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Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? It is quite often said that Pontius Pilate, the man who asked: what is truth, never stayed for an answer. This is from the mere reason that if he would have stayed he would have been waiting until this very day. The truth is constructed of many parts of our existence including language, conscience, knowledge and belief and a complete answer for his question would be far too complicated. In todays society most of these factors are often ignored and the definitions of truth and belief are taken far too simply than they really are. James Williams, who along with Charles Pierce developed pragmatism, claimed Belief is what we accept as truth.
Though I agree with this statement I feel that it is incomplete and too extreme. The acceptance of truth does not necessarily mean without justification. In order to understand what the acceptance of truth means we first must look at the definition of truth. Today truth is mostly regarded to as a statement which accurately tells a state of affairs.
A state of affairs is what we accept or define as fact. The Microsoft Bookshelf definition is Consistent with fact or reality; not false or erroneous. When we take a closer look at the word consistent we find that things are not necessarily true or false though. It is referring to how close the statement is to the fact. Then we must consider how close the language, state of mind, is to the universal fact, state of affairs. For example the statement snow is white will most likely be accepted as the truth.
But judging by this definition the statement is only as true as the word snow describes the natural phenomena snow, and the word white describes the actual color white. We notice that language creates a marginal error. A different view is then provided by the pragmatism theories which claim that the truth is a claim providing with a solution to a problem or prove itself to be good in the way of belief (James Williams). Along with its remark on the characteristics of different beliefs: different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise (Charles Pierce) we conclude that a belief is a truth that we are willing to act upon. There are two types of beliefs: true belief, and justified true belief.
A true belief is the belief that J. Williams is referring to. This is when without any examination we give our selves to a certain statement, opinion or rule and recognize it as the truth even though we do not know why or how the statement represents the truth. At this time we allow it to become a fact and since it is now a fact it must be the truth. For example one might say the table is green.
If a person was to believe that without looking for the green table or asking: Which table? Where is the table? he would believe it without a proper justification. The most common type of true belief or unjustified belief is a religion.
The strength of religious belief is measured by how unjustifiable it is. The reason it is so difficult for people to relate themselves to a religion is because they are unable to prove that what the religion claims is true. Religious people accept statement such is God is omnipotent there is hell there is heaven to be true and so they believe in them. Many philosophers have often construed the problems of justification as though they were problems regarding the knowledge possessed by a social group; and it does of course make absolutely good sense to ask what statements we are justified in believing, and why we are justified in believing them. But such a question cannot be answered without first answering a more fundamental, egocentric question: Why am I, at the present moment justified in believing some statements and not justified in believing other statements?
For the most part people believe in statements as a response to societal pressures and for personal content. Society needs to be comforted by having strong beliefs, which can reduce the stresses of uncertainty. Hence in order to actually believe and justify knowledge, one must have some form of this faith. Edmund L. Gettier, American philosopher, is famous for his theory regarding the knowledge as justified true belief. A very illustrious view about knowledge is that it involves belief and truth; that is, a person, S, knows that p only if it is true that p and S believes that p.
Nevertheless, believing truly that p is not generally satisfactory for knowing that p: knowledge evidently requires something more. A natural thought is that the omitted ingredient is justification. Suppose, for instance, that someone, S, is of the opinion, i. e. is sure, that Robert Maxwell is not dead, and assume, for the sake of argument, that it is in fact true that he is not dead that he is alive and living well in Brazil, say. Would we be obligated to maintain that S knows that Robert Maxwell is not dead?
The answer is surely not. The intuition is that S does not know this fact except she has proof which justifies or guarantees her belief. So knowledge would seem to involve justification as well as truth and belief. On what has become to be known as the conventional view of knowledge, supposedly originating in Plato's Thaeatetus, truth, belief and justification are not only required for knowledge, they are also mutually sufficient. According to the Justified True Belief theory (JTB), S knows that p if and only if, the following conditions are maintained: it is true that p S believes that p S is justified in believing that p Edmund Gettier does not argue that the conditions mentioned above are necessary to maintain knowledge. His view regarding this theory is that the conditions are not mutually sufficient, meaning that S and p can be met even though S does not know p.
Gettier makes two important assumptions about the related notion of justification (and, in the light of it, they seem completely logical). The first is that it is allowed for a person to be justified in believing something that appears to be false. [Note: If this were impossible, condition (1) in the Justified True Belief theory would be excessive: the truth of (3) would warrant the truth of (1). ]] The second supposition is the rightness of the following principle: If (a) S is justified in believing a suggestion r, and (b) r requires a proposition, p, and (c) S believes that p in virtue of having deduced it from r, then S is justified in believing that p. This can be referred to as the transmission principle, because it transmits the justifiability of a proposal against its (deduced) logical consequences. Gettier presents several examples which allegedly challenge this account of knowledge and justification. These counterexamples have the same organization: they both have S believing a true proposition, p, in virtue of having deduced p from another of her beliefs, r, which she is justified in believing, but which appears to be false. It is easy to test that the two suppositions Gettier makes tolerate such a possibility.
Under the transmission principle, S would be justified in believing that p. But then we would have a setting in which: p is true, S believes that p, and S is justified in believing that p. By the JTB view of knowledge, S would thus know that p. Nonetheless, in such situation it is clear that S does not know that p, since she has, so to speak, faltered across that belief (the belief that p) accidentally. Therefore, justified true belief does not need to be knowledge. However, The examples presented by Gettier are somewhat dull, this is why the Gettier-type example by Keith Lehrer is presented: A colleague in Ss office, Mr.
Perkins, has given S proof which justifies her in believing that Mr. Perkins, who is now in this office, owns a Mustang ( = r), from which S (properly) deduces that somebody in this office owns a Mustang ( = p). But, unsuspected by S, Mr. Perkins has been pretending and p is only true because another person in the office, Mr. Sherman, owns a Mustang.
