Is Knowledge and Justified True Belief One-and-the-Same?

My first paper for my Epistemology Philosophy class, hope you guys enjoy!


Eric Darsie
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Philosophy 303|Epistemology
Paper 1

Is Knowledge and Justified True Belief One-and-the-Same?

There’s a question that’s been debated in Epistemology and the question is if “knowledge and justified true belief one in the same?” After some thought and some philosophical consideration, I feel like I came up with an adequate answer to that question. I feel like there is a difference between having knowledge and having justified true belief. In this paper, I will distinguish knowledge from justified true belief, and what the differences are with them.

Here are my definitions of justified true belief and of knowledge:

Justified true belief: a valid true belief.

Knowledge: understanding gained through observation and/or experience.

Now with definitions of both justified true belief and knowledge, let me explain why they are two separate identities. In my eyes, a justified true belief is merely a belief that can be proved out to be valid and proved out to be true. Also, to me, any kind of belief is mere opinion, and opinions can change with the wind, they come and go by whatever situation that arises. At least for me, that’s when I see for justified true belief.

Knowledge is something that is strived for, something that people want to get and hold onto. Knowledge is what you experience to be true, as well as a society as a whole could observe to be true. Knowledge cannot be grasped and be held unto right away; knowledge takes time for someone to be able to have it. Unlike justified true belief, knowledge can be held by any amount of people, up to n.

To help set up why knowledge and justified true belief and two separate items that can be grasped, I will discuss what is commonly known among philosophers as the basic definition of knowledge and will show why each premise is necessary.

S knows p if and only if [a] p is true
[b] S believes p, and
[c] S is justified in believing p.

For premise [a], ‘p is true’ is necessary because if p wasn’t true, then knowledge can’t even be knowledge! If p wasn’t true, then people wouldn’t want it. Yes, one could be mislead on believing that p is true, but if that’s the case, I don’t feel that they wouldn’t go too far on it becoming knowledge. But back on track, if p wasn’t true, then there would be no way of going onto the second and third premise for the basic definition of knowledge.

Now onto premise [b], that ‘S believes p.’ I feel that premise [b] ties in directly with premise [a] in ways of p has to be true before S would decide to believe it. Like in premise [a], someone could be mislead on believing that p is true than believe in p, but if that’s the case, and if another moral agent is aware of it, they would correct that person and set them on the right track if they were mislead. And like I somewhat touched on, S wouldn’t believe p if S didn’t believe that p is true. So premises [a] and [b] go hand-in-hand on if one of them is accepted, then both of them are.

The last premise, premise [c] states ‘S is justified in believing p.’ To make premise [c] make sense, I’ll reword it to: ‘S is right in believing p.’ I think after changing up the wording of premise [c], if premise [a] and [b] were fulfilled, [c] would tend to follow. But to look at the premise ‘S is right in believing p’ would be true if S would believe p and p is true. And just a thought, it could be said that premise is circular to premise [b], that if S believes p then it would be justified in believing p. But in turn, for premise [c] to be fulfilled, p would have to be true and S would have to believe in p (premise [a] and [b]). With premises [a] and [b] having to be accepted before premise [c] to be accepted, it wouldn’t be circular to accept premise [c] because S would be right in believing p due to the two prior premises would make it valid.

So after looking at each premise and discussing why they are necessary for the basic (or broken down version) definition of knowledge, I do believe that they all are necessary for the definition for knowledge. The reason why I say that is because knowledge cannot stand on anything other than those three premises. If one tries to add more premises to the definition for knowledge, it would be harder and harder for one to be able to have it, and if it’s too hard to get it, then no one would want knowledge, and if you take away any of the premises, it wouldn’t be knowledge, because it could be easily changed and persuaded.

But going back to the original question, knowledge is different from justified true belief because of those three premises. Justified true belief is a belief that is true and valid. Knowledge, like already explained, is an understanding gained through observation and/or experience. Justified true belief can be held by a number of people. It’s easy to change it compared to knowledge, which I showed above. As a result, knowledge and justified true belief are two separate identities.