Edmund Lee Gettier III (1927-2021) achieved philosophical fame through a single three-page paper published in Analysis in 1963, when he was a young philosophy teacher at Wayne State University in Detroit. This paper, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, sparked what analytic philosophers call the ‘Gettier industry’—an extensive body of literature attempting to solve the problems it raised.
The Gettier paper
Gettier’s paper challenged what analytic philosophers call the ‘JTB analysis of knowledge’ (JTB stands for ‘justified true belief’). According to this analysis:
S knows that p if and only if:
- p is true
- S believes that p
- S is justified in believing that p
Undergraduates are routinely taught this as the ‘standard definition’ of knowledge, supposedly found in Plato and others (though in fact Plato never held it, and few philosophers have).
The cases
Gettier presented two scenarios purporting to show these conditions were not jointly sufficient for knowledge. In the first case:
Smith and Jones have both applied for a job at their company. The president has assured Smith that Jones will get it. Smith has recently counted ten coins in Jones’s pocket. Therefore Smith has ‘strong evidence’ that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
However, Smith himself unexpectedly gets the job—and Smith also has ten coins in his pocket. So Smith’s belief that ‘the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket’ is:
- True (Smith gets the job and has ten coins)
- Believed (Smith believes this proposition)
- Justified (based on the president’s assurance and his count of Jones’s coins)
Yet, Gettier reasons, surely Smith does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Methodological significance
The Gettier paper exemplifies the intuition-pumping methodology that became increasingly dominant in analytic philosophy from the 1960s onward. Where Gettier implicitly relied on readers sharing his intuitions, subsequent philosophers became increasingly explicit about this reliance.
The paper’s impact raises questions about analytic philosophy’s methodology:
- How can a carefully crafted technical definition collapse so easily?
- What grounds the intuition that Smith does not ‘know’ in the described scenario?
- Why should intuitive responses settle questions about the nature of knowledge?
The Gettier industry
The paper spawned an enormous secondary literature attempting to:
- Modify the JTB conditions to handle Gettier cases
- Develop alternative analyses of knowledge
- Generate further Gettier-style counterexamples
- Defend or reject the intuitions Gettier’s cases elicit
This ‘industry’ exemplifies a pattern in analytic philosophy: once a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is on the table, it provides endless opportunities for ‘indefinitely permuted tinkering with the conditions’.
Critical perspective
From outside analytic philosophy’s intuition-based methodology, Gettier cases appear puzzling. They rely on:
- Accepting highly artificial scenarios as philosophically decisive
- Treating intuitive responses as authoritative ‘data’
- Assuming epistemology consists in providing necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge
- Taking the ‘method of cases’ as a legitimate philosophical approach
The success of Gettier’s paper perhaps reveals less about the nature of knowledge than about the methodological commitments of post-war analytic philosophy.
Legacy
Gettier’s three-page paper remains one of the most cited works in 20th-century analytical-philosophy. Its influence demonstrates how the method of cases and intuition pumping became standard procedure in analytic epistemology, despite representing what critics identify as a form of philosophical dogmatism—appealing to what ‘we’ think rather than providing genuine philosophical grounds.
Further reading
- Gettier, E. (1963). ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis 23: 121-123
- Secondary literature on Gettier cases (vast)
- Critiques of the method of cases in epistemology