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Edmund Gettier
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Edmund L. Gettier III (born 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; he may owe his reputation to a single three-page paper published in 1963 called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"
Gettier was educated at Cornell University, where his mentors included the ordinary language philosopher Max Black and the Wittgensteinian Norman Malcolm. Gettier, himself, was originally attracted to the views of the later Wittgenstein.
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Edmund L. Gettier III (born 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; he may owe his reputation to a single three-page paper published in 1963 called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"
Gettier was educated at Cornell University, where his mentors included the ordinary language philosopher Max Black and the Wittgensteinian Norman Malcolm. Gettier, himself, was originally attracted to the views of the later Wittgenstein. His first teaching job was at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where his colleagues included Keith Lehrer, R. C. Sleigh, and Alvin Plantinga. Because he was short on publications, his colleagues urged him to write up any ideas he had just to satisfy the administration. The result was a three-page paper that remains one of the most famous in recent philosophical history. Gettier has since published nothing, but he has invented and taught to his graduate students new methods for finding and illustrating countermodels in modal logic, as well as simplified semantics for various modal logics.
In his article, Gettier challenges the "justified true belief" definition of knowledge that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus. This account was accepted by most philosophers at the time, most prominently the epistemologist Clarence Irving Lewis and his student, Roderick Chisholm. Gettier's article refuted this account, though some would say that the validity of this definition had already been put into question in a general way by the work of Wittgenstein. (Later, a similar argument was found in the papers of Bertrand Russell).
Gettier problem
Gettier provides several examples of beliefs that are both true and justified, but that we should not intuitively call knowledge. Cases of this sort are now called "Gettier (counter-)examples." Because Gettier's criticism of the Justified True Belief model is systemic, a cottage industry has sprung up around imagining increasingly fantastical counterexamples. For example, I am watching the men's Wimbledon Final and John McEnroe is playing Jimmy Connors, it is match point, and McEnroe wins. I say to myself "John McEnroe is this year's men's champion at Wimbledon". Unbeknownst to me, however, the BBC were experiencing a broadcasting fault and so had stuck in a tape of last year's final, when McEnroe also beat Connors. I had been watching last year's Wimbledon final so I believed that McEnroe had beaten Connors. But at that same time, in real life, McEnroe was repeating last year's victory and beating Connors! So my belief that McEnroe beat Connors to become this year's Wimbledon champion is true, and I had good reason to believe so (my belief was justified) - and yet, there is a sense in which I could not really have claimed to 'know' that McEnroe had beaten Connors because I was only accidentally right that McEnroe beat Connors - my belief was not based on the right kind of justification.
Gettier inspired a great deal of work by philosophers attempting to recover a working definition of knowledge. Major responses include:
- Gettier's use of "justification" is too broad, and only some kinds of justification count;
- Gettier's examples do not count as justification at all, and only some kinds of evidence are justificatory;
- Knowledge must have a fourth condition, such as "no false premises" or "indefeasibility";
- Robert Nozick suggests knowledge must consist of justified true belief that is "truth-tracking"—belief held in such a way that if it turned out to be false it would not have been held, and vice versa;
- Colin McGinn suggests knowledge is atomic (it is indivisible into smaller components). We have knowledge when we have knowledge, and an accurate definition of knowledge may even contain the word "knowledge."
A 2001 study by Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich suggests that the impact of the Gettier problem varies by culture. In particular, individuals from Western countries appear more likely to agree with the judgments described in the story than do those from East Asia. What would people in East Asia say?
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