The Theory of Knowledge and Theory of Justified Belief
S knows P if her belief P is true and she has adequate information, but she and her belief will usually have various other merits as well. In most cases, her cognitive faculties will have functioned properly, she will have used reliable methods, she will have been appropriately careful in gathering and deliberating about the evidence, and so on.
Such merits are frequent accompaniments of knowledge but not prerequisites. If S has a true belief P and there is no important gap in her information, then except perhaps in a few highly unusual situations where knowledge may be blocked, she knows P. Nothing more is necessary to explain why she knows. Not even justification.
In his 1963 article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Edmund Gettier argued that justification when added to true belief is not sufficient for knowledge, but he simply assumed that it is necessary.1 He was not alone. This has been a common presupposition, but one that has had unfortunate consequences for both the theory of knowledge and the theory of justified belief—consequences that became conspicuous in the aftermath of Gettier’s article.
The immediate effect of the article was to inspire a search for a special sort of justification that when added to true belief produces knowledge. The justification, it was said, had to be indefeasible or nondefective or in some other way a cut above the ordinary. Others eventually began to search in a different direction, since justification traditionally understood is associated with having reasons that can be used to defend one’s beliefs, but in many everyday instances of knowledge, the knower seems not to be in a position to provide such a defense.
Phil knows that the bus is a block away because he sees it, but he would be hard pressed to justify his belief. He knows little about optics or the human visual system. Like other sighted people, he relies upon his eyes for information, but he could not provide a noncircular defense of their overall reliability, and if pressed for such a defense, he would simply become confused. Beth knows that she was at the bank last week because she remembers being there, but she is not able to cite convincing evidence in support of the accuracy of her memory. Margaret knows that the sun is much larger than the earth and that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, but she cannot recall the original source of either belief, thus limiting her ability to mount a detailed defense based on the authority of that source. John glimpses a face in a parade and knows it to be that of a childhood friend whom he has not seen for decades, but he has only a vague notion of what visual cues allowed him to recognize his friend.
Examples such as these suggested to many epistemologists that knowledge does not require justification, at least not in a traditional sense, and that to assume otherwise is to overly intellectualize how people acquire much of their everyday knowledge. These epistemologists accordingly shifted their focus away from justification and began to propose accounts, now familiar, in which a true belief, to be knowledge, has to be the product of a highly reliable process, or has to track the truth in close counterfactual situations, or has to be product of cognitive faculties operating in the way that they were designed to function. Because these accounts directed attention away from one’s being able to mount “internally” a defense of what one knows and toward causal and causal-like properties, they came to be known as “externalist” accounts of knowledge.
These accounts, in turn, ushered in a new class of externalist accounts of justification. Initially, externalism was part of a reaction against justification-driven theories of knowledge, but an assumption drawn from the old epistemology made it tempting to reconceive justification as well. The assumption is that by definition justification is that which when added to true belief generates a serious candidate for knowledge, with perhaps some fourth condition added to handle Gettier-style counterexamples. If, as many wanted to claim, knowledge is to be understood as something like reliably produced true belief, then relying on the above assumption, it seemed a small step to the conclusion that having justified beliefs at its core must also be a matter of one’s beliefs being produced and sustained by reliable cognitive processes.
Such proposals sparked a literature on the relative advantages and disadvantages of externalism and internalism. Much of this literature assumes that externalists and internalists are defending rival theories, but a more charitable reading is that they primarily care about different issues.
Externalists are first and foremost interested in understanding the relationship that has to obtain between one’s beliefs and the world in order for the beliefs, when true, to count as knowledge. In carrying out this project, however, they often see themselves as also offering an account of justification, because justification, they presuppose, is that which has to be added to true belief in order to produce a serious candidate for knowledge.
Internalists, on the other hand, are first and foremost interested in understanding what is involved in having beliefs that from one’s perspective one is in a position to defend, but they frequently see themselves as also providing the materials for an adequate account of knowledge, because they too presuppose that justification is by definition that which has to be added to true belief to get a serious candidate for knowledge.
This is a presupposition to be resisted, however. As the theories of knowledge and justified belief are independently developed, interesting connections between them may emerge, but the initial and primary focus of the theory of knowledge is different from that of the theory of justified belief. So, it should not be simply assumed from the start that knowledge and justified belief are necessarily linked as opposed to being frequently associated.
Not making this assumption, moreover, is liberating. It frees the theory of knowledge from the uncomfortable choice of either having to embrace an overly intellectual conception of knowledge, which overlooks the fact that people seem not to be in a position to provide adequate intellectual defenses of much of what they know, or having to engage in awkward attempts to force back into the account some nontraditional notion of justified belief, because the definition of knowledge is thought to require it.
Simultaneously, it frees the theory of justified belief from servitude to the theory of knowledge. If it is stipulated that the properties that make a belief justified must be ones that turn a true belief into a good candidate for knowledge, the theory of justified belief is thereby separated from our everyday assessments of each other’s opinions, which are more concerned with whether individuals have been appropriately careful and responsible in regulating their opinions than on whether they have satisfied the prerequisites of knowledge.2
Once it is no longer assumed that there is a necessary link between justification and knowledge, epistemology is reoriented.
The working strategy that has dominated epistemology since Gettier’s article is to employ the assumption that knowledge and justification are conceptually connected to draw strong, and sometimes antecedently implausible, conclusions about knowledge or justification. The strategy can be thought of as an epistemology game. Call it the “Gettier game.” It starts with a story in which a subject has a true belief but intuitively seems not to have knowledge, and the play of the game is governed by the rule that justification is one of the conditions that has to be added to true belief in order for it to be a serious candidate for knowledge. The goal is then to identify, within the constraints imposed by this rule, the defect that explains why the subject of the story lacks knowledge.
Solutions to the Gettier game take three forms. First, one can claim that although the subject’s belief is true, it is not plausible to regard it as justified. Second, one can claim that although the subject’s true belief is justified, it lacks an additional condition (nondefectiveness or indefeasibility or whatever) that has to be present in order for a true justified belief to be an instance of knowledge. Third, one can claim that although at first glance it might seem plausible to regard the subject’s belief as justified, the case illustrates why it is necessary to amend the traditional notion of justification; one is then in a position to explain that the subject lacks knowledge because her belief is not justified in the amended sense.
Once the assumption that justification is a necessary condition of knowledge is abandoned, the Gettier game can no longer be played. In its place, however, there is a simpler and more illuminating game to play. The game starts identically, with a story in which a subject has a true belief but intuitively seems not to have knowledge, but it is governed by a different rule: look for some important feature of the situation about which the subject lacks true beliefs.
Except perhaps for a few extreme situations in which knowledge may be blocked, this game always has a solution.3