The Gettier Problem: A Marathon

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Philosophy covers a wide range of fundamental problems where it branches out to areas such as language, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, or epistemology – the theory of knowledge. For years, philosophers have analyzed and questions what knowledge is, its value, sources, structure, and whether we know anything at all. Epistemology questions what knowledge is and how we as humans can acquire it – which involves much debate. Though our understanding of knowledge is ambiguous, we do know that knowledge is justified, true belief.

There have been attempts to answer the queries through the Justified-True-Belief Account of Knowledge (JTB), known to have been credited by Plato. According to the theory, knowledge is explained in some manner or way, a proposition known can’t be false, and the proposition must be accepted. The justified-true-belief account of knowledge, though, is considered to be a definition of knowledge where S, a person, knows that P, a proposition, if and only if: P is true, S believes that P is true, and S is justified in believing that P is true. However, this theory of knowledge challenges our understanding of propositional knowledge – like when people once thought they knew that the earth was flat; one could not know what was flat, only think that one knows it. The truth condition of the JTB of knowledge states that if you know that P, then P is true (Powerpoint, Lecture 4). Though P can be a claim that something else is false. Thus, the Gettier problems. In Edmund L. Gettier’s short article, “Is justified true belief knowledge?” he discusses the question about whether or not a piece of information with a faulty premise is knowledge. This innovative philosophical idea that Gettier wrote about, le...

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...rly refutes the tradition definition of knowledge. As earlier stated, many attempts have been made to repair or replace the definition of knowledge; hence the theories such as, the Casual Theory, to use as a solution to an ambiguous problem. However, there is still no positive and certain solution to the Gettier problem as effective as his challenge may be in order to define knowledge.

Works Cited

Gettier, Edmund L. "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" EEE. N.p., n.d. Web.

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Goldman, Alvin I. "A Casual Theory of Knowing." EEE. N.p., n.d. Web. .

Powerpoint.

Powerpoint

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