Accidentality and Knowledge After Gettier

Abstract

Fifty years on since the publication of Gettier’s famous article and there is still no widespread agreement among philosophers on some set of conditions that block Gettier cases and the like. In fact, there is much pessimism about some such project. The aim of this paper is to show that this pessimism is misplaced. I argue that an account that posits a reflective endorsement of the knowledge-yielding procedures that can be met at the social level can capture, what I here call, the non-accidentality desideratum. The lesson we can draw is that the project of adding some accidentality-blocker to true belief to have knowledge is not doomed if we give up the individualistic approach of much mainstream epistemology.