Gettier's assumptions regarding justification may be surely reconsidered. Could S in the example presented above really be justified believing that Perkins owns a Mustang if Perkins in fact does not? Well, suppose that S has seen Perkins driving to work in a Mustang on a number of occurrences; has seen it parked outside Perkins house whenever she has gone there for lunch; has heard Perkins swank about owning a Mustang; has seen a bill of sale for it made out to Perkins, etc. Surely, in these conditions S would be justified in believing that Perkins owns a Mustang what more could be necessary? So, even if the facts are that Perkins has just hired the Mustang on the days S has seen it, may be to astound her, and has faked the bill of sale, etc. , the instinct is that Ss belief that Perkins owns a Mustang is still justified (guaranteed) in the light of what she has seen and heard. Gettier's first assumption must be taken for granted.
As for the transmission principle, the problem about it is that most of the knowledge about the world appears to be inferential; and the more complex beliefs people have (e. g. scientific laws) seem most certainly to be based on presumption from more basic beliefs (perceptual beliefs, for instance). It is difficult to see how it is possible to defend these inferences if the transmissibility of justification can be rejected. Provided that the transmission principle is accepted, Gettiertype counterexamples can stand. A justified true belief is the one where we will use our common sense and available resources to prove the statement or rule at hand.
It is also possible to reach the belief without intending to. A science experiment with a 100 % accuracy level will lead us to see that it is true that the gravitational acceleration of the earth is 9. 81 m / s 2, or that work is the force used multiplied by the distance applied, and that force is the acceleration multiplied by the mass of an object. Thus we reach a conclusion that we establish based on the facts yield by the experiment. And so we take these facts as the truth which causes us to believe in it and make it a rule. An example of the difference between the two is shown in the anonymous quote: Tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the universe and hell believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and hell have to touch to be sure.
This is a good example of the nature of man with relationship to the two facts. There are several reasons for this easy acceptance. The very first one is the fact that unless the man is a very intelligent astronomer he will have no way of testing the number of stars in the universe. In the bench situation the man will simply have to touch the bench and he will find out the truth. Second one is the lack of potential benefit that exists from the man thinking there are the wrong number of stars in the universe or a wet paint on a bench.
In other words there is no reason to lie to the man (finding out about the number of stars in the universe) and the person informing (of the number of stars in the universe) would not benefit from misinforming the other man. Though if we look at the bench situation a person might choose to lie about the paint job so the man will not sit in that bench for one reason or another. Last one is the role that the information takes in our life. It does not really matter, to the average man, whether there are 300 billion stars or 30 billion stars. On the other hand it makes a big difference whether there is really paint on the bench or not. It will cause an immediate change in action.
A portrayal of the documentation of history epitomizes the uncertainties in faith and knowledge. When a historian or any human being for that matter records a situation or an event, he must include his personal opinion. Whether these opinions are subtle or quite overt, this person is never the less personalizing his facts. Though events have indeed taken place in the past, when a historian writes about such an event he will always add personal view to the text.
He will judge what is important and what should be left out. By simply emphasizing that a fact is important he is therefore inserting an opinion. As one witnesses some kind of data, a type of subconscious analysis is almost instantly being activated. At the very instant a person begins to write 'history', he is using personal judgments and reflections. Without such judgment, how could anything be recorded? It is virtually impossible to do so.
All humans are unique individuals, who have certain perspectives and beliefs. Thus, when an individual is recording history, interpretation leaves room for opinionated facts. Actions and sources seen by a single historian could very well be totally different from the perception of a fellow historian. Thus who and what does a knowledge seeker believe? Since there is not one universal portrayal of history, there will always be an uncertainty as to what to consider to be knowledgeable and what to consider to be useless. The basic duty of a historian is to foretell the mysteries of the past occurrences.
This task is usually performed through the method of storytelling. Using imagery, categorization, and reasoning abilities, a historian is indeed portraying elements of writing an enhanced historical portrayal. The problem with the statement is that sometimes, or rather the vast majority of times, we turn justified true beliefs into true beliefs by converting them into axioms. Once we have proven something there is no need to prove it again and we use the part which was proven before to further extend our study and the inquisition of knowledge. If every time we would want to calculate the work done on an object we would like it to be a justified true belief we would also have to restate and prove how force is calculated and how the acceleration due to gravity is calculated. This would make the process much longer and would slow down our development greatly.
And so it necessary to accept things as the truth without proving them at every single moment this, however, does not mean that the belief is an unjustified belief. A more appropriate statement would be the one provided by Schiller who claims belief to be A spiritual attitude of welcome towards what we take to be a truth. The difference lies in distinguishing between accepting something as true and taking something as true. Accepting means without proper proof while take refers to both proven and unproven truths. As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing itso are you to accept my words after examining them and not merely out of regard for me. (Buddha) Word count: 2570 Bibliography: Edmund L. Gettier: Is justified true belief knowledge? , originally in Analysis 1963, reprinted in Sosa and Kim, eds. , Epistemology: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell 2000).
Keith Lehrer, Knowledge, Chapter 1. George Pappas and M. Swain: Essays on Knowledge and Justification, Cornell UP 1978. Robert Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification, Oxford UP, chapters 1 and 2. Ernest Sosa, "The analysis of 'knowledge that P'", Analysis 1964, reprinted in his Knowledge in Perspective, Cambridge UP. Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford UP.
John L. Pollock, Contemporary There of Knowledge, Chapter 1. Jonathan Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology, Chapters 1 and 2. James, William, Edward Myers (ed. ) William James: Writings 1878 - 1899: Psychology, Briefer Course / The Will to Believe. Library of America, June 1992.
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