that Smith, who was so focused on counting the coins in Jones’ pocket, forgot he had ten coins in his pocket. Thus the proposition “the man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job” which Smith had reason to believe before, is still correct.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.