Can you give a simple Gettier-style example?

Someone looks at a clock that reads two o'clock and forms the justified belief that it is two o'clock; it happens to be two o'clock, but the clock stopped exactly twelve hours earlier. The belief is justified and true, yet its truth is mere luck, so we hesitate to call it knowledge.

What is the fake-barn case?

A driver sees a real barn and forms the true, justified belief that there is a barn, but the area is full of barn facades indistinguishable from the road. The belief is true and justified, yet it is only luck that the driver happened to look at the one real barn, so many judge it not to be knowledge.

Gettier Cases

Gettier cases are short thought experiments in which a person holds a belief that is justified and turns out true, yet only by luck, prompting the intuition that the person does not genuinely know — the data that any analysis of knowledge must accommodate.

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Definition

A Gettier case is a counterexample to the justified-true-belief analysis in which a subject has a justified true belief that intuitively does not count as knowledge because its truth depends on luck that breaks the connection between the justification and the fact believed.

Scope

This topic covers the construction and anatomy of Gettier-style counterexamples: Gettier's two original cases, earlier ancestors such as Russell's stopped-clock example, and later variants like the fake-barn and sheep-in-the-field cases. It analyses the recurring recipe — a justified false belief, or justified belief whose truth-maker is accidental, that happens to yield a true conclusion — and the role of epistemic luck. The responses that aim to exclude such cases are treated in companion topics.

Core questions

What common structure do Gettier cases share?
Why does the lucky truth of the belief defeat the claim to knowledge?
How do later variants like fake barns differ from Gettier's originals?
Are the intuitions Gettier cases elicit universal and robust?

Key concepts

Justified true belief that fails to be knowledge
Epistemic luck breaking the link between justification and truth
Inference from a justified false belief to a true conclusion
Earlier ancestors: Russell's stopped clock
Later variants: fake-barn and sheep-in-the-field cases

History

Although Gettier gave the cases their name in 1963, similar examples appear earlier, including Russell's 1948 stopped-clock case in which a person reads the correct time from a clock that has in fact stopped. Gettier's compact presentation made the structure unmistakable, and the subsequent literature multiplied variants — most famously Goldman's fake-barn case — that probe exactly which kinds of luck are incompatible with knowledge.

Debates

How widely Gettier intuitions are shared: Most epistemologists treat the verdict that Gettier subjects lack knowledge as a fixed datum, but experimental and cross-cultural work has questioned how universal the intuition is, bearing on whether the cases can serve as decisive tests of analyses of knowledge.

Key figures

Edmund Gettier
Bertrand Russell
Alvin Goldman
Linda Zagzebski

Seminal works

gettier1963
russell1948

Frequently asked questions

Can you give a simple Gettier-style example?: Someone looks at a clock that reads two o'clock and forms the justified belief that it is two o'clock; it happens to be two o'clock, but the clock stopped exactly twelve hours earlier. The belief is justified and true, yet its truth is mere luck, so we hesitate to call it knowledge.
What is the fake-barn case?: A driver sees a real barn and forms the true, justified belief that there is a barn, but the area is full of barn facades indistinguishable from the road. The belief is true and justified, yet it is only luck that the driver happened to look at the one real barn, so many judge it not to be knowledge.