Epistemology > Knowledge > Defining Knowledge > The Gettier Problem

The Gettier Problem

Edited by Ian M. Church (University of Edinburgh)
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Summary

Traditionally, knowledge has been taken to yield a reductive analysis in terms of (conceptually primitive) necessary and jointly sufficient conditions—most commonly, justified (or warranted) true belief. In 1963, however, Edmund Gettier’s “Is Knowledge Justified True Belief?” challenged the reductive model of knowledge by producing a series of counterexamples where, intuitively, a justified true belief fails to be knowledge. Since Gettier’s original challenge, the philosophical literature has been replete with attempts to defend the reductive analysis against Gettier counterexamples (now generalized well beyond the cases posed in 1963) and those claiming that such defenses fail. 
Key works Gettier 1963 is the piece that started it all, and should be the first point of contact with the literature. And Shope 1983 provides an excellent summary of the first 20 years following Gettier's landmark paper. While there is certainly a legion of accounts aiming to provide a viable reductive account of knowledge that is not vulnerable to Gettier counterexample, four seminal accounts can be found here: Hetherington 2001, Howard-Snyder 2003, Zagzebski 1999, and Nozick 1981. Other philosophers have tried to defuse Gettier counterexamples by challenging the intuitions that inform and undergird them. See Weatherson 2003 and Weinberg et al 2001. Finally, it is worth noting that some philosophers have argued that Gettier counterexamples are unavoidable within the reductive model of knowledge. See Zagzebski 1994, Floridi 2004, and Church 2013
Introductions Encyclopedia articles include Steup 2008 and Hetherington 2005. 
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  1. The Gettier Problem and the Demands of Inquiry.J. J. Acero - 2009 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 28 (3).
  2. The Invalidity of Gettier-Type Counterexamples.Robert Almeder - 1983 - Philosophia 13 (1-2):67-74.
  3. Defending Gettier Counter-Examples.Robert Almeder - 1975 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 53 (1):58 – 60.
  4. Are Gettier Cases Misleading?Philip Atkins - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (3):379-384.
    The orthodox view in contemporary epistemology is that Edmund Gettier refuted the JTB analysis of knowledge, according to which knowledge is justified true belief. In a recent paper Moti Mizrahi questions the orthodox view. According to Mizrahi, the cases that Gettier advanced against the JTB analysis are misleading. In this paper I defend the orthodox view.
  5. The Analysis of Knowing - a Decade of Research - Shope,Rk.B. Aune - unknown
  6. Two for the Show: Anti-Luck and Virtue Epistemologies in Consonance.Guy Axtell - 2007 - Synthese 158 (3):363 - 383.
    This essay extends my side of a discussion begun earlier with Duncan Pritchard, the recent author of Epistemic Luck.Pritchard’s work contributes significantly to improving the “diagnostic appeal” of a neo-Moorean philosophical response to radical scepticism. While agreeing with Pritchard in many respects, the paper questions the need for his concession to the sceptic that the neo-Moorean is capable at best of recovering “‘brute’ externalist knowledge”. The paper discusses and directly responds to a dilemma that Pritchard poses for virtue epistemologies (VE). (...)
  7. Felix Culpa: Luck in Ethics and Epistemology.Guy Axtell - 2003 - Metaphilosophy 34 (3):331--352.
    Luck threatens in similar ways our conceptions of both moral and epistemic evaluation. This essay examines the problem of luck as a metaphilosophical problem spanning the division between subfields in philosophy. I first explore the analogies between ethical and epistemic luck by comparing influential attempts to expunge luck from our conceptions of agency in these two subfields. I then focus upon Duncan Pritchard's challenge to the motivations underlying virtue epistemology, based specifically on its handling of the problem of epistemic luck. (...)
  8. Epistemic Luck in Light of the Virtues.Guy Axtell - 2001 - In Abrol Fairweather & Linda Zagzebski (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Oxford University Press. pp. 158--177.
    The presence of luck in our cognitive as in our moral lives shows that the quality of our intellectual character may not be entirely up to us as individuals, and that our motivation and even our ability to desire the truth, like our moral goodness, can be fragile. This paper uses epistemologists'responses to the problem of “epistemic luck” as a sounding board and locates the source of some of their deepest disagreements in divergent, value-charged “interests in explanation,” which epistemologists bring (...)
