What is the Gettier Problem?

Suppose you're driving through rural Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, the region you're driving through contains a lot of fake barns: mere wooden fronts that just look like barns from the road. But you don't know this, and have no reason to suspect it. You look off to your left and you see something that looks like a barn, so you believe "That's a barn." In fact, it is a barn. It's one of the few barns in the region. But you're just lucky. If you had looked at a fake barn instead, you would have believed that it was a barn.

In this case, it seems that your belief that you're driving by a barn is justified or reasonable. After all, it looks like a barn; and you've never heard about a region full of fake barns. And your belief is also true. But we're reluctant to say that you know that you're driving by a barn.

Cases of this sort are known as Gettier cases, after the philosopher Edmund Gettier. Before Gettier, philosophers thought that knowledge was equivalent to justified true belief. That is:

You know that P iff:

(i) P is true,

(ii) you believe that P,

and (iii) you are justified in believing P (you have good evidence for P).

But then Gettier came along and presented examples in which the subject has a justified true belief which, intuitively, fails to count as knowledge. The fake barn case we just discussed is an example of that sort.

Gettier Problem

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What is the Gettier Problem?

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