I got Gettiered

Last week, I encountered a Gettier case in the wild.¹

My wife and I were about to leave the house, but she couldn’t find her bifocals. So I helped her look.

On the desk in her office was a pair of glasses sitting on a handkerchief. So I said, “Found them! Your bifocals are on the desk.”

No, she said when she came into the room, the glasses I saw were the ones she wears when using the computer and not the bifocals that she wears when going out and about. As it happened, though, her bifocals were under the handkercheif.

So her bifocals were on the desk, I believed that they were, and I had a reasonable justification for that belief— but I did not really know, because the glasses I had seen were not the bifocals.

Voila! Gettier case.

1. Edmund Gettier wrote a very short paper in 1963 arguing against the plausible idea that knowledge is justified true belief. He provides two cases where someone has a justified true belief which doesn’t count as knowledge. His examples are somewhat contrived, but they suffice to make the point.