Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Essay - 2,695 words

Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? It is quite often said that Pontius Pilate, the man who asked: what is truth, never stayed for an answer. This is from the mere reason that if he would have stayed he would have been waiting until this very day. The truth is constructed of many parts of our existence including language, conscience, knowledge and belief and a complete answer for his question would be far too complicated. In todays society most of these factors are often ignored and the definitions of truth and belief are taken far too simply than they really are. James Williams, who along with Charles Pierce developed pragmatism, claimed Belief is what we accept as truth. Though I agree with this statement I feel that it is incomplete and too extreme. The acceptance of truth does not necessarily mean without justification.


In order to understand what the acceptance of truth means we first must look at the definition of truth. Today truth is mostly regarded to as a statement which accurately tells a state of affairs. A state of affairs is what we accept or define as fact. The Microsoft Bookshelf definition is Consistent with fact or reality; not false or erroneous. When we take a closer look at the word consistent we find that things are not necessarily true or false though. It is referring to how close the statement is to the fact.


Then we must consider how close the language, state of mind, is to the universal fact, state of affairs. For example the statement snow is white will most likely be accepted as the truth. But judging by this definition the statement is only as true as the word snow describes the natural phenomena snow, and the word white describes the actual color white. We notice that language creates a marginal error. A different view is then provided by the pragmatism theories which claim that the truth is a claim providing with a solution to a problem or prove itself to be good in the way of belief (James Williams). Along with its remark on the characteristics of different beliefs: different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise (Charles Pierce) we conclude that a belief is a truth that we are willing to act upon. There are two types of beliefs: true belief, and justified true belief.


A true belief is the belief that J. Williams is referring to. This is when without any examination we give our selves to a certain statement, opinion or rule and recognize it as the truth even though we do not know why or how the statement represents the truth. At this time we allow it to become a fact and since it is now a fact it must be the truth. For example one might say the table is green. If a person was to believe that without looking for the green table or asking: Which table? Where is the table? he would believe it without a proper justification. The most common type of true belief or unjustified belief is a religion.


The strength of religious belief is measured by how unjustifiable it is. The reason it is so difficult for people to relate themselves to a religion is because they are unable to prove that what the religion claims is true. Religious people accept statement such is God is omnipotent there is hell there is heaven to be true and so they believe in them. Many philosophers have often construed the problems of justification as though they were problems regarding the knowledge possessed by a social group; and it does of course make absolutely good sense to ask what statements we are justified in believing, and why we are justified in believing them. But such a question cannot be answered without first answering a more fundamental, egocentric question: Why am I, at the present moment justified in believing some statements and not justified in believing other statements? For the most part people believe in statements as a response to societal pressures and for personal content. Society needs to be comforted by having strong beliefs, which can reduce the stresses of uncertainty.


Hence in order to actually believe and justify knowledge, one must have some form of this faith. Edmund L. Gettier, American philosopher, is famous for his theory regarding the knowledge as justified true belief. A very illustrious view about knowledge is that it involves belief and truth; that is, a person, S, knows that p only if it is true that p and S believes that p. Nevertheless, believing truly that p is not generally satisfactory for knowing that p: knowledge evidently requires something more. A natural thought is that the omitted ingredient is justification.


Suppose, for instance, that someone, S, is of the opinion, i.e. is sure, that Robert Maxwell is not dead, and assume, for the sake of argument, that it is in fact true that he is not deadthat he is alive and living well in Brazil, say. Would we be obligated to maintain that S knows that Robert Maxwell is not dead? The answer is surely not. The intuition is that S does not know this fact except she has proof which justifies or guarantees her belief. So knowledge would seem to involve justification as well as truth and belief. On what has become to be known as the conventional view of knowledge, supposedly originating in Platos Thaeatetus, truth, belief and justification are not only required for knowledge, they are also mutually sufficient. According to the Justified True Belief theory (JTB), S knows that p if and only if, the following conditions are maintained: it is true that p S believes that p S is justified in believing that p Edmund Gettier does not argue that the conditions mentioned above are necessary to maintain knowledge.


His view regarding this theory is that the conditions are not mutually sufficient, meaning that S and p can be met even though S does not know p. Gettier makes two important assumptions about the related notion of justification (and, in the light of it, they seem completely logical). The first is that it is allowed for a person to be justified in believing something that appears to be false. [Note: If this were impossible, condition (1) in the Justified True Belief theory would be excessive: the truth of (3) would warrant the truth of (1).]] The second supposition is the rightness of the following principle: If (a) S is justified in believing a suggestion r, and (b) r requires a proposition, p, and (c) S believes that p in virtue of having deduced it from r, then S is justified in believing that p. This can be referred to as the transmission principle, because it transmits the justifiability of a proposal against its (deduced) logical consequences. Gettier presents several examples which allegedly challenge this account of knowledge and justification. These counterexamples have the same organization: they both have S believing a true proposition, p, in virtue of having deduced p from another of her beliefs, r, which she is justified in believing, but which appears to be false.


It is easy to test that the two suppositions Gettier makes tolerate such a possibility. Under the transmission principle, S would be justified in believing that p. But then we would have a setting in which: p is true, S believes that p, and S is justified in believing that p. By the JTB view of knowledge, S would thus know that p. Nonetheless, in such situation it is clear that S does not know that p, since she has, so to speak, faltered across that belief (the belief that p) accidentally. Therefore, justified true belief does not need to be knowledge.


However, The examples presented by Gettier are somewhat dull, this is why the Gettier-type example by Keith Lehrer is presented: A colleague in Ss office, Mr. Perkins, has given S proof which justifies her ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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