Antognazza (“The Benefit to Philosophy”, “The Distinction in Kind”), Dutant (“The Legend”), and I (“Knowledge Before Gettier”) have argued for the historical falsity of the claim that, prior to Gettier’s famous counterexamples of sixty years ago, the so-called ‘traditional’ conception of knowledge was the justified true belief (JTB) conception. This note addresses a related historical question that, rather surprisingly, has not yet been addressed in the philosophical literature; to wit: when did this claim first appear in this literature?

Why are the conditions for propositional knowledge so difficult to discover or devise in this post-Gettier age? Why do not most epistemologists agree on roughly the same analysis as they appear to have done in the pre-Gettier paradise? I argue that the problem lies in that fact that the epistemologists intuitive concept of knowledge appeals to desiderata that probably cannot be satisfied. Unfortunately, if we abandon some of these desiderata, it is difficult to settle on a concept of knowledge which (...) is not too remote from our initial intuitions. I suggest that epistemology may be better off without the concept of knowledge. There are plenty of other interesting notions for us to be going on with. (shrink)