Edmund Gettier's Justified True Belief Theory

Long before philosopher, Edmund Gettier came along, knowledge was thought to be equal to justified true belief, which is to say that: “You know p iff, i) p is true, ii) you believe that p, iii) and you are justified in believing that p” (Gettier, 1963)

However, Gettier argued that ‘p’ cannot simply be known because you are justified in believing that ‘p’. He proposed several counter-examples to the Justified True Belief theory (JTB theory) and they are known as Gettier cases. In this paper, I aim to explain how a Gettier-style case spells trouble for the view that knowledge is justified true belief. Gettier’s main objective wasn’t to solve the mishaps behind the JTB theory, however other philosophers took it upon themselves to use Gettier’s

Each of his cases rely on the premises not necessarily having to be true, but by chance it being true. To exemplify, in the case of the ‘fake barn country’, it was by sheer chance that the man was standing in front of one of the very last standing barns which then made his belief a JTB. Gettier’s main point of argument was based on the factor of sufficiency when it came to the JTB theory. He was skeptical on the fact that a mere justification of a belief was adequate to identify knowledge as this would mean that a truth can be implied by a falsehood producing a false

Also known as counterfactual conditions, the two conditions are ----. If I then apply Nozick’s theory to the previously mentioned Gettier-style case of the barn country, the proposition ‘the man is looking a real barn’ can be further analyzed:

The man knows that he is looking at a real barn iff:

i) He is in fact looking at a real barn, ii) He is justified in believing that it is a real barn,

The first two conditions hold thus far, however, the third condition is when one can start to understand the lack of true knowledge in the Gettier case: iii*) If the man was not looking at a real barn, he would not believe that he was looking at a real barn. But, in this case, the man did not realize that almost all the other barns were fake, therefore, he would not know the difference. The man has no real knowledge of whether he is looking at a real