One thing about the swamping problem: whatever you may think of the thesis that knowledge is merely true belief, I don't think that anyone could have come up with the problem unless they had been focused very critically on the function of justification, someone who was skeptical about regarding justification as necessary for knowledge. And I think that perverse as the position was, it has turned out to be of use to the profession!
That is what I do, I feel, better than anyone working, more or less. I'm not necessarily smarter than the average analytic epistemologist, and i do make mistakes. But I focus on counter-consensus moves kind of automatically. So, if you want to remake part of a discipline or a topic, try this: what are the first few ground-clearing intuitions/assumptions that make everything else possible? These are often inadequately or not even argued for, and often I find when I think about it a little, I don't think they're obvious or even true at all.
That's how I did the swamping problem in Cargile's seminar at UVA, probably '87. I was probing for the assumption that would give a lever (and show my cleverness and profundity, etc). So we did Alvin Goldman's reliabilism, and something just seemed sort of off to me, like that's really just redundant: knowledge is a true belief that is reached by a reliable method for reaching...true belief. Well, what are we after then? What's our goal? Obviously or explicitly just true belief, so the method is merely instrumental to the real admitted telos. Then I started trying to generalize it and that's how I found all those quotes from Bonjour, Moser, Armstrong that Zagzebski and Jones recycled. Without that sort of reasoning, or to save some pet version of justification, no one would ever have generated the swamping problem.
Also I would say you better get out of a narrow frame. Actually, what was driving me was Kierkegaard; I thought that analytic epistemology just deployed definitionally a cult of reason that was really impoverishing and unrealistic. That's why I wanted to delete the justification condition in the first place. No one conducts their epistemic lives in the way the analytic trad suggests we all ought to; and anyone who did would just be gross and inhuman. So that's what made me probe for weaknesses. Ask any of these other alleged originators how and why they thought of this...
So a more recent version of this move is that I assert that free will is not required for moral responsibility. I submitted it here and there with no luck; still getting the 'that's ridiculous' response. But it will be in the ethics chapter of Entanglements. If nothing else, it will really press people in the free will problem to think hard about the initial assumptions. I think it could make a positive difference and I think again that it will be vindicated.
