Quick Test (Whiteboards) What is the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition? Can you give an example of each? What are generally considered to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge (Tripartite view)? Can you give an example of something we would say we know?

Key Questions / Lesson Objective: Discuss what is meant by justification, truth and belief. Explain why each of these is considered to be necessary.

Justified True Belief - Discussion We can raise two kinds of objection to the tripartite definition of knowledge by searching for counterexamples. The method of finding counterexamples is important in philosophy. If a theory makes a general claim, such as ‘all propositional knowledge is justified true belief’, we only need to find a single instance in which this claim is false to show that something is wrong with the theory. (Of course, we then have to find out what is wrong with it.) The two potential objections to the tripartite view are: Either one or more of the conditions are not necessary for knowledge. The conditions together are not sufficient for knowledge.

Justified True Belief – All Necessary? Do you think it is correct to say that all 3 conditions are necessary and sufficient for us to have knowledge? Could we have less than the three and still have knowledge (are any of them not actually necessary)?

Is justification necessary for knowledge? Jill has a rare gift. If you give her any date in the future, say 15th March 2123 she is able to tell you what day of the week this will be (for example, a Monday). She is unable to say how she does this, though she is incredibly accurate; 15th March 2123 will indeed be a Monday. Would you say that Jill knows this? Does it meet the knowledge criteria?

Why is justification necessary for knowledge? What would happen without justification? The difficulty with a lack of justification is twofold: People may have true beliefs without having any evidence or justification for their beliefs. They can be formed or held on irrational grounds. For example: Suppose someone on a jury thinks that the person on trial is guilty just from the way they dress. Their belief, that the person is guilty, might be true; but would we count this as knowledge? Would we be worried if they used this as justification for their guilty sentence? Do they have knowledge? Why / Why not?

Why is justification necessary for knowledge? What would happen without justification? Secondly true beliefs could just be lucky: Consider the dog racing punter who optimistically and groundlessly believes that the dog in trap 6 will win the race. Perhaps the punter just feels that 6 is his ‘lucky number’. Such a feeling is not evidence for the dog’s form or its potential performance. The dog wins. Did he have knowledge? If not, why not? In both examples, it is counter-intuitive to say that the belief counts as knowledge, because the person has no reason, no evidence, no justification, for their belief. Knowledge, then, needs some kind of support, some reason for thinking that the proposition believed is true. This is what is meant by saying that knowledge needs to be justified. NOTE: What counts as strong enough for justification is a controversial topic, but not one we’ll be covering in depth here.

Quick Check - Whiteboard Why is justification generally thought to be needed for knowledge? What would we have without justification?

Is truth necessary for knowledge? Does a fact need to be true in order for you to say you know it? The truth condition is fairly uncontroversial when it comes to why it’s required. It’s generally just accepted that if you know something, it must be true. It must match up with some independent, objective standard. But exactly what counts as truth is a slightly more interesting question. Can you think of any situations when we’d want to say someone knew something, but it turned out it wasn’t true?

Knowledge in the past / future? There are many instances in the past of things we thought we knew that later turned out to be / based on false information: The earth being flat. Newtonian physics being 100% correct. The earth being the centre of the universe. Were we right to say we knew these things? What about the truth condition? Note: One response is to say that the claims of Newtonian physics, and other scientific knowledge (but not outright false-hoods like flat-earth) like this is roughly true, or ‘true enough’ in the context of everyday life. So rather than saying we don’t know them, we can say that we do know them, roughly speaking. But is this really a good, fulfilling answer?

Knowledge in the past / future? Similarly, there are many examples of things we just take for knowledge, despite not strictly being true yet. Usually statements about the future. When I drop the pen it will fall to the ground. The sun will rise tomorrow. You will go to the study hall if you don’t do your homework. Would we call these things knowledge? What about the truth condition?

Possibilities for Truth To explain this discrepancy some philosophers have examined and discussed exactly what we mean by the term ‘truth’ arguing that it isn’t as cut and dry as we first think. For our purposes we’re interested in two possible schools of thought: Correspondence Theory: One of the most popular, intuitive and traditional views of truth is that it consists of a correspondence between a belief / proposition and the relevant fact about the world (i.e. it matches up with the way the world is). According to this theory, a claim is true if what it claims is actually the case. If there is no fact corresponding with the belief, then the statement is not true. If this is accepted then all of the previous examples mentioned would not be counted as truth, and by extension not knowledge.

Possibilities for Truth To explain this discrepancy some philosophers have examined and discussed exactly what we mean by the term ‘truth’ arguing that it isn’t as cut and dry as we first think. For our purposes we’re interested in two possible schools of thought: Consider our understanding of science, most scientists would be quick to accept that we may be missing fundamental truths about the universe that would make our current understanding wrong. Does this mean we don’t have any knowledge? Or would it be better to say we have knowledge because the current scientific understanding fits into a coherent, logical view of the universe, even if some of this understanding later turns out to be false? Coherence Theory: The coherence theory argues that truth is part of a web of beliefs held by a society to be true. This web of beliefs is internally coherent, supporting one another. So in the past for example, the web of beliefs would have included the idea that the earth is flat and the centre of the universe. Since these beliefs fit with the rest of the beliefs that were held by society at the time, some based on evidence, they could be considered true and thus knowledge.

