Gettier's big can of worms

[Magical Realist]

Or, the problem of the lucky dupe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm41d4C2w5g

[C C]

Since it is thinking agents who superimpose epistemological values upon their assumptions and the exhibited affairs of material phenomena, there should then be a degree of understanding in an agent as to why something would count as knowledge. Rather than relationships like chance or happenstance making it true. In the physicalist context, most of the cosmos certainly lacks any interest; it simply "does" rather than interpret / label / care about facts.

However, one does indeed run into the quandary of people believing all sorts of items to be the case which that they don't fully understand or have personally verified; they just leave it authorities and experts and adventurers to have validated such through the proper channels of intellectual and empirical activity.

[Yazata]

I've never found the Gettier problems to be very convincing.

They all seem to revolve around very contrived cases of justified true belief, where the justification is somehow irrelevant to the truth of the belief. The would-be knower has a true belief, and possesses what he or she assumes is good justification for believing it, except that the justification really isn't applicable in that particular instance and the belief is true for some other hypothetical reason.

I don't really understand what all the excitement is. I expect that everyone who has ever championed the justified-true-belief account of knowledge was already assuming that whatever the justification is in a particular example, it needs to justify the truth of the belief in that particular instance. Otherwise, regardless of the believer's subjective feelings of confidence based on a false justification, the belief wouldn't be an instance of knowledge.

Of course, a would-be knower wouldn't necessarily be able to discern that his or her justification isn't any good and that he or she isn't just a "lucky dupe".

I don't think that's a very earth-shaking revelation. We already knew that. It's just another application of philosophy's age-old skeptical doubts. Somebody's boasting that they know something doesn't really guarantee anything. Doubt remains possible not only regarding the truth of the thing believed, but also regardless the soundness of the justifications for the belief.