Edmund Gettier: Is The Justified True Knowledge?

CALELAO, Kyla Ellen, M.

2PHL1

The Gettier problems were discovered in 1963 and it were named in honor of the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who discovered them in 1963. They function as challenges to the philosophical tradition of defining knowledge of a proposition as justified true belief in that proposition. The problems are actual or possible situations in which someone has a belief that is both true and well supported by evidence, yet which — according to almost all epistemologists — fails to be knowledge.

‘Is the Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ is a work of Gettier where he refuted the traditional definition of knowledge. In his work, he mentioned about belief, truth, and justification. In the pre-Gettier epistemology, each

Henry and Mr. Gaspar. Mr. Gaspar is a kagawad in our barangay while Mr. Henry is just an ordinary individual in our community but he is richer than Mr. Gaspar. With the people’s belief that “a politician who give more money to the people have the more capability to govern the people ”, they will vote for Mr. Henry (b). The people are confident with this belief because of their justification that several of the current barangay officials all over the town are rich. Is that knowledge? No. the people have no knowledge if Mr. Henry has really the capability to govern our

All we can do as humans is to go with the flow nature because this is the only way to understand who we are and this way also is our guide in how to become rational and on how we exercise our reason in order to have a right thinking.

Thirdly, I can reflect with the situation of those people who wear eyeglasses like me. Our condition is just like the fake barns (Goldman 1976), we would have been deceived into believing that we was seeing is, for example, letter E but in fact it is really letter F. We do not realize that it is really letter F. We do not have any knowledge that it is not letter E. The only basis of our belief is that E and F have almost the same feature. However, we are lucky to follow the idea of having letter F that is flashed in the optical clinic. Our belief is justified and true. But, is it knowledge?

As a conclusion, I was amazed with the idea that Edmund Gettier has the courage to go outside the box of the traditional concept of epistemology, however, I could hardly understand his work. For me, his work is too complicated to understand but at least he tried to make a change. As my over all reflection, I can only say that it is good to risk yourself in order to make some change. And while doing this, we need to make sure that we are making sense of it just like Edmund