At the end of my “new intuitions paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/iam.pdf I have three arguments that Gettier cases are cases of knowledge. At dinner with Ishani, John Hawthorne and Ernie Lepore last night we discussed (inter alia) a fourth argument. It’s one I’d previously missed, though I should have seen it given its proximity to the arguments I make.

Let p be a Gettiered belief that X has. It seems that X could be happy that p, or sad that p, or disgusted that p and so on. If we accept Williamson’s line that knowledge is the most general factive mental state, so happiness/sadness/disgustedness that p entails knowledge that p, this means that X knows that p, as required. More formally, the argument is:

1. X is happy that p
2. If X is happy that p then X knows that p.
C. X knows that p

Of course someone who strongly rejects the conclusion can reject one of the premises, but 2 is supported by very plausible theoretical claims, and the intuition that 1 is true (in cases where X is plausibly _happy_ rather than, say, _sad_ about p) is at least as strong as the intuition that X does not know that p.