This blog post is part of the ‘Epistemology’ series. In this series I hope to explain, in layman’s terms, the fundamentals of this fascinating subject for people who may not have encountered it before (particularly my fellow freethinkers in Kampala). As people who pride themselves as being skeptics and critical thinkers, its highly important that we develop a good understanding of epistemology.
In Part 1, we looked at how it comes to be that knowledge is defined as ‘justified true belief’. This deconstruction is known as the tripartite definition of knowledge – and it is used as a working model for knowledge by philosophers. According to this analysis, the three conditions — truth, belief, and justification — are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for knowledge.
This approach to understanding knowledge was presented with a potentially devastating problem from philosopher Edmund Gettier in 1963. In a paper titled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" he presented some counter-examples that showed how the tripartite model, fails, in some instances, to establish knowledge. Here is one of the hypothetical cases he presented:
Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
(d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:
(e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not KNOW that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.
Put simply: Smith has applied for a job, but has very good reason to believe that Jones will get the job (Smith has been told by the company president that Jones will win the job) . He also has justified belief that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket (Smith had earlier seen Jones with 10 coins in his pocket). He therefore concludes that…
“the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket.”
But it so happens that in fact Jones does not get the job. Smith does. However, Smith, unknowingly and by sheer chance, ALSO had 10 coins in his pocket. So, indeed, the belief that…
“the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket”
…was justified, and true. But then this can’t really count as knowledge on Smith’s part – for he was not aware that he’d get the job, and neither was he initially aware that he too had 10 coins in his pocket. It was by accident/luck that his justified belief coincided with the truth.
It would thus appear that there is problem with the notion of knowledge being defined as justified true belief, seeing as its possible to have a justified true belief that is still not knowledge.
Several proposals have been offered by various philosophers as a solution to Gettier’s problem:
1. Eliminating Luck Proposal:
One way to proceed in trying to address the problem posed by Gettier is by taking another look at the tripartite structure of knowledge, which takes the following form:
S (Somebody) knows that P (Proposition) if…
S believes P
S’s b