Review Of Edmund Gettier's Undefeated Justified True Belief

First, Gettier

Edmund Gettier is an American philosopher who’s well known for his work in the field of epistemology. Gettier is one of the first to challenge the tripartite structure of ‘justified-true-belief’, arguing there are instances in which an individual could have a true belief, this true belief is justified, and given all that, the individual still fails to acquire any knowledge. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Now, imagine by sheer coincidence you look at a broken clock, which happens to read the correct time; this is a simple, yet valid example of where the ‘JTB’ method goes awry. In other words, the time displayed is true and you’re justified in your belief that the time displayed is correct, and yet, you lack knowledge of the time. At first this may sound shocking, we of course know as readers the clock is broken, but maybe we’re unclear on just why this interferes with the acquisition of knowledge? What’s gone wrong isn’t a matter of if the belief is true or false, but rather, one should not arrive at a true belief via a false belief. That is, false beliefs are inadequate evidence for arriving at truth.

To further explain Gettier’s critiques,

in their paper Undefeated Justified True Belief is a no-defeater formulation. Lehrer and Paxson define two types of knowledge called “Basic” and “Non-Basic.” The first, basic knowledge, is the same kind I had when I broke my arm in half below the elbow after being thrown from my longboard in high school. That is, I had basic knowledge that my elbow was broken, or at the very least, that I was in pain. Lehrer and Paxson define basic knowledge as “completely justified true belief” (225). In other words, the justified true belief does not depend on any other justifying statements. Moreover, statements requiring additional-supporting statements for their justifications are cases of non-basic