How to Get Tenure With a Three-Page Paper

In June 1963 the journal Analysis published a three-page article, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", by an assistant professor at Wayne State University. The author, Edmund Gettier, worked mostly on Bertrand Russell. According to colleagues — Duncan Pritchard puts it plainly — he wrote the paper because he was up for tenure and had nothing else to submit. He never published a paper in epistemology again.

The orthodox view at the time, going back to Plato's Theaetetus, was that knowledge is justified true belief. To know that p is to (1) believe that p, (2) believe it on good evidence, and (3) have it actually be true. Gettier's argument was that all three conditions could hold and the result still would not be knowledge.

His two counterexamples are about Smith and Jones. In the cleaner one, Smith has strong evidence that Jones owns a Ford. Smith forms the disjunctive belief, "Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona." It turns out Jones does not own a Ford — but, by sheer coincidence, Brown is in Barcelona. Smith's belief is true, justified, and held on good evidence. Most readers agree he doesn't know it.

The paper is mechanical and the prose is dry. It worked anyway. Within a decade, philosophers were producing reformed accounts of knowledge — adding "no false lemmas" clauses, reliabilist conditions, safety conditions, sensitivity conditions, tracking conditions — and Gettier's name was attached to a sub-discipline he had no interest in.

He moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1967, made full professor by 1972, and kept teaching until 2001. When the 50th-anniversary conference was organised in 2013, he declined to attend.