The maturation of the Gettier problem

Allan Hazlett 0 0 A. Hazlett (&) Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh , Edinburgh, UK - Edmund Gettiers paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? first appeared in an issue of Analysis (Vol. 23, No. 6), dated June of 1963, and although its tempting (and common) to wax hyperbolic when discussing the papers importance and influence, it is fair to say that its impact on contemporary philosophy has been substantial and wide-ranging. Epistemology has benefited from 50 years of sincere and rigorous discussion of issues arising from the paper, and Gettiers conclusion that knowledge is not justified true belief is sometimes offered as an example of the reality of philosophical progress. (The idea that one short paper could be so important continues to fascinate philosophy students.) However, what can be called the Gettier problem has little to do with the text of the famous paper itself. The importance of the Gettier problem does not depend on the attribution of the tripartite theory of knowledge to Plato, Chisholm, and Ayer, nor on the psychological plausibility of the particular examples that Gettier describes, nor on the novelty of those cases (cf. Russell 1948/2000, p. 140). The history of the Gettier problem does provide us with a case of study in conceptual analysis, a paradigm of that distinctively twentieth-century form of philosophical inquiry, but it also includes epistemologys twenty-first century movement away from conceptual analysis, and a suggestion that the problems of philosophy are not, after all, merely conceptual. The papers in this volume were presented in June of 2014 at a conference at the University of Edinburgh that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Gettiers paper. In this introduction I shall briefly trace the history of the Gettier problem, from its basic form to its status in contemporary epistemology, and describe some of its apparent future directions. 1 Fifty years of research You might think that knowledge is justified true belief, i.e. that S knows that p if and only if it is true that p, and S believes that p, and S is justified in believing that p. This elegant account is known as the tripartite theory of knowledge, and it captures several plausible ideas about knowledge, including that falsehoods cannot be known and that unreasonable or irrational beliefs, even if true, do not amount to knowledge. However, it is subject to a family of counterexamples, known as Gettier cases. We can divide these into three types. First, there are cases in which someone reasonably infers a true conclusion from a false premise that she believes with justification. The cases from Gettiers paper (1963, pp. 122123) are of this type. Second, there are cases in which someone believes some true proposition, and is justified in so believing, but in which her belief is caused by something other than the truth of that proposition. Roderick Chisholms (1966) case of the sheep in the field (p. 23n) is of this type. Third, there are cases in which someone believes some true proposition on some basis, and is justified in so believing, but in which an unusual or abnormal environmental condition makes it such that she would easily have believed something false on the same (or a similar) basis. Carl Ginets (1988) fake barn case (p. 106) is of this type. In these cases, it seems that the person who believes that p does not know that p, despite its being the case that it is true that p, that she believes that p, and that she is justified in believing that p. Justified true belief is therefore insufficient for knowledge, and the tripartite theory of knowledge is false. The premise that, in Gettier cases, the person who believes that p does not know that p, has been widely endorsed by epistemologists. The basic form of the Gettier problem, therefore, has consisted of a challenge for theorists of knowledge: amend or replace the tripartite theory of knowledge with a theory of knowledge that is immune to (at least this kind of) counterexample. Several decades (at least) of post-Gettier research were addressed explicitly to solving this problem. (Shope 1983 provides the definitive account of this period.) Some (Clark 1963) argued that knowledge cannot be derived from a false premise; others (Lehrer and Paxson 1969) argued that knowledge requires indefeasible justification; others (Goldman 1967) argued that knowledge must be caused by the truth of the proposition known; others (Stine 1976; Goldman 1976; Dretske 1981, Chapter 4) argued that knowledge requires the elimination of relevant alternatives; others (Nozick 1981, Chap. 3; Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000) argued that knowledge requires sensitivity (that you would not believe that p, were it not true that p) or safety (that you would not easily believe falsely that p). Externalist theories of knowledge flourished during this periodwhere these are (roughly) those that allow necessary conditions on knowledge (apart from the truth condition) the obtaining of which may be (in some sense) inaccessible to the knower. Early contextualist discussions of the Gettier problem (Cohen 1988) did not develop further, and by contrast with the problem of philosophical skepticism, there has been little interest in appealing to claims about knowledge attributions in discussions of the Gettier problem. For the most part, epistemologists agreed with Gettiers conclusion, and took it to represent an important insight into the nature of knowledge. Towards the end of the twentieth century, a different sort of discussion of the Gettier problem emerged, focusing on questions about the source and solubility of the problem. Some argued that the problem is, in some sense, unsolvable (Zagzebski 1994), which assumption, at least on some suitable articulation, is a central premise of knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson 2000), and some epistemologists now offer accounts of knowledge that appeal to the notion of knowledge (see Lisa Miracchis contribution to this volume). Many epistemologists agree that the Gettier problem has something to do with luckit is argued that all Gettier cases have a double luck structure (Zagzebski 1966, pp. 288289; cf. Zagzebski 1994) and that they reveal the centrality of epistemic luck to the nature of knowledge (Pritchard 2005). Given the difficulty of providing a straightforward solution to the Gettier problem, it is tempting to think that it reveals some previously undetected complexity in the nature of knowledge. However, many now see the Gettier problem as arising as a result of a few simple and seemingly innocuous assumptions about knowledge (see Duncan Pritchard and Timothy Williamsons contributions to this volume). Early in our century, a still different (although related) strain of research came to prominence. Meta-philosophical research on the nature and evidential status of philosophical intuitions (cf. DePaul and Ramsey 1998; Sosa 2011) often treated the Gettier problem as a case s (...truncated)