I’ve read all your posts and I think you’ll find replies or reactions in what follows.

I would like to explain why I said that the mistake is to answer the question.

Faced with a problem like this one, it can be helpful to look at things from a fresh perspective. That can be achieved here by putting oneself in the place of the subject and considering the situation, not so much from the question whether it counts as knowledge or not but considering the related question “was I right or not”.

Take the Gettier case at the beginning of this thread:-

It's dusk, you're a farmer. You go into your fields and see a cowish shape (it actually happens to be a cloth swaying in the wind). You conclude that there's a cow in your field. There, in fact, is a cow in your field. — TheMadFool

If you know that you didn't see a cow, but just a cowishly shaped rag, you will withdraw your claim that there's a cow in the field. But you will notice that there is a cow in the field, but that you couldn’t have seen it. So you were right, but for the wrong reasons. If it had been a bet, you would have won it. But it is precisely to differentiate winning a bet from knowing that the J clause was invented. So it is clearly not knowledge or even justified true belief because the J clause fails.

Now, Gettier stipulates that it is possible for one to be justified in believing that p even when p is false. This opens the door to his counter-examples, but I am reluctant to find fault with it.

However, there is a problem with the next step. He further stipulates that if one believes that p and if p entails q, one is entitled to deduce that q and believe it. He does not say that it is sufficient to believe that p entails q. Hence, even though we must accept the belief that p, if it asserted by S, we must agree that p entails q, if the justification is to be valid. Assuming that we are not talking about the truth-functional definition of implication, it is clear that even if p does entail q, one is not entitled to deduce q if p is false. So the cases all fail.

Russell’s clock is not a classic Gettier problem (and Russell himself treats as a simple case of true belief which is not knowledge). It raises the rather different problem, that we nearly always make assumptions which could be taken into account, but are ignored for one reason or another, or even for no particular reason. Sometimes these assumptions fail, and the result is awkward to classify. Jennifer Nagel calls this the Harman Vogel paradox.

The classic example is parking your car in the street to attend a meeting or party or whatever. If all goes well, you will be perfectly comfortable saying that you know that your car is safe. But suppose the question arises “Is your car safe? Are you sure it hasn’t been stolen?” You ignored that possibility when you parked, assuming that the area was safe. But perhaps you aren’t quite sure, after all. It is perfectly possible that my car will be stolen while I’ve left it. I do not know how to answer this. Our yearning for certainty, for which knowledge caters, collides with the practical need to take risks and live with uncertainty. One might point out that we take risks every time we assert something; if it goes wrong, we have to withdraw the assertion. But that is just a description of the situation, not a solution.

I think there may be something to be said for the knowledge-first view, but I haven’t done any detailed work on it. It might well be worth following up. It occurs to me that it would be much easier to teach the use of “know” to someone who didn’t know either “know” or “believe” than the other way round.

The J clause is a bit of a rag-bag and I’m not sure it is capable of a strict definition. But I’m not sure how much, if at all, that matters.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that there is no knowledge here, so I wonder why you think there's a problem saying there is or isn't.

I'm sorry I wasn't very clear. Some people think that there is no knowledge in Gettier cases, but that there is justified true belief. Hence they conclude that the JTB definition is inadequate. Others, like me, think that the JTB is correct, (subject to some caveats). They think that if there is no knowledge, there cannot be justified true belief. The question comes down to whether the main character's belief is justified or not; the stories create situations in which it isn't possible to give a straight answer. Or that's my view.

I was aware that not everyone agrees with "no false lemmas". I confess that I don't know what the full definition of a lemma would be so I'm not in a position to argue with them. For the sake of brevity, I ignored them. The "apparent dog" is not an impressive counter-example. An apparent dog is not a dog. One might argue that a robot dog is a kind of dog, but that would blow the point of the story, so we don't need to worry about that.

I agree with you that it is strange that so many people think that Gettier is important. But somehow the problem gets under one's skin. I think it's because the solution seems so simple, but then turns out to be so hard to pin down. I agree with you that believing that one knows is not sufficient for knowledge. It has to be endorsed by someone else. That's the effect of the T clause in the JTB. But Gettier doesn't claim that his characters know. On the contrary, he claims that they have a justified true belief and not knowledge. That's the point.

And its a feature of the stories that the main character doesn't know the full circumstances; I assume that is because if the main character knew the full circumstances, they would immediately recognize that their justification is not a justification and would then not even believe.

So although I agree with your conclusion, I don't agree with your diagnosis. Sorry.

Excuse me joining this so late in the day. I wasn't a member nine months ago.

I certainly don't agree that the Gettier problem is solved by relativism about truth. I think that if relativism is true (which I don't accept) then the concept of knowledge is meaningless.

Gettier creates the problem by offering a justification based on a false belief. Which seems to me not a justification for anything - even if it is a reasonable belief. He combines this with a story that provides a truth-condition for the proposed knowledge quite independent of the justification. The result is a set of conditions that escape the definition. The story is not catered for by the definition. The mistake is to try and classify it as knowledge or not.

I think what I have said falls under the slogan "no false lemmas".