The problem posed by Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?, which offered short counterexamples in which a subject has a justified true belief that intuitively still falls short of knowledge, because the justification is accidentally disconnected from the truth of the belief. The paper overturned the long-standing tripartite analysis of knowledge as justified true belief and launched a large literature of proposed fourth conditions, no-false-lemmas and no-defeater clauses, and causal and reliabilist theories of knowledge, none of which has won consensus as a full solution.
Facts
Origin YearEdmund Gettier, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?, Analysis 23 (1963). Classification
Position Kind Connections
Associated With
Source Gettier Problem (Wikipedia)
In Branch
Sources
1. The Gettier Problem (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The Gettier Problem
Gettier problems or cases are named in honor of the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who discovered them in 1963.
The Gettier Problem, on the 1963 article
Initially, that challenge appeared in an article by Edmund Gettier, published in 1963.
Gettier Problem (Wikipedia)
WikipediaAssociated With: Edmund Gettier, Lead sectionQuote, Associated With: Edmund Gettier, Lead section
Attributed to American philosopher Edmund Gettier, Gettier-type counterexamples (called 'Gettier-cases') challenge the long-held notion of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB).
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
Goldman's Appropriate Causality Proposal argues that a justified true belief needs one more ingredient to count as knowledge: the facts that make the belief true must be appropriately involved in causing the belief to be held, not merely coincide with it. On this view Gettier's cases fail as knowledge exactly because the connection between the true facts and the justified belief is accidental rather than causal, so requiring the right causal link rules them out without abandoning the justified-true-belief framework entirely.
A dissenting reading, from Alvin GoldmanThe Gettier Problem (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Frequently Asked Questions
If a belief is both true and backed by good justification, why isn't that automatically knowledge?
Edmund Gettier's 1963 cases show situations where a justified true belief is true only by luck, so most philosophers agree some further condition beyond justification and truth is needed for knowledge; Alvin Goldman's causal theory proposes that the facts making the belief true must be appropriately causally connected to it.
Gettier's 1963 paper described cases where someone holds a belief that is both justified and true, yet the truth of the belief has nothing to do with the justification behind it, so the person seems to have gotten it right only by luck rather than by knowing. This convinced most epistemologists that justified true belief cannot be the whole story about knowledge, and prompted decades of proposed fixes. Alvin Goldman's causal theory proposes that a justified true belief counts as knowledge only when the facts that make it true are appropriately involved in causing the belief, ruling out the lucky coincidences Gettier's cases turn on.
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