Knowledge and Belief

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Knowledge and Belief

The knowledge being talked about in the question is propositional

knowledge. An example of prepositional knowledge is; “my name is

Bert” justified true belief, is a proposition that someone feels is

correct and for which they have a cogent argument for believing so and

which is in fact true. But is knowledge equivalent to justified true

belief? For knowledge to be equivalent to justified true belief, it

follows that justified true belief is necessary and sufficient for

knowledge.

Belief is necessary for knowledge, since without belief you would be

unable to maintain that you knew a certain proposition. For example

you may say that you know that you are holding a pen in your hand but

unless you believed you were holding a pen in your hand you couldn’t

know that.

Some level of justification is also necessary for knowledge, since to

feel that you know something you must have some cogent argument to

allow yourself to believe it. For example “I can see water hitting

the window, so it must be raining”.

Truth is also necessary for knowledge since if something is not true

it follows that it cannot be held to be knowledge. For example a

psychic who predicts that a card picked from a pack will be a six of

hearts, even though he has got the card right for the last 100 times

cannot be said to know the card will be a six of hearts until it is

picked from the pack. So all three are necessary for knowledge an

example would be “I know it is raining since water is falling from the

clouds above my head”.

The only question left is; are these three criteria sufficient? It

would seem that they are, however it is possible to think of

situations where a true belief can be based on a falsehood. These

cases are known as Gettier cases an example is as follows; imagine a

man is sleeping under a tree which has leaves thick enough to stop any

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