Philosophy deals with questions about reality, human nature, morality, religious matters, and knowledge, to name just a few examples. Epistemology, the subject matter of this section, is the branch of philosophy that deals with the philosophical questions about knowledge. Epistemology is concerned with questions about how we know, what the criteria for knowledge are, whether our perceptions of the world line up with the world outside our minds, and the proper way to formulate theories. Over the course of this discussion we will not deal with every epistemological question. But we will deal with most of the important issues within this field of philosophy. For example, we consider the relationship between faith and reason, faith and modern science, skepticism, intellectual virtues, the possibility of gaining knowledge of God through nature (natural revelation and natural theology), and questions about truth, knowledge, and justification.
In this particular chapter we deal with philosophical questions about truth, knowledge, and justification. To be more specific, we will explore different theories about the nature of truth. What does it mean to say that some statement is true? To answer this question, we will consider three different theories of truth. After this, we will consider the nature of knowledge and whether we have an adequate set of criteria to determine when a person has it. As we will see, this amounts to answering the question of what exactly “knowing” is.
Discussions about truth arise within any number of disciplines. Scientists, for example, make claims about the world and develop theories that they hold to be true. Likewise, theologians set forth ideas and make truth claims. The same could be said for historians, psychologists, medical doctors, lawyers—just about everybody, for that matter. In short, we all make truth claims about the world around us. But what makes a statement true instead of false? How are we to adjudicate between truth and falsehood? In this section, we explore three major attempts to answer this question: correspondence theory, pragmatic theory, and coherence theory.
Correspondence Theory of Truth
Historically speaking, philosophers have generally affirmed what we now call the correspondence theory of truth. That is, they agreed, at least until recent history, that true propositions are those that correspond to reality. For example, on this account of truth, the proposition “The United States is in North America” is true because it is a matter of geographical fact that the United States is indeed in North America. As a matter of geographical fact, this statement corresponds to the way things really are in our world. If the world turned out to be different than this, then such a statement would be false. But since the world is the way that the statement says it is, the statement is true. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, put it this way: “A false belief will be a matter of believing things that are contrary to those which are.”1 Or as Aristotle put it, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and what is not that it is not, is true; so that he says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false; but neither what is nor what is not is said to be or not to be.”2 Because of its straightforward and simple account of truth, the correspondence theory of truth was held by the overwhelming majority of philosophers from Plato until the end of the modern era and the beginning of postmodernity. But according to many postmodern thinkers, the correspondence theory of truth naively assumes a superhuman ability to be perfectly objective in our perceptions of reality. Postmodern thinkers staunchly reject this possibility, arguing instead that we are creatures situated within cultures and contexts that inevitably influence the way we see the world. Because of this, we have no basis for thinking that our ideas “match up” with the way the world really is. And as a consequence, “truth,” for postmodern thinkers, simply cannot be a matter of correspondence.
Pragmatic Theory of Truth
But if postmodern thinkers reject the correspondence theory of truth, what do they put in its place? Generally speaking, postmodern philosophers go in one of two possible directions. First, postmodern thinkers sometimes embrace a pragmatic theory of truth. Pragmatists reject correspondence theory and any sense of absolute truth shared by all people in all places. On pragmatic theory, a proposition or idea is true, in a lesser sense, if the proposition or idea works for us in some way. As Stewart Kelly puts it, “The ballpark idea is that truth is to be construed instrumentally, such that true beliefs always prove useful or expedient to those who believe them.”3 According to William James, often thought to be the central figure in pragmatic theory and a source of influence for later postmodern thinkers, “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”4 James’s rationale for grounding truth in utility is not arbitrary or without cause. After all, one feature of truth is that it does tend to be helpful in navigating the world. In this sense, truth is fruitful and productive for us. Because of this, we could rightly think of pragmatism as a legitimate test for truth claims. In other words, one thing we might expect of true propositions is that they are useful.
