What if the facsimile does all of those things? My initial reaction to the example was, "so what"? The guy _knew_ there was a cow but was wrong. The fact a _real_ cow existed behind the fascimile is irrelevant. All knowledge is contingent and relative. How could it be otherwise? What if 100% of all cow facsimiles ever displayed in the past were displayed on a farm with real cows--would that alone be sufficient to justify an inference of a cow nearby? To say that a belief is _justified_ simply begs the question--how can you _really_ know the truth of something?

In the scientific method you can never prove hypotheses, you can only disprove them. 'nuff said.

I find the Gettier problem entirely uninteresting myself. Someone elsethread explained it in the context of technical discourse in philosophy, in which case I could maybe appreciate the issue as a way to test and explore epistemological theories in a systematic, rigorous manner, even if for many theories it's not particularly challenging to overcome.

It's interesting because until Gettier nobody had actually proved that a justified true belief does not constitute what we commonly consider to be knowledge.

It's all very well dismissing it an inconsequential, but several generations of philosophers and scientists have grown up in the post-Gettier world, before which the Justified True Belief account was widely considered to be unassailable. Yes _now_ we all know better and are brought up knowing this, but Gettier and his huge influence on later thought is the reason why and it's just that not many people are aware of this.

But plenty of philosophers prior had suggested, if not argued, the contigency of knowledge. Kant famously discussed how knowledge is shaped and circumscribed by our faculties (e.g. sense of space and time).

Positivism was already well developed long before 1963.

I could on. I've studied enough philosophy to be comfortable with my criticism. But I'll grant that it may not have been until after 1963 that all these philosophical strains became predominate. But that doesn't excuse people from not seeing what's coming.