True belief and epistemic luck › Looking for a better connection with the truth

An appealing repair forbids reliance on false premises. Both original cases involve an inferential starting point that is false, so such a restriction addresses their visible mechanism. That observation supports investigating the proposal. It does not prove that every possible case of accidental truth must contain an explicitly false premise.

Return to the imagined frozen display. A person might read it without consciously inferring anything from the proposition that it is functioning. Whether an implicit false assumption is involved depends on how belief formation is analyzed. Merely instructing people to avoid false steps leaves that question unanswered. This example illustrates a problem a repair must address; it is not a third case from Gettier's paper.

Alvin Goldman offers a different direction in "A Causal Theory of Knowing." He asks for an appropriate causal connection between an empirical fact and the person's belief. In his discussion of the Ford case, Brown's actual presence in Barcelona is disconnected from the formation of Smith's belief. The contrast is between an appropriate connection and coincidental correctness. Goldman, 1967, pp.357–358.

Goldman's proposal needs qualifications. His paper explicitly concerns empirical propositions, so treating mathematical knowledge as an overlooked problem for that exact stated scope would misrepresent it. He also considers causal connections through a common cause and argues that an inferential reconstruction must get the important links right. The proposal is more specific than the slogan that a true fact must directly cause a belief. Goldman, pp.357, 363–365.

The broader question is how to explain a belief's connection with its truth. Evidence available to the subject, the process producing the belief, and the surrounding circumstances can all become candidates for analysis. Listing these possibilities is a way of locating the work still required. Gettier's two counterexamples alone do not demonstrate that any one later theory succeeds.