Gettier problem: a standalone construct

Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? introduced the problem that now carries his name: he gave short counterexamples in which a person holds a belief that is true and for which they have good justification, yet we would not credit them with knowledge, because the belief turns out to be true only by luck. The cases target the classical account, traceable to Plato, that knowledge just is justified true belief, and they show that all three of those conditions can be satisfied while knowledge is still absent. Linda Zagzebski's 1994 study The Inescapability of Gettier Problems argued that any account of knowledge that keeps justification and truth as separate conditions, neither of which guarantees the other, can be defeated by a Gettier-style case, so the difficulty generalises well beyond Gettier's original examples. The construct is distinctive as the standard test a theory of knowledge is expected to pass: it names the gap between justified true belief and knowledge, and it sets the target for later proposals that add a fourth condition or replace justification altogether.[1][2]

Unit

A class of counterexample to the justified-true-belief account of knowledge

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by constructing or examining cases in which a belief is both justified and true yet intuitively falls short of knowledge, typically because its truth depends on luck