Hi, hope this thread qualifies for the open discussion - if not, maybe I was not lucky enough and it should be moved somewhere else.

Anyway, I’d like to discuss Gettier problems. It seems I don’t appreciate the depth of the problem enough, as the solution appears to be on the surface to me, so I’m hoping you could point at my logical error here.

Context: Gettier case intends to challenge JTB (justified-true-belief) concept of knowledge. Classical example is of Smith believing that whoever will get the job has 10 coins in their pocket and being “mistakenly right” with reasoning as follows:

1. Company president tells him that Jones will win the job
2. Smith believes that Jones will win the job
3. Smith observes that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket
4. Smith infers that whoever will get the job has 10 coins in their pocket

In the end, Smith got the job instead, but as he by chance had 10 coins in his pocket too, he was right.

The problem as I see it is in answering the question whether by fulfilling the JTB, we could say Smith indeed knew that the winner had 10 coins.

In my opinion (and I humbly accept it’s only one incomplete and likely wrong perspective), the problem doesn’t really pose a challenge to the original definition, and could be invalidated if we take a closer look at step 4 of the above reasoning.

Following Wittgenstein, what the author really saying is “Smith thinks that [Jones] who has 10 coins in his pocket will win the job”. Whether or not Smith was right a posteriori is irrelevant - step 2 of the reasoning (that Jones will win the job) does not satisfy the truth requirement, and as step 4 can be reduced to step 2, it is therefore not knowledge regardless. In other words, the equal phrase of the challenge could be “Smith thinks that Jones will win the job”, and it should take precedence over a more complex one.

In other examples (e.g. looking at a dog disguised as a sheep and concluding that there’s a sheep in the field when indeed there’s one outside of sight of the viewer) the problem is the same - by introducing a false belief and further expanding it with additional unjustified statement that leads to a true statement. However, if we look closely, the actual statement is “The viewer thinks there’s a [dog that he thinks is] a sheep in the field”, which is not the same as “The viewer thinks there’s a sheep in the field”. Again, since it’s possible to break down the “chain of knowledge” to simpler steps and discover an error there (that what he saw was a dog and not a sheep), the chain as a whole fails to become knowledge but doesn’t really void the original definition of JTB. The reduced statement for which JTB is still valid would be “The viewer believes that what he sees is a sheep” (which is not true).

Now, I know that this problem will celebrate its 60th anniversary soon, but I fail to see what I miss in my attempts to solve it. I’d appreciate your comments and help in improving my logical thinking. Thank you.