Abstract
The central focus of post-Gettier epistemology was the attempt to find necessary and sufficient conditions that captured “the ordinary concept of knowledge” - on the assumption that there was a single, widely shared concept to be found. A guiding assumption behind this project was that the competent epistemic judgments of ordinary individuals were relevant to whether an analysis is correct. Against this backdrop, experimental epistemology emerged as the systematic empirical study of epistemic judgments. Expecting to find cross-cultural differences, experimental philosophers have instead uncovered broad agreement. Notably, researchers have found that most people agree that false beliefs and unjustified beliefs do not count as knowledge and that justified true beliefs in Gettier cases do not count as knowledge when they are based upon merely apparent rather than authentic evidence. However, contrary to received philosophical wisdom, non-philosophers judge that justified true beliefs formed on the basis of authentic evidence do count as knowledge even when the putative knower is in a classic Gettier situation. What the distinction between authentic and apparent evidence amounts to and what other differences in epistemic intuitions across demographic groups there might be are important issues that mainstream and experimental philosophers need to work together to understand.
