Chapter 10 - Truthmaking and the Gettier Problem

• Published in: Aspects of Knowing pp. 151 - 167
• Main Author: Heathcote, Adrian
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2006
• ISBN: 9780080449791; 0080449794
• DOI: 10.1016/B978-008044979-1/50011-4

This chapter argues the constraints that Gettier places on the situations that are simultaneously unsatisfiable. When one knows something, what they know is some fact. But they easily shift from the fact to the proposition that expresses that fact. Therefore, they come to say that what they know is a proposition, and that the content of their belief is a proposition; this anomalous situation was first identified by Russell, but Edmund Gettier gave the first expression to it. The Gettier problem is unsolvable, which means that the problem is resistant to solution. The Gettier problems are not unsolvable. Moreover, the reason why the Gettier problems have seemed so resistant to solution is the phobia that philosophers have been possessed for invoking facts and states of affairs to solve philosophical problems. This is, however, a great mistake because it has been argued that the problem arises from shifting attention from the fact that is the object of the knowledge to the proposition that is the object of our knowledge.