The Flaw in Knowing Everything

You can have a perfectly justified belief that turns out to be true by pure accident, yet philosophers argue this still does not count as actual knowledge. A simple three-page paper shattered centuries of established wisdom.

For thousands of years, experts defined knowledge as a justified true belief. Edmund Gettier proved this wrong by showing that luck can make a belief true even when the reasoning behind it is flawed. Because the truth was reached through a coincidence, the person cannot be said to truly know the fact. This discovery forced thinkers to scramble for a better definition of how we actually learn things.