If a stopped clock happens to show the right time, why don’t I know the time?

Question

I drive the 413 across Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. 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.

Giulia Ferrante · Accepted Answer

On why anyone should care: your timetable doesn't care, but your passengers do, and so would you if you thought about tomorrow.
The lucky glance and the knowing glance give the same answer today. They come apart over every other day. A belief that is true by luck carries no promise about the next time. That is why we don't give people credit for lucky guesses, and why we blame them less for honest mistakes made on good evidence.
Plato has a lovely image for this in the Meno. True opinions, Socrates says, are like the statues of Daedalus that run away unless you tie them down; once they are tied down by working out the reason, they become knowledge and stay put. The stopped clock is a true opinion that is not tied to anything.
So "knowing" names a particular kind of being right: right because of the way you got there, in a way that would keep you right if things went differently. Gettier's three pages showed that "having a good reason" does not guarantee that connection. Everything since has been an argument about what does.

Tomasz Wójcik · Answer

Two separate things got merged in the lecture, which is easy to do at a red light.
The clock is Bertrand Russell's. He uses it in Human Knowledge (1948), decades before Gettier, as an example of a true belief that is not knowledge. He was not attacking any particular definition with it.
Gettier's paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963), has two different cases. In one, Smith has strong evidence that Jones will get a job and that Jones has ten coins in his pocket, so he concludes "the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket". In fact Smith gets the job, and Smith, without knowing it, also has ten coins. In the other, Smith infers "either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" from good evidence about Jones's car. Jones owns no Ford; Brown happens to be in Barcelona.
Same structure as your clock: good reasons, true conclusion, and the truth comes from somewhere the reasons never touched.

Serkan Aydoğdu · Answer

Thank you both. So the clock is Russell's and the ten coins are Gettier's, and knowing means being right in a way that would still work tomorrow. That I can explain to my wife. From now on I will check the depot clock against my phone, not because I am a philosopher but because I do not want to be lucky.

Meera Kulkarni · Answer

One footnote for the curious: an eighth-century Buddhist epistemologist, Dharmottara, describes a traveller who sees a mirage, believes there is water ahead, and does find water there, hidden nearby. Whether it works exactly like Gettier's cases is argued about, but the idea that you can be right by accident is much older than 1963.

If a stopped clock happens to show the right time, why don’t I know the time?

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