If a stopped clock happens to show the right time, why don’t I know the time?
Yesterday's lecture was about knowledge. The lecturer said that for a long time philosophers agreed that knowledge is "justified true belief", and then a man called Gettier wrote three pages and the agreement fell apart.
The example that stayed with me was a clock. You look at a clock that has always worked. It says three o'clock. It really is three o'clock. But the clock stopped exactly twelve hours ago. So you believe something true, you have a good reason, and still you don't know the time.
Here is my problem. In our depot there is a clock above the dispatcher's window that I check every morning before I take the bus out. If one day it had stopped and I got the right time by luck, I would just say "fine, I was right". When you have a timetable, being right is what matters.
So why do philosophers care so much about the difference between being right and knowing? And is the clock example really Gettier's? The lecturer mentioned Russell as well and I lost the thread at a red light.