
The Gettier Problem—it sounds like a math riddle or a bad bar joke, doesn’t it?
But no, it’s a philosophical hand grenade. Before Gettier, the story was simple. Knowledge, they said, was “justified true belief.”
Like a neat little triangle, it had three sides:
- You believe something.
- That belief is true.
- You have good reasons for it (justification).
Boom. That’s knowledge. Plato said so, and everyone nodded along for two thousand years.
But then in 1963, Edmund Gettier, an unassuming philosophy professor, scribbled out a two-page paper that flipped the table.
The Clock Is Ticking
Here’s a stripped-down example, clean and brutal, like a shot of cheap whiskey:
- You look at a clock on the wall. It says 3:00.
- You believe it’s 3:00 because the clock usually works fine. That’s your justification.
- And, coincidentally, it really is 3:00. That’s truth.
So, you’ve got belief, truth, and justification. Jackpot, right? Wrong.
The clock’s broken. It stopped at 3:00 a long time ago. You didn’t “know” the time—you just got lucky. A cosmic joke at your expense.
This is the Gettier Problem in a nutshell.
Even when the holy trinity of belief, truth, and justification are in play, you might still be chasing shadows.
The Job Candidate Example
Here’s another thought experiment by Gettier where all three conditions of JTB (justified true belief) were met, but the result still wasn’t knowledge.
It was more like…luck dressed up as certainty.
Smith is told by the boss that Jones will get the job.
Smith sees that Jones has ten coins in his pocket, so he concludes: “The guy with ten coins in his pocket will get the job.”
Turns out, the boss was lying—Smith gets the job instead. And wouldn’t you know it, Smith also has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s belief was true, justified, and yet somehow not knowledge.
It was an accident of circumstances—a cosmic joke.
Why It Matters
Gettier yanked the rug out from under us. He didn’t just break the definition of knowledge; he shattered the illusion that we ever really understood it to begin with.
Philosophers have been scrambling ever since, trying to patch the holes with duct tape and a prayer.
When I was younger—long before I knew what a “Gettier problem” was—I worked nights unloading trucks at a warehouse. There was this old timer, Frank, who ran the forklift.
Frank wasn’t a philosopher; hell, he wasn’t much of anything except bitter and stubborn. But he had this thing he’d say when someone messed up: “You thought you knew, but you didn’t.”
One night, after I dropped a crate of lightbulbs—ironic, right?—he gave me that line, and I snapped back: “How the hell do you know I didn’t know? I thought I knew it was secure!”
He just laughed. “Thinking ain’t knowing, kid. Thinking’s just what we do while we wait to find out we were wrong.”
Frank wasn’t quoting Socrates. But he might as well have been.
And years later, when I stumbled across Gettier’s paper, that old bastard’s words rang in my ears.
Talking to the Kid: Explaining JTB Like a Campfire Story
“Alright, listen up,” I told my nephew last summer, as we roasted marshmallows by the fire. He was 7, but sharp, the kind of kid who’d argue with a teacher if they got a math problem wrong. “
He nodded, chocolate smeared across the face.
“Well, imagine you ‘knew’ you had a hundred bucks in your pocket because you just saw me put it there.”
“But then you find out,” I said, “that what you actually have is fake money I slipped in to mess with you. But a real hundred-dollar bill just so happened to be stuck to the fake one. You thought you knew, but you didn’t. That’s what a Gettier problem is.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So, even when I think I know, I might not know?”
“Exactly,” I said, toasting my marshmallow.
“Philosophy’s like that. It doesn’t give you answers. It just reminds you how little you actually know.”
Breaking Down the Chaos
Concept | What We Used to Think | What Gettier Proved |
---|---|---|
Knowledge | Justified true belief = certainty. | Certainty is slippery. |
The Role of Justification | Justification guarantees knowledge. | Justification can lead to lucky guesses. |
The Role of Truth | Truth + belief + justification = enough. | Truth doesn’t make it knowledge. |
Another Forklift Brush with Epistemic Luck
I just remembered another a good example from my youth…
Back in my warehouse days, there was a shift where we had to clear out 50 pallets before dawn. I bet my buddy twenty bucks we’d finish early. Why? Because the last four shifts had all run short, so I “knew” we’d breeze through.
We worked like dogs, and sure enough, we finished early. I collected my twenty bucks and laughed about how “right” I was.
Then, the next day, I found out we’d gotten the wrong shipment. The pallets were supposed to be twice as heavy, but someone at HQ messed up the order.
I didn’t know we’d finish early. I just got lucky. And that’s Gettier again in a nutshell. You think you’re on solid ground, but half the time, you’re just walking on thin ice that hasn’t cracked yet.
The Rebels Against Gettier
Some people weren’t about to let Gettier’s little intellectual bomb drop without a fight.
They didn’t just accept the fact that knowledge might be as flimsy as a house of cards.
No, they threw on their gloves, spit out their whiskey, and got to work trying to fix what Gettier broke.
First, Alvin Plantinga. A sharp guy who didn’t like the idea that all our nice tidy definitions of knowledge were now open to scrutiny.
Plantinga wasn’t having any of it. He came up with something called “Warranted True Belief.”
To him, you needed more than just belief, truth, and justification—you needed your beliefs to come from a properly functioning system.
In other words, your brain better be sober and sharp, not hungover or asleep. If your brain’s working fine, then you can be warranted in your beliefs.
But if you’re drunk on cheap whiskey or dreaming away, then no matter how justified your belief is, it’s all for nothing. Your belief’s only worth something if it comes from a system that works.
Then, there’s Robert Nozick. This guy wasn’t satisfied with Plantinga’s version of things. He wanted more. Nozick said that knowledge had to “track the truth.”
Sounds simple, right? But it’s deeper than it sounds. Nozick argued that knowledge isn’t just about having the right beliefs. It’s about following the truth wherever it goes.
Think about it like this: If the truth changes, your belief should change with it. If you’re standing in front of a broken clock, and the time changes, but you stick with your wrong belief that it’s 3:00, then you’re not tracking the truth.
You’re stuck in some mental rut. Real knowledge has to move with the truth, not stay stuck in one place like a hamster on a wheel.
But then, you’ve got the guys who just tossed the whole “Justified True Belief” idea out the window. These were the mystics, inspired by the old philosopher Wittgenstein.
They weren’t about to fight for JTB like everyone else. No, they didn’t think knowledge was some mental process at all. They said knowledge wasn’t even about belief—it was a skill.
Think about it like playing the piano. You don’t know the notes just because you believe you do—you’ve got to play those notes, press those keys. Knowledge is like catching a fly ball.
It’s not about believing you can do it—it’s about doing it. And if you do it right, then you know. If you fumble it, well, then you don’t. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Final Talk
So here we are. 40-60 years after Gettier, we still don’t know what knowledge is. We’ve got definitions that don’t quite fit, solutions that don’t quite stick.
It’s enough to make you wonder if we ever really know anything at all.
Maybe life is just a series of best guesses, dressed up in certainty to keep us from falling apart.
Maybe that’s enough. Camus said we should imagine Sisyphus happy, pushing his rock up the hill for eternity. Maybe the act of questioning—of chasing knowledge even when we know we’ll never catch it—is the point.
Because what’s the alternative? To stop trying? To give up?
Screw that.
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