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Abstract More than half a century ago,the American philosopher Edmund Gettier proposed two classic counterexamples against the traditional tripartite analysis of knowledge .These counterexamples have brought a great problem for the definition of knowledge,which is called″the Gettier problem .″There has been endless debate among epistemologists about how to understand and solve it and a lot of misunderstandings of that problem have thus arisen . Firstly,the Gettier problem has been narrowly interpreted by some epistemologists as the problem of searching for a fourth condition that has to add to the justified-true-belief definition of propositional knowledge .In fact,the the Gettier problem aims to solve the paradox in epistemology which can be shown in the following three propositions :(1) Knowledge is justified true belief;(2) S has a justified true belief p;(3) S does not know that p .These three propositions can not be true at the same time because they are inconsistent .To solve this paradox,you can partly or completely deny any one or two of those three propositions . Searching for the fourth condition is but one of the many proposed approaches to the Gettier problem . Secondly,some epistemologists think that the Gettier problem results from the false premise of deduction,which directly leads to the no-false premise solution (NFPS) to the problem .NFPS can either be strict or moderate .As a strong advocate of strict NFPS,the Chinese epistemologist Chen Jiaming interprets epistemic justification as″verification,″and then views Gettier's counterexample of the ten-coin case not as an epistemic case but as the case of misusage of words .In fact,the strict NFPS is a disguised form of infallibilism which directly results in skepticism while the proponents of the moderate NFPS fail to make clear the meaning of″essentially″in the condition that″S's justification for p does not essentially depend on any false premise .″The failure of NFPS arises from the misconception about the fundamental structure of the Gettier problem,which is a combination of fallibilist justification and veritic epistemic luck .Fallibilist justification may cause the justifiers of proposition to separate from the facts asserted by the proposition . That is to say,the justifiers of proposition are inconsistent with its truth-maker,which will usually induce a falsehood .But the good luck called″veritic epistemic luck″ makes you magically avoid the falsehood and get the truth .In order to solve the Gettier problem,we should eliminate either the inconsistency between justifier and truth-maker or the effect of veritic epistemic luck .But you cannot eliminate the inconsistency completely;otherwise you will get into infallibilism .So it is a preponderant solution to the Gettier problem to eliminate the effect of veritic epistemic luck by means of the condition of″safety .″ Finally,some epistemologists think that knowledge can be lucky,which means that the epistemic agents in Gettier's counterexamples actually know the target propositions instead of not knowing .The claim is based on the idea that knowledge varies in degree .Lucky knowledge is at the edge of″knowing,″ but it is still″knowing″instead of″not knowing .″This argument hardly holds water because it begs the question .It is the case that knowledge is incompatible with veritic epistemic luck,but it is not the case that knowledge is incompatible with all kinds of luck .Furthermore,it is our universal intuition and day-to-day practice that knowledge excludes veritic epistemic luck .
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Received: 20 December 2014
Published: 28 February 2015
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