Borges Scoops Gettier

Edmund Gettier's famous 1963 paper "Is Justified, True Belief Knowledge?" has had an enormous impact on epistemology. What has not been acknowledged to date is that Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges had the same characterization of justified, true belief (JTB) as something short of knowledge in his 1948 short story "Emma Zunz." And not only did Borges's insight precede Gettier's paper by more than a decade, but "Emma Zunz" also suggests that imaginative writing may be inherently better than philosophical treatises at establishing both the validity and the consequence of counterexamples to the JTB formula for knowledge.