  9. Does Luck Have a Place in Epistemology?Nathan Ballantyne - 2014 - Synthese 191 (7):1391-1407.
    Some epistemologists hold that exploration and elaboration of the nature of luck will allow us to better understand knowledge. I argue this is a mistake.
  10. Paradox Without Knowledge.John A. Barker - 1974 - Synthese 28 (2):261 - 270.
  11. Va Savoir! De la Connaissance En Général -- Pascal Engel. [REVIEW]Guillaume Beaulac & Pierre Poirier - 2009 - Dialogue 48 (1):217-221.
  12. Gettierized Knobe Effects.James Beebe & Joseph Shea - 2013 - Episteme 10 (3):219-240.
    We report experimental results showing that participants are more likely to attribute knowledge in familiar Gettier cases when the would-be knowers are performing actions that are negative in some way (e.g. harmful, blameworthy, norm-violating) than when they are performing positive or neutral actions. Our experiments bring together important elements from the Gettier case literature in epistemology and the Knobe effect literature in experimental philosophy and reveal new insights into folk patterns of knowledge attribution.
  13. Keeping Track of the Gettier Problem.Sven Bernecker - 2011 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2):127-152.
    This paper argues that for someone to know proposition p inferentially it is not enough that his belief in p and his justification for believing p covary with the truth of p through a sphere of possibilities. A further condition on inferential knowledge is that p's truth-maker is identical with, or causally related to, the state of affairs the justification is grounded in. This position is dubbed ‘identificationism.’.
  14. Logical Knowledge and Gettier Cases.Corine Besson - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (234):1-19.
    Knowledge of the basic rules of logic is often thought to be distinctive, for it seems to be a case of non-inferential a priori knowledge. Many philosophers take its source to be different from those of other types of knowledge, such as knowledge of empirical facts. The most prominent account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic takes this source to be the understanding of logical expressions or concepts. On this account, what explains why such knowledge is distinctive is (...)
  15. Gettier's Theorem.John Bigelow - 2006 - In Stephen Cade Hetherington (ed.), Aspects of Knowing: Epistemological Essays. Elsevier. pp. 203--218.
  16. Non-Pickwickian Belief and 'the Gettier Problem'.John Biro - 2017 - Logos and Episteme 8 (1):47-69.
    That in Gettier's alleged counterexamples to the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief the belief condition is satisfied has rarely been questioned. Yet there is reason to doubt that a rational person would come to believe what Gettier's protagonists are said to believe in the way they are said to have come to believe it. If they would not, the examples are not counter-examples to the traditional analysis. I go on to discuss a number of examples inspired by (...)
  17. Sensitivity Actually.Michael Blome‐Tillmann - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3):606-625.
    A number of prominent epistemologists claim that the principle of sensitivity “play[s] a starring role in the solution to some important epistemological problems”. I argue that traditional sensitivity accounts fail to explain even the most basic data that are usually considered to constitute their primary motivation. To establish this result I develop Gettier and lottery cases involving necessary truths. Since beliefs in necessary truths are sensitive by default, the resulting cases give rise to a serious explanatory problem for the defenders (...)
  18. Gettier Cases: A Taxonomy.Peter Blouw, Wesley Buckwalter & John Turri - forthcoming - In R. Borges, C. de Almeida & P. Klein (eds.), Explaining knowledge: new essays on the Gettier problem. Oxford University Press.
    The term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier case” in (...)
  19. The Gettier Illusion, the Tripartite Analysis, and the Divorce Thesis.Anthony Robert Booth - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):625-638.
    Stephen Hetherington has defended the tripartite analysis of knowledge (Hetherington in Philos Q 48:453–469, 1998; J Philos 96:565–587, 1999; J Philos Res 26:307–324, 2001a; Good knowledge, bad knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001b). His defence has recently come under attack (Madison in Australas J Philos 89(1):47–58, 2011; Turri in Synthese 183(3):247–259, 2012). I critically evaluate those attacks as well as Hetherington’s newest formulation of his defence (Hetherington in Philosophia 40(3):539–547, 2012b; How to know: A practicalist conception of knowledge, Wiley, Oxford, (...)
