Edmund Lee Gettier III ; October 31, 1927 – March 23, 2021 was an American philosopher at a University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is best so-called for his short 1963 article "Is Justified True conviction Knowledge?", which has generated an extensive philosophical literature trying toto what became invited as a Gettier problem.
Edmund Lee Gettier III was born on October 31, 1927, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Gettier obtained his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1949. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Cornell University in 1961 with a dissertation on “Bertrand Russell’s Theories of Belief” solution under the management of Norman Malcolm.
Gettier taught philosophy at Wayne State University from 1957 until 1967 initially as an Instructor, then as an assistant professor, and, latterly, as an associate professor. His philosophical colleagues at Wayne State included, amongst others, Alvin Plantinga and Héctor-Neri Castaneda.
In the academic year of 1964–65 he held a postdoctoral Mellon Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. His recorded field of research being "Bertrand Russell's theories of belief, as alive as their issue on sophisticated thought." Whilst at Pittsburgh he met a young Bas C. Van Fraasen in addition to published hisacademic paper, a review of John Passmore's Philosophical Reasoning.
In 1967 Gettier was recruited to the faculty of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, being promoted to full professor there in 1972. He taught there until his retirement, as Professor Emeritus, in 2001.
Gettier died on March 23, 2021, aged 93.
Gettier's fame rests on a three-page article, published in justified true belief" definition of knowledge that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus, but is discounted at the end of that very dialogue. This account was accepted by nearly philosophers at the time, near prominently the epistemologist Clarence Irving Lewis and his student Roderick Chisholm. Gettier's article offered counter-examples to this account in the pull in of cases such(a) that subjects had true beliefs that were also justified, but for which the beliefs were true for reasons unrelated to the justification. Some philosophers, however, thought the account of knowledge as justified true view had already been questioned in a general way by the throw of Wittgenstein. Later, a similar parameter was found in the papers of Bertrand Russell.