Gettier Cases

Epistemologists in general have long agreed that a belief’s being gettiered precludes its being knowledge. However, they have long disagreed on how to understand or explicate that preclusion relation. Of course, some suggestions attract more approval than others do. One of the most commonly favored ones talk, in modal terms, of epistemic safety and epistemic luck. But this chapter argues that such attempted explications fail, because they have not learned enough from the history of modal metaphysics. In particular, epistemologists who reach for such an approach when seeking to understand Gettier cases have unwittingly allowed themselves to be conceiving of such cases in counterpart-theoretic terms, even while deriving a putative result that depends instead on a kind of transworld identity for Gettier cases and for gettiered beliefs. Methodologically, this combination is not viable.