The Gettier Problem

In 1963 Edmund Gettier published a short paper with an outsized effect: it suggested that a belief can be justified and true and still fall short of knowledge. More than fifty years later, philosophers have yet to agree on what is missing. Stephen Hetherington, a leading voice in epistemology, brings together a sequence of clear, distinctive chapters that trace how the debate has unfolded and where it might head next.

The ground covered is wide: fallibility, evidence, reliability, truth-tracking, context, luck, intellectual virtue and wisdom, alongside questions of method such as intuition, conceptual analysis, experimental philosophy and explication. The result is an authoritative survey that also offers provocative ideas for future work. It suits students meeting the problem for the first time and seasoned philosophers who want the whole argument mapped in one place.