  20. Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem.R. Borges, C. de Almeida & P. Klein (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
    This is an edited collection of twenty-three (23) new papers on the Gettier Problem and the issues connected with it. The set of authors includes many of the major figures in contemporary epistemology who have developed some of the well-known responses to the Problem, and the list contains some younger epistemologists who bring new perspectives to the issues raised in the literature. Together, they cover the state of the art scholarship on virtually every epistemological and methodological aspect of the Gettier (...)
  21. Inferential Knowledge and the Gettier Conjecture.Rodrigo Borges - forthcoming - In Rodrigo Borges Claudio de Almeida & Peter Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem. Oxford University Press.
    I propose and defend the conjecture that what explains why Gettiered subjects fail to know is the fact that their justified true belief depends essentially on unknown propositions. The conjecture follows from the plausible principle about inference in general according to which one knows the conclusion of one’s inference only if one knows all the premises it involves essentially.
  22. How to Moore a Gettier: Notes on the Dark Side of Knowledge.Rodrigo Borges - 2014 - Logos and Episteme 5 (2):133-140.
    The Gettier Problem and Moore’s Paradox are related in a way that is unappreciated by philosophers. If one is in a Gettier situation, then one is also in a Moorean situation. The fact that S is in a Gettier situation (the fact that S is “Gettiered”), like the fact that S is in a Moorean situation (the fact that S is “Moored”), cannot (in the logical sense of “cannot”) be known by S while S is in that situation. The paper (...)
  23. Knowledge, Scepticism, and Defeat: Themes From Klein.Rodrigo Borges, Branden Fitelson & Cherie Braden (eds.) - forthcoming - Springer.
    This is a collection of new essays written in honor of the work of Peter D. Klein, who has had and continues to have a tremendous influence in the development of epistemology. The essays reflect the breadth and depth of Klein’s work by engaging directly with his views and with the views of his interlocutors.
  24. The Reliability of Epistemic Intuitions.Kenneth Boyd & Jennifer Nagel - 2014 - In Edouard Machery & O'Neill Elizabeth (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 109-127.
  25. Epistemic Dispositions. Reply to Turri and Bronner.Rachel Briggs & Daniel Nolan - 2012 - Logos and Episteme 3 (4):629-636.
    We reply to recent papers by John Turri and Ben Bronner, who criticise the dispositionalised Nozickian tracking account we discuss in “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.” We argue that the account we suggested can handle the problems raised by Turri and Bronner. In the course of responding to Turri and Bronner’s objections, we draw three general lessons for theories of epistemic dispositions: that epistemic dispositions are to some extent extrinsic, that epistemic dispositions can have manifestation conditions concerning circumstances where (...)
  26. Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Gettier Problem.B. Brogaard - 2004 - Synthese 139 (3):367 - 386.
    The contextualist epistemological theories proposed by David Lewis and othersoffer a view of knowledge which awards a central role to the contexts ofknowledge attributions. Such contexts are held to determine how strong anepistemic position must be in order to count as knowledge. Lewis has suggestedthat contextualism so construed can be used both to ward off the skeptic and tosolve the Gettier problem. A person knows P, he says, just in case her evidenceeliminates every possibility that not-P, where the domain of (...)
  27. Robust Virtue Epistemology As Anti‐Luck Epistemology: A New Solution.J. Adam Carter - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (2):140-155.
    Robust Virtue Epistemology maintains that knowledge is achieved just when an agent gets to the truth through, or because of, the manifestation of intellectual virtue or ability. A notorious objection to the view is that the satisfaction of the virtue condition will be insufficient to ensure the safety of the target belief; that is, RVE is no anti-luck epistemology. Some of the most promising recent attempts to get around this problem are considered and shown to ultimately fail. Finally, a new (...)
