Gettier problem

You work in the office with a great guy called Mr. Nogot. In the past he has explained network cards and nuclear physics to you, and kept you informed of the donut count in the staff room. He has not lied to you, and you feel justified in trusting his word.

Today Mr. Nogot informs you that he is the proud owner of a new Ford car. At lunch, you see him drive off in a Ford. And while digging through the papers on his desk you come across the ownership papers to a Ford.
Because of all this, you form a justified belief that Mr. Nogot does indeed own a ford. Because of this, you also form the belief that "someone in this office owns a Ford". (If you were asked who, you would say Mr. Nogot. But if simply asked if someone if your office owned a Ford, the answer would be yes).

But it turns out that Mr. Nogot was only fooling you... It's not his Ford he was driving, and those papers were forged. So you can no longer claim that you knew** that Mr. Nogot owned a Ford (Because it wasn't a justified true belief).

The next day you see your co-worker Mr. Havit in the parking lot, where he is parking his Ford. He, five reliable witnesses, and the parking attendant explain that he has had this Ford for the past year. You are convinced. You now have a justified true belief that Mr. Havit owns a Ford. And, therefore, that "someone in your office owns a Ford".
So... Did you know before this that someone in your office owned a Ford? You did have a justified true belief that someone did (You thought it was Mr. Nogot). You were just basing that belief on false evidence.

So is justified true belief enough for knowledge? Even when it's based on false Ford ownership? And if it isn't enough for knowledge, what is required?

* This is not the original Gettier problem. I'm not exactly sure what form that took, but I think it involved Mr. Nogot and a Ferrari.

** You didn't have a justified true belief, and if you didn't have a JTB, you didn't 'know'--that is, at that point you didn't have knowledge. A possible problem here is that not all people have the same definition of 'knowledge', and that not all people use 'know' as only a form of 'knowledge'. In this case we have defined knowledge as a JTB, and we are using 'know' and 'knew' as forms of JTB.

This was all thrown into chaos, when Earnest Gettier who was an American philosopher in the early 1960's (1963 to be precise I think) pointed out that while a person may hold a belief, and it may be true, and justified, but it may not relate to the truth in the right way. In other words it is relatively accidental, or it's just lucky the person is right.

This is counter intuitive when first heard, and so he furnished a series of examples, the aforementioned Gettier Examples, to illustrate his point. Lets say I reasonably and justifiably saw the Pope receiving a bottle of whiskey and thus rightly concluded that the Pontiff was a drinking man who enjoyed the occasional bottle of Jack's Best. Now the truth is that his holiness does, but on this occasion he was in fact taking delivery of a medical specimen for his dear aunt in Poland. Now in this case my belief is true, and justified, nevertheless I don't know that he drinks whiskey, since the truth is just accidentally relative to my belief. He could be a teetotaller.

As you can imagine, this sparked a long and furious debate over the kinds of conditions that could be put in place to offer a verifiable model of knowledge, or whether this was a futile exercise, and such a model couldn't in fact be said to exist at all. This debate was used to add fire to the philosophies of relativism, nihilism, and oddly enough some aspects of phenomenology. The logical positivists had a hard time with it as well, because they couldn't create a formal system that got around the notions, but they were to have enough troubles dealing with Godel.

The Gettier Problem essentially boils down to this: false beliefs (through the magic of deductive reasoning) can be used to justify true beliefs, which are therefore knowledge. This is bad because if the deducer had known that their original belief was false, they would not have been able to justify their new belief. In turn, this demonstrates that the concept of justification was much weaker and less intuitive than epistemologists had previously believed.

So the obvious next step was to slap a bandaid on JTB to get JTB+: knowledge is a true belief that is justified by true beliefs (or without reference to false beliefs). However, this turns out to suffer from problems when a belief is justified insufficiently but happens to be true by chance. For example:

Say you're watching a magic show and the magician puts a rabbit into his hat. Based on your true observations, you conclude "there's a rabbit in that hat". However it turned out that your eyes deceived you: it was a stuffed rabbit. But while you were making your deduction, the magician switched it for a real rabbit*, thereby making your belief true.

Your belief about the rabbit was justified and turned out to be true, but only by luck. So something's still wrong here, and I think this is just about the point in the history of epistemology where people started questioning truth and the whole JTB enterprise fell apart.

* What, you think it's a stupid trick? Well I didn't tell you the end yet, did I?!