Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

What do we mean when we say we know something? The long held thought in philosophy was that for a belief to be considered knowledge it had to have three characteristics.

1. First that it was true in accordance with a fact of the world.
2. Second, that the holder of the belief holds it with conviction.
3. And lastly, that the believer has justification for holding the belief.

This proposal for analysis of knowledge is commonly referred to as Justified True Belief (JTB).

Edmund Gettier (1963), in his seminal paper, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?, outlines three logical examples of JTB:

AS knows that P IFF:

1. P is true
2. S believes that P, and
3. S is justified in believing that P.

BS knows that P IFF:

1. S accepts P
2. S has adequate evidence for P, and
3. P is true.

CS knows that P IFF:

1. P is true
2. S is sure that P is true, and
3. S has the right to be sure that P is true.

Gettier in applying these versions of JTB, found that the conditions stated in these logical outlines “do not constitute a sufficient condition for the truth of the proposition that S knows that P.” (1963 p. 121) Gettier points out that in each of the examples of JTB, it is possible for someone to hold a justified true belief that is false. He illustrates this fact in his example of Smith and Jones:

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:

1. E is true
2. Smith believes that E is true, and
3. 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 the coins in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.

(1963 p. 122)

I contend that Gettier was right to question this understanding of knowledge and expose it as lacking; but that a further provisional form of knowledge can be saved from this analysis by the addition of a fourth clause, consisting of an appropriate external test. Moreover, that by reversing the analytical approach and instead of trying to solve for what knowledge is, a better method may be to distinguish what knowledge can’t be; thereby defining where the theoretical limit of knowledge is and exposing the demarcation point between knowing and not knowing.

Once we have an argument for knowledge we have two basic approaches by which we can justify that argument.

If we are to accept the pure internalist view, then we must accept that knowledge by this means is limited. If we are to accept a purely outward externalist view, we are the forced to deny that knowledge exists at all within our minds. If on the other hand we take both an internalist and externalist view, blending the justificational framework across both domains, that of the inner mental and the outer worldly, we can mitigate some of these apparent imposed limits on our knowledge.

It is only when an internal belief is tested and doesn’t fail can we say we hold some form of actual knowledge. Internalistically, our beliefs rely on frameworks for justification, built up on prior arguments, deductions, experience, intuitions and the appearance of internal consistency. But this alone is not enough to fully satisfy the truth conditions necessary for knowledge; we need a further external justification for this; before this crucial step the best we can claim to hold is possible knowledge.

In essence, there is a demarcation that separates possible knowledge from actual knowledge, and this demarcation correlates with the boundary that exists between our internal frameworks and the external measure of the outside world.

The problem we face then is how do we cross this demarcation? What would be a satisfactory test for actual knowledge?

Let’s look at a specific example from Stanley and Williamson’s article, Knowing How.

Bob wants to learn how to fly in a flight simulator. He is instructed by Henry. Unknown to Bob, Henry is a malicious impostor who has inserted a randomizing device in the simulator’s controls and intends to give all kinds of incorrect advice. Fortunately, by sheer chance the randomizing device causes exactly the same results in the simulator as would have occurred without it, and by incompetence Henry gives exactly the same advice as a proper instructor would have done. Bob passes the course with flying colors. He has still not flown a real plane. Bob has a justified true belief about how to fly.

(2001 p. 435)

Bob at this point only has a reasonably justified true belief. It is only after Bob has successfully flown a plane independent of the teaching process, that we can say that he has true/real knowledge of how to fly a plane. Before that, objectively, it’s only an untested propositional possibility. It’s the action of actually piloting that illuminates the knowledge known, and distinguishes between a true and a false proposition. It is only once a JTB scenario is tested and not disqualified by the test, can it be known as knowledge, albeit a provisional type. Before that test it can only be thought of as a reasonably justified true belief.

In other words, we can view a pre-test JTB as similar to a pre-test scientific hypothesis. Essentially, the analysis of knowledge is an argument, and like all arguments to know its soundness and its validity we must measure it objectively. Essentially this is a soft-scepticism approach to the problem; knowledge is at best provisional. In this sense, Gettier cases would still hold that JTB fails in accounting for knowledge, but that by adding a fourth clause provisional-truth could be ascertained.

For instance, let’s look at Bertrand Russell’s well known example of the stopped clock:

Alice sees a clock that reads two o’clock, and believes that the time is two o’clock. It is in fact two o’clock. There’s a problem, however: unknown to Alice, the clock she’s looking at stopped twelve hours ago. Alice thus has an accidentally true, justified belief.

(Wikipedia)

Alice clearly does not hold what we would classify as a genuine case of knowledge in this scenario, as it is by sheer luck that the broken clock’s hands happen to correlate with the actual time that it happens to be when Alice makers her observation. This particular case also aids to highlight just how often these scenarios can arise, as the broken clock will always be exactly correct at two separate times of every day. But what if Alice, instead of ending her inquiry at the initial observation, had taken the time to inspect the clock to test its working state? If we add the clause that the clock must be tested at the time of the first observation for working order, we can provisionally test its truthfulness and therefore also its knowledge claim.