Nevertheless, despite whatever usefulness pragmatic concerns might have for us in testing truth claims, pragmatism seems to be lacking as a way to define truth, since it is always possible that an idea can be helpful in some way without also being true. Paul Horwich puts it this way: “True beliefs tend to foster success. But it happens regularly that actions based on true beliefs lead to disaster, while false assumptions, by pure chance, produce beneficial results.”5 Consider habits, such as the way children might close their eyes in a scary situation, believing that if they cannot see the bad guys, then the bad guys cannot see them. Such a belief may indeed help the child to cope with the situation, but nonetheless the belief is false. Furthermore, as Kelly points out, pragmatism leads to relativism and logical absurdities, as each person’s “truths” are shaped by different social and personal factors. “What is useful varies significantly from person to person. What is considered useful depends in part both on one’s personality and on their outlook on life.”6 But if that is the case, absurdity seems to follow. “A wildlife biologist going to Antarctica believes it is true that various penguins inhabit the area. . . . But the average person could care less about the funny-looking birds that waddle thousands of miles away. Its usefulness to them is minimal at best.”7 And because of this, it “is true for the wildlife biologist but not for the average person” that “(P) Penguins live in Antarctica.”8
Coherence Theory of Truth
Another way that postmodern thinkers have defined truth is in terms of coherence. On the coherence theory of truth, a statement is considered to be true if it is consistent with other ideas or beliefs held within a system of beliefs. As Douglas Groothuis describes it, “Coherence theories of truth argue that what makes a statement or belief true is its coherence or consistency with one’s other beliefs. If my ‘web of belief’ is large and internally consistent—that is, if none of my beliefs contradict each other—my beliefs are true. A belief is false if it fails to cohere with the rest of my beliefs. In other words, truth is simply defined as logical coherence.”9 As an example, consider the way postliberal theologians emphasize the internal consistency of Christian beliefs as a way to defend such beliefs. According to Alister McGrath, theologians like George Lindbeck de-emphasized “the intellectual content of a doctrinal statement in order to stress its formal function. It is not what a doctrine appears to say that matters, but its place and function within the overall fabric of the Christian faith.”10 In other words, in Lindbeck’s approach to doctrine, what matters is not so much whether a doctrine reflects the way the world really is. Rather, what is most important is whether the doctrine is internally consistent with other doctrines held by Christian theism.
As with pragmatism, coherence theory can be helpful in testing truth claims. As minimal features of truth, logical consistency and internal coherence are necessary conditions. When we find conflicting or contradictory ideas present within a belief system, we are rightly inclined to conclude that either (1) one of the beliefs is false, (2) several of the beliefs are false, or (3) the whole system of beliefs is false. But, given the law of noncontradiction, we cannot say that two mutually exclusive beliefs are true. As such, we might think of internal coherence as a necessary condition for truth—a minimal condition that must be met for a proposition to be true. If so, the test of coherence will always be important for us in assessing claims. But here again, despite whatever usefulness coherence theory may have in testing truth claims, it too is an insufficient way of defining just what truth actually is. Put another way, while coherence is a necessary condition for truth, it is not a sufficient condition. Coherence is a condition that must be met for something to be true, but this condition is not sufficient by itself to guarantee that a given belief is true. McGrath is again helpful in showing us why this is the case: “The coherentist position, taken on its own, is perfectly capable of validating an internally consistent world-view which makes no significant point of contact with the real world, or which evades such contact altogether. Coherency does not guarantee truth—merely logical consistency. A belief can be consistent with all other beliefs within a system, and yet have no independent supporting evidence.”11 McGrath’s observation is important for us to note. It is entirely possible for a belief system to be internally consistent and free from self-contradiction, while also being completely fictitious. As such, coherence is an important test for truth claims, but an insufficient definition of truth itself.
