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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

In Memoriam: Ed Gettier (1927-2021)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 13:  UPDATED

Professor Gettier was responsible for what was no doubt the most famous paper in epistemology–and the most famous short paper in Anglophone philosophy–of the past sixty years, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"  David Lewis, as I recall, once said that no one had ever "proved" anything in philosophy, except Gettier (readers can correct me in the comments, or supply the reference to where Lewis said this). 

Gettier was of a generation when philosophers could make careers in the academy based on high regard from their colleagues without many publications (think Rogers Albritton [Harvard, then UCLA] or Thompson Clarke [Berkeley]).   He taught at Wayne State during its own "golden era" as a center for analytic philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, but spent most of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (which he helped establish as a leading center for analytic philosophy), where he was emeritus.   Philosopher Hilary Kornblith tells me a memorial is forthcoming, which I'll add when it appears.

UPDATE:   Memorials from colleagues at U Mass/Amherst are now available here; others can add their own remembrances there as well.  (Thanks to Hilary Kornblith for the pointer.)

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28 responses to “In Memoriam: Ed Gettier (1927-2021)”

  1. Allen Hazen

    I'll look for it later, but I don't remember exactly where David Lewis made the comment. But it was in a published piece, and the context was something like "conclusive refutations are rare in philosophy — Gödel and Gettier may have managed them –"

    Reply
  2. Allen Hazen

    Or, to quote it more precisely,
    "Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (Or hardly ever. Gödel and Gettier may have done it.)"
    In the "Introduction" to David Lewis, "Philosophical Papers, volume I" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), page x.

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  3. Allen Hazen

    There is a festschrift for Gettier: "Philosophical Analysis: a defence by example," edited by David (?) Austin. In the biographical introduction it is said that Hector-Neri Castaneda solicited a paper from Gettier for some Central American philosophy journal: Gettier wrote it in English, Castaneda translated it, and it was published, leaving (according to the writers of the introduction) Gettier, who did not know Spanish, in the unusual situation of being unable to read one third of his own published work.
    Which is perhaps a good lead-in to the comment that, despite his lack of publications, Gettier continued to be active philosophically. He is one of those philosophers (the late Joseph Camp of Pittsburgh was another) who have been more influential through their graduate teaching than through their own publications.

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  4. Charles Pigden

    Gettier's central argument was anticipated at least twice by Russell.

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  5. Benj

    Russell’s clock examples are well known. But I don’t know the context in which he presented them: I would be very surprised if it were in the attack Gettier made — the latter was on a theory specified with considerable precision, and read into proposals by Ayer and by Chisholm: those latter had not yet been advanced during Russell’s productive career.

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  6. Rodrigo Borges

    Russell's oft-cited discussion of the stopped clock case in 'Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits' (1948) is not an anticipation of the Gettier Problem. The point Russell wanted to make is that knowledge is not the same as true belief, while Gettier's point is that justified true belief is not the same as knowledge. It was Israel Scheffler who first suggested that Russell's case could be turned into a counterexample to the JTB analysis of knowledge, if we assumed that the subject looking at the clock ‘has good grounds to suppose the clock is going.’ Scheffler did that in 'Conditions of Knowledge' (1965:112). What is the other place where Russell anticipated Gettier?

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  7. James C. Klagge

    See Russell's Problems of Philosophy, the first few pages of Chapter XIII: Knowledge, Error and Probable Opinion.

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  8. Rodrigo Borges

    Again, Russel discusses those cases in an (explicit) effort to distinguish knowledge from true belief, not to distinguish knowledge from justified true belief. In the Republic, Plato used the divided line to make the same point Russell is making in those pages of the Problems of Philosophy. Neither anticipated the Gettier Problem.

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  9. Roman Bonzon

    Russell's discussion in Problems of Philosophy, Chap XIII is also in service of the point that true belief is not knowledge:

    "At first sight we might imagine that knowledge could be defined as 'true belief'. When what we believe is true, it might be supposed that we had achieved a knowledge of what we believe. But this would not accord with the way in which the word is commonly used. To take a very trivial instance: If a man believes that the late Prime Minister's last name began with a B, he believes what is true, since the late Prime Minister was Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman. But if he believes that Mr. Balfour was the late Prime Minister, he will still believe that the late Prime Minister's last name began with a B, yet this belief, though true, would not be thought to constitute knowledge."

    Scheffler's Conditions of Knowledge cited by Rodrigo Borges was published a couple of years after Gettier's article, and on the page cited (p. 112) Scheffler in fact cites the Gettier article. So unless Borges has another citation, it seems clear that it was Gettier and not Scheffler who first noticed the extension.

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  10. Sean Matthews

    Am I the only one who is utterly underwhelmed by Gettier's cases? I've never understood why you philosophers find them so impressive. But then I suppose I'm only a logician/computer scientist.

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  11. Benj

    You might then want to read Williamson's 'Gettier cases in epistemic logic' and Stalnaker's 'On the logics of knowledge and belief'.

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  12. Joshua Harris

    Plato (via Socrates, of course) does explicitly reject something like JTB ("true judgment with logos") in *Theaetetus*, however.

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  13. James C. Klagge

    202C ff.

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  14. Rodrigo Borges

    Correct. As Gettier himself points out in footnote 1 of his paper.

