Quick questions on The tripartite analysis and Gettier explained: H2 Knowledge and Inquiry

The standard analysis says S knows that p if and only if p is true, S believes that p, and S is justified in believing that p. Each condition is meant to be necessary, and the three together sufficient. Gettier accepts that the conditions are necessary; what he attacks is the claim that they are jointly sufficient.

A Gettier case is a recipe. Take a justified belief that happens to be false, draw from it a logical consequence that is also justified, and arrange the world so that the consequence is true, but true for a reason unconnected to the believer's evidence. The belief then satisfies all three conditions, yet the truth was a matter of luck, so it is not knowledge. The lesson is that justification can attach to a belief while failing to connect it to the fact that makes it true.

The common diagnosis is that Gettier beliefs are true by luck. Justification was supposed to rule out luck (that was its job in defeating the lucky-guess cases), but Gettier shows it can fail to do so when justification and truth come apart. So knowledge needs more than justified true belief: it needs the right kind of non-lucky connection between belief and fact.

One repair adds a fourth condition: the justified true belief must not be inferred from any false premise. In the classic office case the believer reasoned through a false assumption (that a particular colleague owned the car), so the belief is disqualified. This handles inference-based cases neatly. Its weakness is that some Gettier cases involve no inference from a falsehood at all, such as perceptual cases.

A second repair says a justified true belief is knowledge only if there is no true proposition which, were it added to the believer's evidence, would defeat the justification. In Gettier cases there is always such a hidden truth (that the colleague had sold the car). The difficulty is that some genuine knowledge has misleading defeaters, true facts that would mislead if known, so deciding which defeaters disqualify knowledge is itself a problem.

Explain the recipe for constructing a Gettier case. [6 marks]

Why does the no-false-lemmas repair fail to handle every Gettier case? [8 marks]

Briefly explain how reliabilism responds to the Gettier problem and one objection to it. [6 marks]