Back to Correspondence Theory
Despite the concerns that postmodern philosophers have raised about correspondence theory, it is far more resilient than its critics give it credit for and continues to be the most widely held account of truth by philosophers, scientists, and others. We offer two reasons for this. First, while both pragmatism and coherence theories are helpful tests for truth, neither provides an adequate understanding of the nature of truth. Second, and even more important, all of our thinking, planning, theorizing, and cognition about the world seem to require the correspondence account of truth. John Searle contends that this “view” is one of several default positions about knowledge and reality that we simply must take as a starting point for our thinking: “In our ordinary everyday lives, these views are so much taken for granted that I think it is misleading to describe them as ‘views’—or hypotheses or opinions—at all.”12 David K. Clark seems to agree: “Since virtually all people, including those who have never studied epistemology, typically assume something like this notion of truth, it is a pretheoretic intuition regarding truth. . . . This is pretheoretic in that it is not an idea that results from complex theory building about the nature of truth but a belief that people bring to their theorizing about truth. It is a basic assumption, rooted in experience. It is something people philosophize with, not something they philosophize to.”13 Third, there are also theological reasons to embrace the correspondence theory of truth. Groothuis states that this account is especially important for grounding the claims of Christianity: “The correspondence view of truth is not simply one of many options for Christians. It is the only biblically and logically grounded view of truth available and allowable. We neglect or deny it to our peril and disgrace. Truth decay will not be dispelled without it.”14 To underscore Groothuis’s point, imagine trying to square the apostle Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures” (NKJV). What did Paul mean by this? If the pragmatic theory of truth is correct, then perhaps Paul simply meant to say that the idea of Jesus crucified, buried, and raised is a useful concept for us. Or, if coherence theory is correct, then perhaps he simply meant to say that the idea of Jesus crucified, buried, and raised is consistent with other things that we believe. But surely neither of these is what Paul intends to say to us. Rather, what Paul means to say here is that, in fact, Jesus was crucified, he was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day. He wants us to know that this is what really happened and that this claim expresses real facts about the world. In short, such claims require a correspondence theory of truth. For reasons such as these, philosophers and theologians should continue to hold to a correspondence theory of truth, even if they allow for pragmatism and coherence as tests for truth.
What Is Knowledge?
Now that we have considered the various ways of thinking about truth, we turn to the issue of knowledge. As human beings, we know a lot of things. We know people and have relationships with them. This kind of knowledge is typically referred to as relational and is not usually the sort of knowledge we are concerned with in epistemology. We also have knowledge about how to do things like tie our shoes, bake cakes, or throw a football. This kind of knowledge is sometimes called ability knowledge, but again, this is not generally what we focus on in epistemological discussions. The kind of knowledge we are concerned about in epistemology is called propositional knowledge. Propositions are about things, states of affairs, places, or people. Consider some examples of propositions that we know. We know that (A) Barack Obama was the forty-fourth president of the United States of America, (B) the United States declared its independence on July 4, 1776, (C) Elvis Presley was a musician, (D) red and green are the colors of Christmas, and (E) Raleigh is the capital city of North Carolina. That we know such things is rather clear and uncontroversial. But how we know these things is less clear and much debated, at least for philosophers. Notice that we do not merely believe these things: we know them. In this case, knowing is a stronger kind of cognitive activity than simply believing. But if so, what does “knowing” have that “believing” lacks?
Justified, True, Belief
Another way to ask this question is to ask what the criteria for knowledge are. In other words, what criteria must be met in order to actually know propositions (A–E) above as opposed to merely believing them? Traditionally speaking, philosophers have tended to offer three criteria for knowledge: justification, truth, and belief. Or we might simply say:
Knowledge = Justified, True, Belief (JTB)
On the JTB theory of knowledge, we know some proposition like (A)—Barack Obama was the forty-fourth president of the United States of America—when (1) we believe (A); (2) we have some kind of evidential or rational justification for believing (A); and (3) as it turns out, (A) is a fact of history.
