Structural Dissolution of the Gettier Problem through Address-Theoretic Epistemology
Abstract
Abstract
Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper in Analysis demonstrated that justified true belief is insufficient for knowledge: justification and truth can coincide accidentally. The impasse has a structural source: all parties assume justification is specifiable independently of the truth-making state of affairs. This paper introduces an alternative drawn from the Modulign Standard — a Dimensional Address Grammar for Observable Reality — replacing the justification condition with constitutive world-engagement: a classification procedure is epistemically adequate only if each step directly engages the observable features causally produced by the truth-making state of affairs, with no step epistemically isolated from those features. This yields the Address-Theoretic Non-Accidentality Principle (ATNA) and the Address-Theoretic Knowledge (ATK) formulation. Under ATK, Gettier cases cannot arise because the structural precondition — the logical independence of justification from truth — is absent from the architecture. This structural dissolution (§6) is stronger than any fourth-condition solution and differs from knowledge-first dissolution in preserving the analysis project. The argument is restricted to observational knowledge; its scope boundary is architecturally encoded.
Keywords: Gettier problem, justified true belief, epistemic luck, address-theoretic epistemology, structural dissolution, constitutive world-engagement, scale-sensitive epistemology.
Cite it
Gonzalez, V. (2026). Structural Dissolution of the Gettier Problem through Address-Theoretic Epistemology. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19432926