Pierre Le Morvan

Antognazza (“The Benefit to Philosophy”, “The Distinction in Kind”), Dutant (“The Legend”), and I (“Knowledge Before Gettier”) have argued for the historical falsity of the claim that, prior to Gettier’s famous counterexamples of sixty years ago, the so-called ‘traditional’ conception of knowledge was the justified true belief (JTB) conception. This note addresses a related historical question that, rather surprisingly, has not yet been addressed in the philosophical literature; to wit: when did this claim first appear in this literature?

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the “Complement Thesis”. In this article, I discuss its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge.