Gettier Cases, Knowledge and Experimental Inquiry

Abstract

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a short paper in the journal Analysis. That paper, entitled “Is Justifi ed True Belief Knowledge?,” purported to demonstrate that even though a person is justified in believing a true proposition p, having that justified true belief (JTB) is not sufficient for the person knowing that p (Gettier, 1963). In particular, Gettier presented examples purporting to show that a person may have a justified true belief, but the belief is, in one way or another, a “lucky belief,” and so the person having the justified true belief that p does not know that p. In what follows, I argue that justified, but luckily true beliefs do count as knowledge. What is important is that there is a limited ability to generalize from such cases, suggesting that many, if not most of what we count as instances of knowledge are, to a greater or lesser extent, localized.