  28. Lehrer's Fourth Condition for Knowing.Randolph Carter - 1977 - Philosophical Studies 31 (5):327 - 335.
  29. Accidentally True Belief and Warrant.Andrew Chignell - 2003 - Synthese 137 (3):445 - 458.
    The Proper Functionist account of warrant – like many otherexternalist accounts – is vulnerable to certain Gettier-style counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. In this paper, I briefly survey the development of the account, noting the way it was altered in response to such counterexamples. I then argue that Alvin Plantinga's latest amendment to the account is flawed insofar as it rules out cases of true beliefs which do intuitively strike us as knowledge, and that a conjecture recently put forward by (...)
  30. Ist das Gettier-Problem wirklich ein Problem?Arkadiusz Chrudzimski - 2000 - Conceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 33 (82):45-56.
    Viele Philosophen Glauben, daß die sogenannte „klassische” Definition des Wissens: -/- (W)Das Subjekt S weiß, daß p =Df. (i) S glaubt (ist überzeugt), daß p; (ii) S hat eine Begründung (eine epistemische Rechtferigung) für seine Überzeugung, daß p; und (iii) es ist der Fall, daß p. -/- durch das berühmte Gegenbeispiel Gettiers endgültig demoliert wurde: Gettier hat die folgende Situation konstruiert: -/- (G)(1) Das Subjekt S hat eine gute induktive Begründung für die Überzeugung, daß p. (2) S hat die Überzeugung (...)
  31. Intuition in Gettier.Elijah Chudnoff - forthcoming - In Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Classic Philosophical Arguments: The Gettier Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss.
    Gettier’s paper, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” is widely taken to be a paradigm example of the sort of philosophical methodology that has been so hotly debated in the recent literature. Reflection on it motivates the following four theses about that methodology: (A) Intuitive judgments form an epistemically distinctive kind. (B) Intuitive judgments play an epistemically privileged role in philosophical methodology. (C) If intuitive judgments play an epistemically privileged role in philosophical methodology, then their role is to be taken as (...)
  32. What Should a Theory of Knowledge Do?Elijah Chudnoff - 2011 - Dialectica 65 (4):561-579.
    The Gettier Problem is the problem of revising the view that knowledge is justified true belief in a way that is immune to Gettier counter-examples. The “Gettier Problem problem”, according to Lycan, is the problem of saying what is misguided about trying to solve the Gettier Problem. In this paper I take up the Gettier Problem problem. I distinguish giving conditions that are necessary and sufficient for knowledge from giving conditions that explain why one knows when one does know. I (...)
  33. 50 Years of Gettier: A New Direction in Religious Epistemology?Ian M. Church - 2015 - Journal of Analytic Theology 3:147-171.
    In this paper, I lend credence to the move toward non-reductive religious epistemology by highlighting the systematic failings of Alvin Plantinga’s seminal, religious epistemology when it comes to surmounting the Gettier Problem. Taking Plantinga’s account as archetypal, I argue that we have systematic reasons to believe that no reductive theory of knowledge (religious or otherwise) can viably surmount the Gettier Problem, that the future of religious epistemology lies in non-reductive models of knowledge.
  34. Manifest Failure Failure: The Gettier Problem Revived.Ian M. Church - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (1):171-177.
    If the history of the Gettier Problem has taught us anything, it is to be skeptical regarding purported solutions. Nevertheless, in “Manifest Failure: The Gettier Problem Solved” (2011), that is precisely what John Turri offers us. For nearly fifty years, epistemologists have been chasing a solution for the Gettier Problem but with little to no success. If Turri is right, if he has actually solved the Gettier Problem, then he has done something that is absolutely groundbreaking and really quite remarkable. (...)
  35. Getting 'Lucky' with Gettier.Ian M. Church - 2013 - European Journal of Philosophy 21 (1):37-49.
    In this paper I add credence to Linda Zagzebski's (1994) diagnosis of Gettier problems (and the current trend to abandon the standard analysis) by analyzing the nature of luck. It is widely accepted that the lesson to be learned from Gettier problems is that knowledge is incompatible with luck or at least a certain species thereof. As such, understanding the nature of luck is central to understanding the Gettier problem. Thanks by and large to Duncan Pritchard's seminal work, Epistemic Luck, (...)