Consider the way this account evolves from belief to knowledge. We begin with some ideas that we believe. Yet, as we have already noted, belief is a weaker epistemic cognition than knowledge. That is because we believe all sorts of things that turn out to be false. To get from believing to knowing, something more is required. To belief we might add the truth condition. That is, perhaps we simply need it to be the case that what we believe is actually true. For example, imagine a person named Bruce buys a lottery ticket and believes that his is the winning ticket. Further imagine that, as he will later find out when the lottery numbers are published, by pure coincidence and dumb luck, Bruce’s belief that his ticket is the winning ticket is true. In this case, Bruce has a “true belief.” Given that Bruce’s belief is actually true, we might be tempted to think that this is enough of a basis to claim that Bruce “knows” he has a winning ticket. But we shouldn’t be so quick to settle for “true belief” as a proper basis for knowing. After all, even though Bruce is right in believing that he will win the lottery, he still does not “know” that this is true. Since he does not actually have justification for believing that he will win, he really has no good reason for thinking that he is right. His belief is just lucky. Describing this kind of situation, Bertrand Russell declares, “Such instances can be multiplied indefinitely, and show that you cannot claim to have known merely because you turned out to be right.”15
In his work Meno, Plato describes the key distinction between knowledge and true belief, or what he calls “true opinion.” He says, “For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by giving an account of the reason why. . . . After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place.”16 As Plato notes, “true opinions” are the kinds of ideas that do not remain long, because we hold them without rational support. But once “one ties them down by giving an account of the reason” for holding them, thus providing justification for them, we are then in a position of “knowing.” In other words, by meeting all three criteria—justification, truth, and belief—we are said to have knowledge.
The Gettier Problem
For the most part, JTB has been, and continues to be, the most common way to think about knowledge itself, though contemporary advocates offer various tweaks and revisions of this account. Such revisions and tweaks were prompted by a three-page article by a relatively unknown philosopher named Edmund Gettier; the article was published in 1963 and is now widely regarded as the greatest challenge to JTB. In short, Gettier offers two different scenarios where the criteria of JTB can be satisfied, but where we are still not confident that we have knowledge. In particular, his scenarios are designed to show problems with the justification criterion of JTB:
Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
(d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:
(e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of coins in Jones’s pocket, who he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.17
What Gettier shows here is that there are some cases where our beliefs about certain things that turn out to be true also have a justification, but it is a justification that is based on a piece of false information or improper inference. Put more simply, there are times when we have justification for a true belief, but the justification is questionable.
There are other ways of illustrating this problem. As Russell (1948) noted prior to Gettier (1963), we might imagine being asked what time it is, looking at the stopped clock on the wall to see that it says 2:10 p.m., and answering back that it is 2:10 p.m. We can further imagine that at the moment we are asked about the time, it really is exactly 2:10 p.m.18 If such were the case, we have satisfied JTB, but should not feel confident that we “know” it is 2:10 p.m., since our justification for saying so is complete luck or coincidence. Numerous other illustrations could be offered. The important thing to see in them is that in such cases, JTB has been satisfied, but despite this, we should not be confident that we have knowledge. As a result, JTB cannot be a sufficient condition for knowledge.
Responses to Gettier
If Gettier showed that JTB has a serious problem, how might an advocate of JTB respond? As Noah Lemos has noted, one way the JTB advocate could respond is by adopting an additional criterion we might call the No False Grounds criterion. According to such an approach, the major problem that Gettier surfaces for JTB is that the justification in such cases is based on questionable or problematic premises. This proposed solution suggests that we address this problem by adding something to address the weak premises. That is, perhaps we could now just say something like “no false propositions can be a part of the justification.” If so, then by adding the additional criterion to the JTB definition of knowledge, our new definition of knowledge would be something like this:
S knows that p = Df. (1) S believes that p [is true], (2) p is true, (3) p is epistemically justified for S, and (4) S’s grounds for believing that p [is true] do not include any false propositions.19
But as Lemos points out, there are problems with this approach. Among other problems with this revision, he notes that this approach may be so strong that it rules out some things we clearly know. What if, for example, we form a belief about who won the football game on the basis of fifteen reports from friends who watched the game, and that only one of those friends lied about watching the game? In this case, we form a belief that the Patriots beat the Falcons on the basis of their collective fifteen testimonies. In this scenario, we are able to satisfy JTB, but we cannot satisfy the new criterion of No False Grounds, as one of the fifteen is a lie. Despite the lie of the one friend, it seems like we are still right in thinking that we know the Patriots won the game in light of the fourteen other true reports.20
Another popular response is to add what we might call a defeasibility condition to JTB. On this approach, we must require that there is justification of the belief in question and that there be no defeating evidence for that belief. With this in mind, Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson offer the following formulation of knowledge:
S has nonbasic knowledge that h if and only if (i) h is true, (ii) S believes that h, and (iii) there is some statement p that completely justifies S in believing that h and no other statement defeats this justification.21
So then, as long as there are no claims of evidence that defeat the belief in question, we are within our epistemic rights to think that we actually have knowledge. But once again, there is a problem with this solution. How are we to know if there is no defeating evidence? It may certainly be the case that we may not know of any defeating evidence for our knowledge claims, but it does not follow from that that there is no defeating evidence. Since our knowledge of the world is forever partial and extremely limited, it is entirely possible that we simply don’t know about the evidence that defeats our knowledge claim.
