Person

Edmund Gettier

American philosopher (1927-2021); author of the famous three-page paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (Analysis 23:6, June 1963) that produced the Gettier Problem in epistemology. The paper precipitated 60+ years of analytic-epistemology engagement with what knowledge is.

Biography

1927, Born in Baltimore, Maryland
1957, PhD from Cornell (with Max Black, Norman Malcolm)
1957-1967, Wayne State University
1967-2001, University of Massachusetts Amherst
1963, Published "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", three pages, two examples, vast influence
2021, Died at age 93

Gettier is famous for that one three-page paper. He published almost nothing else. He reportedly resisted retiring from teaching despite his short publication record because he simply enjoyed teaching philosophy.

The 1963 paper

The classical analysis (pre-Gettier)

Plato's Theaetetus, knowledge as justified true belief (JTB):

S knows p iff:

p is true
S believes p
S is justified in believing p

This analysis dominated philosophy from Plato through the mid-20th century. See Justified True Belief for full treatment.

Gettier's counterexamples

Gettier presented two short cases showing that JTB conditions can all be satisfied without genuine knowledge:

Case I, Smith and Jones / the job interview Smith and Jones have applied for the same job. Smith has strong evidence for the conjunction:

Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket

Smith's evidence: the company president told him Jones would get the job, and Smith counted Jones's coins. Smith therefore believes:

The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket

But, unknown to Smith, Smith himself will get the job. And Smith also happens to have ten coins in his pocket.

So:

The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, TRUE
Smith BELIEVES it
Smith is JUSTIFIED in believing it (his evidence was reasonable)

But Smith does not know it, his belief is true by accident relative to his justification.

Case II, Brown in Barcelona A similar structure with disjunctive reasoning leading to true belief by accidental coincidence.

The Gettier Problem

The cases show JTB is not sufficient for knowledge. Some additional condition is needed to rule out accidentally true beliefs from counting as knowledge.

The Gettier industry, 60 years of attempted solutions

Major proposed solutions

1. No-false-grounds (Lehrer, Paxson 1969) Knowledge requires JTB plus the absence of any false essential lemma in the justification chain. Gettier cases involve a false lemma (e.g., Smith's belief that Jones will get the job).

Problem: subsequent counterexamples (Goldman 1976, the fake-barn case) showed Gettier-like problems can arise without false lemmas.

2. Defeasibility (Lehrer 1965; Klein) Knowledge requires that no "defeater" exists, no true proposition such that, if added to the agent's evidence, would defeat the justification.

Problem: specifying which defeaters count without circularity is hard.

3. Causal theory (Goldman 1967) Knowledge requires that the truth of p be appropriately caused (or counterfactually-connected) to the agent's belief.

Problem: abstract / mathematical knowledge has no clear causal connection.

4. Reliabilism (Goldman 1979 onwards) Knowledge requires that the belief be produced by a reliable belief-forming process.

Problem: the "new evil demon" thought experiment, agents in a Cartesian-demon world have unreliable processes but seem to have justification (if not knowledge).

5. Tracking accounts (Nozick 1981, Philosophical Explanations) Knowledge requires that:

If p were false, S would not believe p (sensitivity)
If p were true (in nearby possible worlds), S would believe p (adherence)

Problem: sensitivity has counterintuitive consequences in some cases.

6. Safety theory (Sosa 1999, 2007, Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge) Knowledge requires that S's belief is safe, could not easily have been wrong.

7. Plantinga's proper function (1993) Knowledge requires that the belief be produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, aimed at truth, in a congenial environment. See Alvin Plantinga and Argument from the Reliability of Reason.

8. Virtue epistemology (Sosa, Greco, Zagzebski) Knowledge as a cognitive achievement, true belief that succeeds because of the agent's intellectual virtues, not by accident.

9. Knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson 2000, Knowledge and Its Limits) Reverses the analytic order: knowledge is taken as primitive; belief / justification analyzed in terms of knowledge. Treats Gettier cases as showing that JTB analysis was misguided from the start.

Modern consensus (rough)

There is no decisive resolution. The dominant moves:

Most epistemologists agree JTB is necessary but not sufficient
Some additional condition is needed to rule out accidental truth
Various candidates have problems
Many epistemologists work within one of the above frameworks pragmatically without claiming a final solution

Why this matters apologetically

The Gettier problem has theological-apologetic relevance:

Limits of pure rationalism, even with apparently good justification, knowledge can fail. This humbles purely-evidentialist approaches to faith.
Defense of Reformed Epistemology, Plantinga's proper-function / warrant alternative emerged partly in response to the Gettier impasse. Properly-basic Christian belief, on Plantinga's view, doesn't require JTB-style justification because it is produced by the sensus divinitatis + Holy Spirit's witness, properly functioning cognitive faculties.
Apologetic for the testimony tradition, Christian belief ordinarily comes through testimony (apostolic / scriptural / personal) rather than independent inference. Gettier-style problems with inference-based knowledge make testimony-based knowledge more pragmatically defensible.
Anti-evidentialism, the demand that all rational belief must be justified by independent evidence (Clifford's evidentialism; modern atheist apologetics) is itself epistemologically vulnerable. Gettier shows that justification + truth + belief still doesn't deliver knowledge, making the evidentialist standard suspicious.

Gettier in this corpus

Justified True Belief, primary engagement
Argument from the Reliability of Reason, Plantinga's response to JTB inadequacy
Alvin Plantinga, Reformed Epistemology as Gettier-response

Major secondary literature

Robert Shope, The Analysis of Knowing (1983)
John Greco & John Turri (eds.), Virtue Epistemology (2012)
Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (1996)
Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology Futures (2006)
Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (2002)
Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge (2001)