Gettier Cases: A Taxonomy

Blouw, P., Buckwalter, W., & Turri, J. (2018). Gettier cases: a taxonomy. In R. Borges, C. de Almeida, & P. Klein (Eds.), Explaining knowledge: new essays on the Gettier problem (pp. 242–252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier Case” in favor of more finely grained terminology. We propose such terminology, and use it to effectively sort the myriad Gettier cases from the theoretical literature in a way that charts deep fault lines in ordinary judgments about knowledge.