Ernest Sosa has argued that if someone knows that p, then his belief that p is "safe", and Timothy Williamson has agreed. In this paper I argue that safety, as defined by Sosa, is not a necessary condition on knowledge -that we can have unsafe knowledge. I present Sosa's definition of safety and a counterexample to it as a necessary condition on knowledge. I also argue that Sosa's most recent refinements to the notion of safety don't help him to avoid the counterexample. I consider three replies on behalf of the defender of safety, and find them all wanting. Finally, I offer a tentative diagnosis of my counterexample.Synthese (2005) 146: 395-404

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Timothy Williamson has fruitfully exploited formal resources to shed considerable light on the nature of knowledge. In the paper under examination, Williamson turns his attention to Gettier cases, showing how they can be motivated formally. At the same time, he disparages the kind of justification he thinks gives rise to these cases. He favors instead his own notion of justification for which Gettier cases cannot arise. We take issue both with his disparagement of the kind of justification that figures in Gettier cases and the specifics of the formal motivation. I. Gettier Cases, Excusability, and JustificationWhy, according to Williamson, do Gettier cases matter? For most of us, they matter because they show that the gap between knowing p and being justified in believing p is greater than what one might otherwise have thought. What Gettier cases show is that one's justified belief that p can fail to be knowledge that p for reasons other than that p is false. This realization has led epistemologists to think of knowledge in new and sometimes surprising ways. Williamson takes a different view of the relation between knowledge and justification. For Williamson, a belief is genuinely justified only if it is knowledge. He notes that on such a view, Gettier cases cannot arise. But if this is true, then the answer to the question posed in the title of Gettier's 1963 paper, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?' should have been a clear 'yes!'. Of course, Gettier posed the question rhetorically. His paper seems to show convincingly that knowledge is not justified true belief. And epistemology's subsequent preoccupation with the search for a fourth condition for

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