There are other ways epistemologists have tried to salvage JTB, but questions linger about each attempt, and philosophers generally disagree about the best way to resolve the Gettier problem. For now, we might simply note that while Gettier shows the inadequacies of JTB as a full account of knowledge, it is not the case that JTB is useless for us. JTB may not be a sufficient condition for knowledge, but it does seem to be a necessary condition.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have offered a brief overview of the major discussions surrounding the questions of truth, knowledge, and justification. Truth, we argued, has been variously understood, yet the correspondence theory of truth continues to be the most viable option for us moving forward. It seems to capture our basic intuitions concerning the way we think about truth claims, and it allows us to make sense of the world around us. Knowledge has traditionally been thought of as justified true belief (JTB), but JTB has challenges of its own. The Gettier problem seems to suggest that JTB might not be a sufficient condition for truth after all, and philosophers are still divided over the best way to move forward. In the next chapter, we will zero in on one specific criterion in the JTB formulation—namely, justification.
1. Plato, Sophist 240d, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 261.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1011b.25, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1597.
3. Stewart Kelly, Truth Considered and Applied: Examining Postmodernism, History, and Christian Faith (Nashville: B&H, 2011), 281–82.
4. William James, Pragmatism (1907; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 36.
5. Paul Horwich, “Theories of Truth,” in A Companion to Metaphysics, ed. Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1995), 493.
6. Stewart Kelly and James K. Dew Jr., Understanding Postmodernism: A Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 210.
7. Kelly and Dew, Understanding Postmodernism, 210.
8. Kelly and Dew, Understanding Postmodernism, 210.
9. Douglas Groothuis, “Truth Defined and Defended,” in Reclaiming the Center, ed. Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 73.
10. Alister E. McGrath, The Science of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 102.
11. Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 2:19.
12. John Searle, Mind, Language, and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 10.
13. David K. Clark, To Know and Love God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003), 354 (emphasis in original).
14. Groothuis, “Truth Defined and Defended,” 110.
15. Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Routledge, 2009), 140.
16. Plato, Meno 98a, in Plato: Complete Works, 896.
17. Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief [the Same as] Knowledge?” Analysis 23, no. 6 (June 1963): 122.
18. This illustration is owed to Russell, who interestingly offered it in 1949 prior to Gettier’s treatment. He said, “There is the man who looks at a clock which is not going, though he thinks it is, and who happens to look at it at the moment when it is right; this man acquires a true belief as to the time of day, but cannot be said to have knowledge.” See Russell, Human Knowledge, 140. In fairness to Gettier, however, Russell offers this illustration not as a way to articulate the exact objection that Gettier sets forth. Rather, Russell offers this as a way to illustrate the inadequacy of “true belief” as a complete account of knowledge.
19. Noah Lemos, An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28.
20. Lemos, Theory of Knowledge, 28.
21. Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson Jr., “Knowledge: Undefeated Justified True Belief,” in Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 8 (1969): 227.