Philosophy - Sufficiently Justified
Belief Philosophy - Sufficiently Justified
Belief
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Justified True BeliefA common and popular metaphysical view of knowledge is known as Justified True Belief. That is, knowledge is where one holds a belief, one is justified in holding that belief, and the belief is true. If all three conditions are met, then supposedly one has "knowledge".The Gettier ProblemThen Edmund Gettier came along and showed, or tried to show, that the three conditions could all be true, but one might still not have "knowledge". There are many links and examples for the Gettier problem. Personally, I thought Gettier's own examples were a little too thin, but other, better examples have been derived by other people.The Problem With The Gettier ProblemThe problem with the Gettier problem is that it relies on mistakes or highly unlikely coincidences. It calls into question exactly what one means by "justified". In a weak sense, a person might be justified in believing something because it is often or usually true, but it may not be true in unusual circumstances. In a stronger sense of justification, such mistakes or coincidences simply wouldn't be allowed--a stronger burden of proof is called for.The real problem that Gettier raises, unintentionally, is simply that Justified True Belief isn't a clear enough reference or guide to indicate when one has knowledge and when one doesn't. |
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Sufficiently Justified BeliefA more fundamental problem with Justified True Belief is the condition that a belief be "true". How is it possible to know that a belief is true independently of one's justification for the belief? We cannot consider a belief to be true except when we think we have sufficient evidence or justification for believing it to be true. Thus, the requirement by JTB that a belief be true is either unknowable and thus unattainable, or is only attainable through our justification of the belief.Instead of knowledge being considered Justified True Belief, we could instead simply call it Justified Belief, or as I would prefer to call it, Sufficiently Justified Belief (SJB), to stress the necessity of justification. The Further Pursuit of KnowledgeSufficiently Justified Belief has its own problem--namely, how do we know when a belief has been sufficiently justified to be considered true, and thus knowledge? This is a more difficult question to answer, and requires more sophistication and accuracy than any metaphysics that I'm familiar with.We could try to derive something like Coherentism, where evidence is ranked according to its validity, and the more evidence one has, the more probable or likely a belief is to be true. However, how are we to rank or quantify the validity of beliefs? And doesn't such a probabilistic approach preempt the absolute certainty of knowledge? Not necessarily. If we have a high enough probability of a belief being true, then the uncertainty factor may be, for all practical purposes, insignificant. Furthermore, especially when considering what is known as "analytic" statements, knowledge is certain because it has specifically been limited to a certain context, or is true by definition. The logic of mathematics is thus one form of "certain" knowledge. Francois Tremblay's A Process-Based Theory of Knowledge is one such attempt to rank the validity of justification for knowledge. |
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Responses to Sufficiently Justified BeliefOne response has been that I have misunderstood JTB. JTB calls for a belief to be justified and true, but it doesn't call for the believer to know that the belief is true. Okay, in that case, the truth of any belief is simply unknowable. Then why are philosophers bothering with a formula for knowledge if it isn't going to tell us when we have knowledge? Or in other words, knowledge is simply "true belief", that is, if we have a belief, and it's true, then we have knowledge. But the truth of a belief is precisely what we're trying to find out, so saying that knowledge is true belief doesn't help us very much. Why do the philosophers even bother with the "justification" component, then? Because they intuitively feel that knowledge requires a stronger burden on humans than to simply hold a belief that coincidentally happens to be true, that you can't have knowledge by accident, which is part of what Gettier was claiming with his problems with JTB. Quite clearly, then, the formulation of knowledge is not merely some abstract, mental puzzle, but an attempt to help humans determine when they have knowledge. Thus, my objection to the "truth" component of JTB remains valid. Collapsing Truth into JustificationA further objection to Sufficiently Justified Belief is that by collapsing the "truth" component into the "justification" component, this allows humans to believe something that isn't true and call it knowledge. But JTB results in the same thing, for all practical purposes, since the truth of a belief is either unknowable or is only knowable through one's justification for it. Lots of people believe things that are most likely not true because JTB provides insufficient means for determining when we have knowledge.Take an uncontroversial example: snow is white. Do we know that snow is white? Do we know that this is a true statement? We think we do, because most of us have actually seen snow with our own eyes, and we've seen it's white. Even someone who lives in a tropical environment and has never actually seen snow believes it's white because they've seen it in movies, pictures, or had it described to them by other people who've seen it. Thus, we think we're pretty justified in believing that snow is white. According to JTB, we still don't have knowledge, because we don't know if our strongly justified belief is true or not. With SJB, we may at least think we have knowledge because our justification is so strong and pervasive. SJB by itself still isn't enough to tell us that we actually know snow is white, but at least there are no impossible, omniscient requirements, either. |
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