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:
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- 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 animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“... like anyone else who does not have a soul, you cannot stand anyone who has too much of one. Too much soul! That is troublesome, is it not? So, it is called a sickness: the eggheads are justified and happy.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.””
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief we are inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)