Truth As External External Truth: Regardless of which approach you take it’s important to note that one cannot establish from internal criteria alone whether something is true, it must relate to something external to the thinker. Either our belief must correspond to reality or cohere with a set of beliefs society holds about reality – no matter which view you support we cannot discover truth by looking closely at our own ideas. Both approaches however would agree that no matter how much justification you have, or how much you believe something, without truth you do not have knowledge. Thus it is a necessary condition.

Quick Check Outline an example showing when we might say we have knowledge, despite not having truth (past or future beliefs). What approaches to truth have people taken to deal with this issue? How would they answer it? What does it mean to say that truth is an external criterion?

Is belief necessary for knowledge? Example: Suppose John is sitting an exam, but he’s very nervous and has no confidence in his answers. Suppose when answering ‘Which philosopher wrote the Meditations?’, he writes ‘Descartes’. He’s right, and the answer isn’t a lucky guess – he has remembered what he learned, he is just unconfident in himself and did not believe he knew the correct answer. Do you think John has knowledge? Why?

Belief Vs Knowledge 1 There are two main objections to the idea that belief is necessary for knowledge. The weaker objection is that sometimes it is possible to know something without believing it (as in the example previously mentioned). We can defend the tripartite view here in one of two ways: Either John doesn’t know the answer, e.g. because he can’t produce a justification for giving that answer. Or we can say that John does believe that the answer is ‘Descartes’, although this belief is unconscious or ‘tacit’. This unconscious / tacit belief amounts to knowledge. Either way JTB stands.

Belief Vs Knowledge 2 The stronger objection comes from Timothy Williamson who argues that knowledge is not a form of belief, but an entirely different mental state (Knowledge and Its Limits). Either you believe something or you know it; but you don’t know something by believing it. His reasoning for this stretches back to Plato and is deceptively simple: You can only know that p if p is true (i.e. knowledge cannot be false). Beliefs, by contrast, are mental states that can be true or false – you can have a belief that is entirely wrong and it would not change the fact it is still a belief. Since knowledge and belief have different characteristics (i.e. one is infallible the other is fallible) they must be different ways of apprehending the world.

Belief Vs Knowledge 2 We might support the view that knowledge and belief are fundamentally different by pointing out that people often speak as if they are. When a tennis player says “I don’t believe I will win, I know I will” does this not imply that to come to know something is to cease believing it? The tripartite definition explains this difference by saying that knowledge is belief with additional conditions (truth, justification). But every attempt to spell out the conditions has met objections. This is a reason to think that knowledge is not a kind of belief at all. Perhaps knowledge is unanalysable – there are no necessary and sufficient conditions that accurately describe what knowledge is. (If some analysis of knowledge is convincing, this theory loses much of its motivation.)

Belief Vs Knowledge Both of these objections argue against belief being a necessary condition of having knowledge, either you can have knowledge without belief (in the case of the exam question / journey) or belief is not the same as knowledge (from Plato and Williamson). These objections however don’t apply to someone making the claim that they have knowledge. It makes no sense to say “I know Paris is the capital of France but I do not believe it”. Someone claiming knowledge of a fact would presumably always also believe that fact. No matter which stance you support it’s worth remembering the general consensus in philosophy is that belief is required for knowledge. It is a necessary condition. If a person does not believe a fact, they cannot know it.

Quick Check Why might some people argue that you can know something without believing it? Why might some people argue that belief and knowledge are different things? Why does claiming you have knowledge require belief?

What have we covered this lesson? What can we say about each condition of knowledge?

Justified True Belief - Discussion We can raise two kinds of objection to the tripartite definition of knowledge by searching for counterexamples. The method of finding counterexamples is important in philosophy. If a theory makes a general claim, such as ‘all propositional knowledge is justified true belief’, we only need to find a single instance in which this claim is false to show that something is wrong with the theory. (Of course, we then have to find out what is wrong with it.) The two potential objections to the tripartite view are: Either one or more of the conditions are not necessary for knowledge. The conditions together are not sufficient for knowledge.

Homework We said earlier that the JTB (tripartite) view of knowledge held fairly strongly until the 20th Century. This is because in the 1960’s a seminal philosophy paper was written by a man called Edmund Gettier that called into question the tripartite view of knowledge and seriously undermined it’s strength. Gettier used a series of counter-examples (or thought experiments) to show why he thought that the JTB definition was not sufficient (i.e. not enough) for knowledge. These became known as Gettier Problems. Task: Identify and outline 1 Gettier (or Gettier style) counter-example / problem and explain clearly why it shows that justified true belief is not enough for knowledge. Extension: Can you think of any replies to Gettier, either in a way that saves the JTB definition, or by redefining knowledge to deal with his counter-examples.

What was our key question? How well can you answer it? How could you expand on your answer? How good is your partner’s answer? What can you do outside of lesson to improve your answer?