Not Knowing Not Knowing

This paper kicks away post-Gettier epistemology’s foundation-stone. Epistemologists have long agreed that Edmund Gettier, in 1963, disproved knowledge’s definability as an epistemically well-justified true belief. He did so with two tales about someone, Smith, having a belief that, although true and well justified, fails to be knowledge. But agreement is one thing; knowledge is another. Have epistemologists ever actually known that Smith did not know? If not, should they cease being committed to conceiving of knowledge in ways that unquestioningly accommodate Gettier’s being correct about Smith? Should even those who claim to eschew ‘analysing’ the concept of knowledge be wary of assuming that a conception of knowledge must be shaped partly by Gettier’s tales? I argue so: either no or almost no epistemologists know that Smith lacked knowledge within those tales. This argument comes us to us from meta-Gettier: given the past several decades of post-Gettier aporia, epistemologists themselves are afflicted, when evaluating Smith, in much the same way as, according to their own evaluation, Smith himself was afflicted in Gettier’s first tale. Those epistemologists are thus meta-Gettiered. If Smith was Gettiered, so are they, when regarding him as being so: if he fails to know, so do they—in much the same way (whatever, exactly, that way involves). Their failure is meta-epistemic: they fail to know that he fails to know.