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  15. Chuck Pigsty

    Can we perhaps resist the temptation to comment negatively on a philosopher’s contribution to the field under their memorial notice? Please and thank you.

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  16. V. Alan White

    Hear, hear "Pigsty". There's no question Gettier innovated 20th-21st century epistemology in the punchiest fashion of truly great philosophy.

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  17. Allen Hazen

    Sean Mathews– The actual examples are often silly, but that isn't a serious defect: often it is possible to discuss important principles in terms of contrived examples. Physicists do it: what sort of sadist would really lock up a cat in a box with a radioactivity-activated/radioactivity non-activated poison gas releaser?
    As for the principle… Your mileage may vary, but it is at least initially plausible to think that "know" expresses an important concept, one we use in many practically important contexts. (Should we trust X? That partly depends on whether we think X KNOWS what he is talking about.) Considering Gettier's problems is a strategy for finding a precise definition of the concept. Maybe it can be compared to the way linguists, trying to find an exact statement of the grammatical rules of a natural language, dream up a range of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, and try to get speakers of the language (themselves in many cases, and their colleagues) to say which are which.
    Is that helpful?

    Reply
  18. Sean Matthews

    I was just a passing comment, but since you responded, I would quote Williiamson, who writes:

    Knowledge is factive: whatever is known is true. That uncontentious principle…

    I have problems with this – I certainly contend it. I am not sure that I 'know' much, if anything, in the sense that Williamson seems to have in mind. I don't know general relativity, which is, after all, only an effective field theory, I don't know quantum theory, ditto, and inconsistent with GR. In fact I don't know any causal relations at all. I don't know that I am the father of what I assume are my children (I think so, but I do appreciate that there is a marginal risk that I might be wrong). I don't know of any mechanism that can with absolute confidence, as opposed to reasonable confidence, even map declarative propositions onto the world (especially when you go and push language) , This is part of the reason why Logicist AI failed – it is not just we could not get it to work – it is why people look at it and wonder, why did we ever imagine that it could work.

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  19. ehz

    Sean, I'm not sure how what you wrote has anything to do with the claim that knowledge is factive. But here's a simple way to get at the idea: "Ann knows it's raining" and "Bob knows it's not raining" cannot both be true while "Ann believes it's raining" and "Bob believes it's not raining" certainly can. The explanation for this is that "S knows it's raining" is true only if "it's raining" is true. This is all that factivity means in this context.

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  20. Benj

    To expand on ehz's correct claims, there are many mental verbs with a factive presupposition: know, regret, remember, recognize, discern, be glad, find it odd, be proud. Common to these are that assertions using 'so-and-so FACTIVEs that p' are unacceptable when 'p' is not accepted: and likewise for assertions 'so-and-so does not FACTIVE that p' and 'if so-and-so FACTIVEs that p, then q' and questions 'does so-and-so FACTIVE that p?'.

    Factivity is pervasive and undemanding, and not really worth contending.

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  21. Walter Horn

    Gettier was talking about "knowing THAT p." "Knowing quantum theory" is something else: thorough acquaintance with it and ability to muck around with it, maybe.

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  22. Benj

    Has anyone identified Gettier's second article, as alluded to by Phil Bricker here: https://www.umass.edu/…/memoriam-edmund-l-gettier-iii…?
    I was able to find the *review* (of Passmore's /Philosophical Reasoning/: PR '65), but PhilPapers does not index the other *article*.

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  23. J. Houston

    “Comments on A. J. Ayer’s ‘The Concept of a Person’,” in Intentionality, Minds, and Perception: Discussions on Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Hector-Neri Castañeda (Detroit, 1967).

    Reply
  24. Dean C. Rowan

    Is a ten page comment an article? A comment on Ayers' "The Concept of a Person" appears here: https://archive.org/details/intentionalitymi0000wayn_k5i8/page/104/mode/1up

    One can view it in full by setting up an account in Internet Archive and then "checking out" the volume.

    Reply
  25. Benj

    Thanks! Also to Dean, below.

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  26. J

    A little off-topic, but Brian Leiter notes: "Gettier was of a generation when philosophers could make careers in the academy based on high regard from their colleagues without many publications (think Rogers Albritton [Harvard, then UCLA] or Thompson Clarke [Berkeley])."

    I have heard of a few other philosophers whose reputation was based on "high regard from their colleagues without many publications", such as Sidney Morgenbesser.

    Is there a list of such philosophers somewhere? And if not, perhaps it is worth creating one before memories of those philosophers I'd lost.

    Reply
  27. Brad

    I did not know Edmund Gettier, but when I was edited my epistemology text, Knowledge and Inquiry (Broadview Press, 2002), Gettier graciously permitted me to reprint his paper without having to pay for copyright permission. I appreciated that.

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  28. J. Houston

    I don't know of any lists of philosophers who 'neither published (much) nor perished.' In Albritton's case, I do rather like how the New York Times obituarist put it: "[his] penchant for always questioning a conclusion led him to avoid the permanency of the written word." Another obituary remark that comes to mind is The Times (Keynes) on W.E. Johnson: "his critical intellect did not readily lend itself to authorship". Perhaps some such list could include 'epitaphs' of a similar spirit?

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