Gettier's Essay: Is Justified True Knowledge?

The following essay responds to question 5):

Gettier’s 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? challenges the traditional formulation of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB). The JTB analysis provides that one knows P given the sufficient and necessary conditions that: P is true; one believes that P is true; and one is justified in believing P (Gettier 1963). Gettier provides two cases in which all three conditions that constitute the JTB analysis of knowledge are fulfilled, yet, they do not seem to entail knowledge, and thus concludes that the conditions outlined do not constitute a sufficient condition for knowledge. In this essay, I will examine the dependence of Gettier’s argument on the assumptions he makes At the beginning

Of course, believing P does not imply believing Q, but one could surely come to believing Q through perfectly valid deduction, and one does not lose justification through this process. It is difficult to refute this if we are to accept that knowledge entails justification at all. If one were to be justified in believing there are ten people in a room, surely they would be equally justified in believing there are more than five people in the room. It would be absurd to suggest that they would instead need to count exactly five people, and then realise that there were, in fact more people than the number counted thus far to be justified in this belief.

Yet, accepting (2) leads to Gettier cases where P is false, and so the truth of Q is independent of P, and may be true coincidentally. We may the suggest that S is not justified in believing Q because P is false, and so may state certain conditions only under which (2) is acceptable, such that S’s belief that Q ‘is not inferred from any falsehood’ . However, such “no false lemmas” proposals, although seemingly satisfactory in Gettier’s specific cases, fails in alternate examples such as the Barn County case (Goldman 1976). Such cases can be generalised in the following