ABSTRACT
Edmund Gettier is an American philosopher who became famous for the one short article he published during his professional life. Although his article made him famous among philosophers, Gettier has shown almost no interest in the decades' worth of debates it set off. Justified true belief, or JTB, as it is known, is how philosophers have traditionally understood what knowledge is. Gettier's short article shook the philosophy world. For the first time in more than 2000 years, someone found a major flaw that seemed to disprove a bedrock theory of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that looks at the nature of knowledge. With its focus on what it really means to know something, Gettier's article has influenced thinking in nearly all branches of philosophy. The article has been cited over 2,300 times since it first appeared. At a brief 930 words, it holds the highest citation-per-word ratio of any philosophical work ever published.