  36. Against Gettier.Rodrigo Cid - manuscript
    In “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Edmund Gettier (1963) attacked the thesis ‘S knows that P iff P is true, S believes that P, and S is justified in believing that P’. His intention was to sustain that someone can have a justified true belief without knowing that belief. He made that by creating two counter-examples to that thesis. In this article, I try to show that Gettier’s arguments are based in a weak account of justification, and that such a (...)
  37. Knowledge and Grounds: A Comment on Mr. Gettier's Paper.Michael Clark - 1963 - (Repr. In Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series; Gendin and Hoffman, Eds., Introduction to Philosophy, 1973; Lucey, Ed., On Knowing and the Known, 1996; Huemer, Ed., The Epistemology Reader, 2002) Analysis 24 (2):46 - 48.
  38. Naturalizing the Gettier Argument.David Coder - 1974 - Philosophical Studies 26 (2):111 - 118.
  39. Thalberg's Defense of Justified True Belief.David Coder - 1970 - Journal of Philosophy 67 (12):424-425.
  40. Contextualist Solutions to Epistemological Problems: Scepticism, Gettier, and the Lottery.Stewart Cohen - 1998 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (2):289 – 306.
    (1998). Contextualist solutions to epistemological problems: Scepticism, Gettier, and the lottery. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 76, No. 2, pp. 289-306. doi: 10.1080/00048409812348411.
  41. Good to Know.Earl Conee - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (2):311-331.
    Our curiosity has us interested in finding out the truth. Knowing the fact of the matter fulfills the interest. This fulfillment is something satisfying about knowledge. Additionally, knowledge is a good way for a person to relate to a proposition. Knowing is good because of what knowledge is. In other words, knowledge is intrinsically good. The credibility of these assessments calls for some explanation. A traditional view is that knowledge is justified true belief with no Gettier accidents. This conception is (...)
  42. An Essay on Knowledge and Belief.John Corcoran - 2006 - International Journal of Decision Ethics (2):125-144.
    This accessible essay treats knowledge and belief in a usable and applicable way. Many of its basic ideas have been developed recently in Corcoran-Hamid 2014: Investigating knowledge and opinion. The Road to Universal Logic. Vol. I. Arthur Buchsbaum and Arnold Koslow, Editors. Springer. Pp. 95-126. http://www.springer.com/birkhauser/mathematics/book/978-3-319-10192-7 .
  43. Induction and the Gettier Problem.Richard Creath - 1992 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (2):401-404.
  44. Gettier and Plantinga's Revised Account of Warrant.Thomas M. Crisp - 2000 - Analysis 60 (1):42–50.
  45. Justified True Belief is Knowledge.Graham Dawson - 1981 - Philosophical Quarterly 31 (125):315-329.
  46. KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH, INSIGHT, WISDOM.Ulrich De Balbian - 2017 - Oxford: Academic Publications.
    An exploration of the umbrella notion‭ '‬knowledge‭' ‬and related notions,‭ ‬truth,‭ ‬wisdom,‭ ‬knowing,‭ ‬insights,‭ ‬understanding,‭ ‬perception,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬The‭ ‬philosophical approach,‭ ‬such as that of Gettier,‭ ‬to this notion.
  47. Gettier's Argument Against the Traditional Account of Knowledge.John M. DePoe - 2011 - In Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell.
  48. Un análisis lógico del problema de Gettier.Gustavo Fernandez Diez-Picazo - 1997 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 16 (2):51-59.
  49. A Contextualist Solution to the Gettier Problem.Igor Douven - 2005 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 69 (1):207-228.
    According to the deontological view on justification, being justified in believing some proposition is a matter of having done one's epistemic duty with respect to that proposition. The present paper argues that, given a proper articulation of the deontological view, it is defensible that knowledge is justified true belief, pace virtually all epistemologists since Gettier. One important claim to be argued for is that once it is appreciated that it depends on contextual factors whether a person has done her epistemic (...)
  50. How to Be an Infallibilist.Julien Dutant - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):148-171.
    When spelled out properly infallibilism is a viable and even attractive view. Because it has long been summary dismissed, however, we need a guide on how to properly spell it out. The guide has to fulfil four tasks. The first two concern the nature of knowledge: to argue that infallible belief is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for knowledge. The other two concern the norm of belief: to argue that knowledge is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for justified (...)
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