Edmund Gettier

Edmund L. Gettier III (* 1927 in Baltimore , Maryland ) is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . It was primarily supported by a three-page article from 1963 entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? known. In this essay he formulated the so-called Gettier problem .

Gettier graduated from Cornell University. His mentors were the “conventional” language philosopher Max Black and the Wittgensteinian Norman Malcolm . Gettier himself was originally drawn to the views of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein . He received his first teaching position at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan - alongside Keith Lehrer , RC Sleigh and Alvin Plantinga , among others . Because he had published little, his colleagues urged him to write at least enough that the administration was satisfied. The result was a three-page essay - one of the most famous in the history of modern philosophy.

In his essay, Gettier challenges the classic definition of knowledge, which was already discussed in Plato's dialogue Theaetetus . In the dialogue, the definition of knowledge "true opinion with explanation (justification)" was proposed, examined and found to be inadequate. This definition was later accepted by most philosophers, especially the epistemologist Clarence Irving Lewis and his student Roderick Chisholm . Gettier's paper rejected this approach after this classical definition had already been questioned (in a more general way) in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A similar argument was later found in the works of Bertrand Russell .

literature

• Edmund Gettier: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? . In Analysis , Volume 23 (1963), pp. 121-123. Available Online: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?