A Christmas Gettier Problem

Recently, I was reflecting on an epistemically abnormal situation I was in last Christmas.

My mum and I had both been enjoying a scrabble-like word game called Bananagrams, and had independently recognised its strong qualifications as a Christmas gift. We had both purchased a copy of the game, hers intended for my auntie and mine intended for her as we didn't have a copy at home.

Christmas was inching ever closer and neither of our copies had arrived. Then, strangely, the company she had bought her gift from delivered not one but two copies of the game. The few remaining days till Christmas passed and my package never came. On account of her excess of fortune and my lack of it, we decided to take both copies to our family Christmas that year, where we could pass off the extra as my gift to her.

This is where the main event happens. After a characteristically enormous lunch (with an unprecedented number of vegan options - go family), mum asked if some other relatives would be interested in a game of Bananagrams. One auntie enquired about the game's rules, to which my mum offered an explanation, adding our pre-devised white lie about me having bought it for her. This didn't seem that interesting an utterance until a month or so later when, having thought about the sheer unlikelihood of my parcel getting misplaced just as hers duplicated, I re-checked my email. Lo and behold, my parcel had in fact been delivered and we had just managed to convince ourselves otherwise.

What, then, can we say about my mum's statement on the gift having been for her?

In one sense, she was inaccurately reporting her internally-held beliefs. In another she was, although unknowingly, reporting the truth.

I don't pretend to wield the sword of conceptual analysis with enough mastery to tackle a problem like this, but I do claim my place in the long history of Gettier-like cases.