If the time on the clock at the time of the observation matches up with the time it actually is, then at that moment this has to be considered knowledge, albeit only the provisional type. While at any other time it would not. Given this new approach of only ever having any kind of knowledge after testing it, Alice would actually have knowledge even when the clock is broken. She would gain knew reliable, testable, and justifiable knowledge that the clock isn’t working. In one case, Alice discovers the clock is broken and has obtained knowledge that the clock probably is not showing the correct time. On the other, she discovers that the clock appears to be functioning normally and can therefore reasonably declare, that if there is no discordance with other facts that are contingent to knowing what time it is, that the clock is showing the real time and thus has knowledge of what time it is. Though, even this new knowledge is still only ever provisional.

It is only by further appropriate tests, say checking another clock, looking outside and seeing the Sun is at the expected place in the sky, etc, that the knowledge she has acquired by test can be somewhat retained. Worryingly for some, this may be the best knowledge level that can ever be justifiably known from any position that necessarily entails a first person internalistic perspective as part of the justificational framework. In other words, knowledge is fleeting and momentary. We need to constantly test our internal theories against the world in order to have any form of consistent knowledge. And since it’s always possible that our beliefs could in the future fail such an appropriate test, any knowledge acquired at any moment can only ever be provisional.

A Possible Revision to the Knowledge Problem

As per Gettier’s examples, it doesn’t appear that we can ever truly avoid the possibility of having justified false beliefs. If this is the case as it appears to be, then perhaps we should reverse the knowledge narrative and instead of trying to define what we know to be true, we should try to define what we know not to be true. As the boundary of what we know to be false expands, we also limit what can be true. In this sense knowledge is asymptotic; we aim for truth, but never fully realise it absolutely.

Metaphysically, knowledge seems beyond our reach as justification for true beliefs are reliant on too many levels of contingent organisation. If we take a Humean perspective of the internal and external metaphysics at play, we can easily see these levels of organisation overwhelmingly building up on us. David Hume operated under the distinction that there are two distinct ways we can think between, internally represented as a relationship of ideas (ROI), or externally as cases of matters of fact (MOF).

Within this first internal perspective (ROI) we can see that our beliefs rely on other beliefs, and that this reliance isn’t always homogeneous; beliefs can conflict with each other and large gaps of ignorance can exist between them. Moreover, these beliefs operate atop an underlying framework of presuppositions and apparent self-evident axioms; all of which are further reliant on the internal language of the mind, seemingly consisting of non-commutable symbols, words, and intuitions. On the other hand, the external world (MOF) is in large part beyond our metaphysical reach, both in size and time, and also by the limits of our observational stance; the human senses only being able to see a tiny slither of space and time of this immense and old external world.

Not to mention that any justification that isn’t reliant on luck or intuition must be based on some logical ground, and that logic itself when pushed lacks complete internal consistency; which Kurt Gödel (1931) devastatingly exposed in his incompleteness theorems. This means that the space we seemingly know the best, the internal world of our own mind, is justificationally just as limited to us as the external world is metaphysically. Worse still, these problems of justification don’t appear to be going anywhere; they appear to be fundamental.

One way we can think of this arena of knowledge is like a deep dark ocean. Where we can dive down into it holding our breath and investigate for a while, but eventually are forced to resurface for lack of air. Like the water of the ocean, we too can dive into knowledge by testing what we think on justifiable grounds internally, and likewise we can’t stay there indefinitely as we lack the means to test every possible proposition in constancy. But the good news is that we don’t necessarily need any other type of knowledge beyond this momentary type. As David Hume also points out, sometimes it’s rational to be irrational when it comes to what we do and do not know in an operational-sense.

There are many things that we aren’t absolutely sure of, but at the same time we are aware of the futility in seeking genuine knowledge regarding these cases. For instance, when we look out our window on to the street outside and see people outside we can’t be absolutely certain that they are in fact actually people and not robots disguised to look like ordinary people. While technically possible, the value and the effort needed to constantly test this scenario is reasonably unjustified on the grounds of probability and futility. It is probabilistically unlikely that this would be the case, and it’s an action of futility to forever test. As Hume rightly pointed out, there are limits to what we are capable of knowing and as such need to base our inquiries to those matters of that best fit our ability to know, and best fit our need to now. In this case, it is of low importance considering the contingent facts and beliefs that form the belief that people there exist, and the low risk associated if they were not who they appeared to be.

Lastly, in trying to gain the type of resilient knowledge that JTB arguments and the like seek, we only expose ourselves to the problem of scepticism; which may be the truer account of what is really the case when it comes to our ability to know. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hold a type of provisional knowledge, based on internal mechanisms of justification in concert with further external means, by way of appropriate tests. We just have to accept that knowledge may be asymptotic by nature, and as such never fully realisable. While this may be an unwelcome fact, it doesn’t need to lead to fatalism, as it does not entail that we are any more limited than we have ever been. By simply adding the clause that the demarcation between belief and knowledge is crossed by an appropriate test, and further that the test is limited to that moment, we are able to justifiably hold a type of knowledge of the world, albeit provisional.

If you made it this far and are interested in a broader overview of knowledge, the Gettier cases, and responses to scepticism check out Wireless Philosophy‘s YouTube series: Epistemology: Introduction to Theory of Knowledge. It’s definitely worth checking out.

References