Knowledge As Justified True Belief
Many or most analytic philosophers would wish to be able to hold to what is known as the JTB account of knowledge: the claim that knowledge can be conceptually analyzed as justified true belief — which is to say that the meaning of sentences such as "Smith knows that it rained today" can be given with the following set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:
- A subject S knows that a proposition P is true if and only if:
-
- P is true
- S believes that P is true, and
- S is justified in believing that P is true
Read more about this topic: Gettier Problem
Famous quotes containing the words knowledge, justified, true and/or belief:
“The pathetic thing about the great wellintentioned mass of college and highschool students is that they have been so badly educated they have no knowledge or understanding of the complications of the world we live in and they have been so conditioned and prejudiced by generations of ill-taught teachers that they refuse to see a fact when they are confronted with one.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with ‘the world’; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous. Rather—speaking loosely and without trying to answer either Pilate’s question or Tarski’s—a version is to be taken to be true when it offends no unyielding beliefs and none of its own precepts.”
—Nelson Goodman (b. 1906)
“Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)