Edmund Gettier's Article: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

In the 1963 philosophy paper titled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Edmund Gettier attempts to deconstruct and disprove the philosophical argument that justified true belief is knowledge. Justified true belief, also commonly referred to as JTB, is used as a certain set of conditions that are used to explain someone s knowing some sort of proposition p. More specifically, JTB is used to say that s has knowledge of p if and only if p is true, s believes that p is true, and s is justified in believing that p is true. Gettier offers main points as the conclusion of his argument against this claim. First, he states that s can be justified in believing that p is true while p is actually false. Second, he proposes that for any p, if s is justified in believing p and s deduces some q

While this can seem quite complicated to follow, Gettier supports his claims by presenting two specific cases. In this paper, I will refute Gettire’s argument against JTB as knowledge through the lack of justification and persuasiveness in his cases.
In the first case, we are presented with two characters, Smith and Jones, who have both applied for the same job. It is stated that Smith has evidence for a proposition, which we will call A, that 1) Jones is going to get the job and 2) Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith’s evidence for this is that 1) the president of the company told him that Jones would get the job and 2) Smith counted the number of coins in Jones pocket ten minutes ago. Here is the first problem in this case. I would argue that for both parts A, the evidence that is provided is not sufficient enough to classify it as true justification. In terms of the first reason, merely trusting what someone says, no matter how much power