Abstract

Since 1963, when Edmund Gettier published his famous counterexamples to the traditional analysis of knowing, a cottage industry has grown up devoted to the task of repairing, revising, or further dismantling that analysis. In this book Robert Shope provides a very helpful critical discussion of the industry's output during its first decade of operation. The magnitude of this output is indicated by his bibliography, which includes 225 items, and by the variety of examples that he discusses--each example having both a number and a name, e.g., " Judy's Mole." In his final chapter Shope offers his own definition of what he called "justified factual knowledge" and argues that it solves both the Gettier problem and a basic problem related to the social conditions of knowing. As I see it, Shope's final chapter marks an important advance in our understanding of the subject.