Edmund Gettier

Edmund Gettier

Edmund L. Gettier III (born 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known best for his 1963 paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?".

Gettier was educated at Cornell University, where his mentors included Max Black and Norman Malcolm. Gettier, himself, was originally attracted to the views of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. His first teaching job was at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where his colleagues included Keith Lehrer, R. C. Sleigh, and Alvin Plantinga. Because he was short on publications, his colleagues urged him to write up any ideas he had just to satisfy the administration. The result was a three-page paper that remains one of the most famous in recent philosophical history. According to anecdotal comments that Plantinga has given in lectures, Gettier was originally so unenthused about the paper that he wrote it, had someone translate it into Spanish, and published in in an obscure South American journal. The paper was later published in the United States. Gettier has since published nothing, but he has invented and taught to his graduate students new methods for finding and illustrating countermodels in modal logic, as well as simplified semantics for various modal logics.

In his article, Gettier challenges the "justified true belief" definition of knowledge that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus, but is discounted at the end of that very dialogue. This account was accepted by most philosophers at the time, most prominently the epistemologist Clarence Irving Lewis and his student, Roderick Chisholm. Gettier's article refuted this account, though some would say that the validity of this definition had already been put into question in a general way by the work of Wittgenstein. (Later, a similar argument was found in the papers of Bertrand Russell).