Why, According To Hetherington, Is This Reason Unconvincing?

Theory of Knowledge-Mid Term Exam
0607197- 9 November, 2015

1. According to Hetherington, what is the reason why so many epistemologists reject thesis (T)?
Edmund Gettier, threw a curveball at the then epistemological notion of knowledge being a justified true belief. With his examples, or famously known as Gettier cases, he in fact showed that a belief could be true and justified by evidence, without it necessarily being knowledge. The epistemological studies, shaken by this curvature, have since then been rather linear in their acceptance of this claim. According to Hetherington, most epistemologists reject the thesis (T), because it feels counter-intuitive to consider something knowledge which has been arrived upon through luck/chance.
Why, according to Hetherington, is this reason unconvincing?
Stephen Hetherington is questioning the ease with which epistemologists have rejected the tri-partite division of knowledge. He argues that if the determination of knowledge is based on the possibility of counterfactual situations, then the epistemologist are committing an epistemic counterfactuals fallacy. It is redundant to say that the possibility of S not knowing p in another world(s) is proof of S actually lacking knowledge p. Hetherington is claiming that the subject S in the present context has knowledge, irrespective of what could have been.
The principle that “Other things being equal, one knows that p only if it is not true that one might easily not have known that p.”, for Hetherington, does not allow for knowledge to be present by happenstance, and concurrently elevates knowledge to a stature of infallibility. To be able to ‘solve’ the Gettier problem, one needs to accept that knowledge is fallible. He is attempting to negotiate for an epistemic “in-betweeness” to explain how the subject can have knowledge p in a Gettier case. Hetherington believes that the epistemologists have made the mistake of accepting the standard interpretation of the Gettier cases as being mandatory as opposed to an interpretation. (201
He posits that the subject(s) are indicating the presence of knowledge because of what is as opposed to what could have been. In the Fake Barn Case, for example, there are several alternatives to how Henry could have been deceived if he had continued his drive by identifying a fake barn as real one. But this possibility/hypothesis of situation where he would have been deceived should not take away from the fact that in the present, Henry has not been deceived and has perceived a real barn to be a barn. The “epistemic subject who has not done X (e.g., who has not been misled by a fake barn) need not lack a specific piece of knowledge just because he would lack it if he were to do X.” The use of counterfactuals to establish a lack of knowledge, are rather poor reasons to deny the existence of knowledge in the problematic cases. He is proposing a degree of knowledge by claiming that even when the subject knows p even while almost not doing so. (190