Knowledge as Justified True Belief

There are three components to the traditional (“tripartite”) analysis of knowledge. According to
this analysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge.

The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge:

S knows that p iff
p is true;
S believes that p;
S is justified in believing that p.
The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified
true belief”.

Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its
starting-point. It became something of a convenient fiction to suppose that this analysis was
widely accepted throughout much of the history of philosophy. In fact, however, the JTB analysis
was first articulated in the twentieth century by its attackers.[1] Before turning to influential
twentieth-century arguments against the JTB theory, let us briefly consider the three traditional
components of knowledge in turn.

1.1 The Truth Condition

Most epistemologists have found it overwhelmingly plausible that what is false cannot be known.
For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US Presidential election. Consequently, nobody
knows that Hillary Clinton won the election. One can only know things that are true.

Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns out to be wrong, we use the
word “knows” to describe their situation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election.
Speaking loosely, one might even say that many people “knew” that Clinton would win the
election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010) argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is not
a factive verb.[2] Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; most epistemologists will treat
sentences like “I knew that Clinton was going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as not
literally true.

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths
are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it
landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is a metaphysical, as opposed to
epistemological, notion: truth is a matter of how things are, not how they can be shown to be. So
when we say that only true things can be known, we’re not (yet) saying anything about how
anyone can access the truth. As we’ll see, the other conditions have important roles to play here.
Knowledge is a kind of relationship with the truth—to know something is to have a certain kind of
access to a fact.[3]

1.2 The Belief Condition

The belief condition is only slightly more controversial than the truth condition. The general idea
behind the belief condition is that you can only know what you believe. Failing to believe
something precludes knowing it. “Belief” in the context of the JTB theory means full belief, or
outright belief. In a weak sense, one might “believe” something by virtue of being pretty
confident that it’s probably true—in this weak sense, someone who considered Clinton the
favourite to win the election, even while recognizing a nontrivial possibility of her losing, might
be said to have “believed” that Clinton would win. Outright belief is stronger (see, e.g., Fantl &
McGrath 2009: 141; Nagel 2010: 413–4; Williamson 2005: 108; or Gibbons 2013: 201.). To
believe outright that p, it isn’t enough to have a pretty high confidence in p; it is something
closer to a commitment or a being sure.[4]

Although initially it might seem obvious that knowing that p requires believing that p, a few
philosophers have argued that knowledge without belief is indeed possible. Suppose Walter comes
home after work to find out that his house has burned down. He says: “I don’t believe it”.
Critics of the belief condition might argue that Walter knows that his house has burned down (he
sees that it has), but, as his words indicate, he does not believe it. The standard response is that
Walter’s avowal of disbelief is not literally true; what Walter wishes to convey by saying “I
don’t believe it” is not that he really does not believe that his house has burned down, but
rather that he finds it hard to come to terms with what he sees. If he genuinely didn ’t believe it,
some of his subsequent actions, such as phoning his insurance company, would be rather
mysterious.

A more serious counterexample has been suggested by Colin Radford (1966). Suppose Albert is
quizzed on English history. One of the questions is: “When did Queen Elizabeth die?” Albert
doesn’t think he knows, but answers the question correctly. Moreover, he gives correct answers
to many other questions to which he didn’t think he knew the answer. Let us focus on Albert’s
answer to the question about Elizabeth:

(E) Elizabeth died in 1603.

Radford makes the following two claims about this example:

Albert does not believe (E).

Albert knows (E).
Radford’s intuitions about cases like these do not seem to be idiosyncratic; Myers-Schutz &
Schwitzgebel (2013) find evidence suggesting that many ordinary speakers tend to react in the
way Radford suggests. In support of (a), Radford emphasizes that Albert thinks he doesn’t know
the answer to the question. He doesn’t trust his answer because he takes it to be a mere guess. In
support of (b), Radford argues that Albert’s answer is not at all just a lucky guess. The fact that
he answers most of the questions correctly indicates that he has actually learned, and never
forgotten, such historical facts.

Since he takes (a) and (b) to be true, Radford holds that belief is not necessary for knowledge. But
either of (a) and (b) might be resisted. One might deny (a), arguing that Albert does have a tacit
belief that (E), even though it’s not one that he thinks amounts to knowledge. David Rose and
Jonathan Schaffer (2013) take this route. Alternatively, one might deny (b), arguing that Albert’s
correct answer is not an expression of knowledge, perhaps because, given his subjective position,
he does not have justification for believing (E). The justification condition is the topic of the next
section.

1.3 The Justification Condition

Why is condition (iii) necessary? Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer
is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief might be true
even though it is formed improperly. Suppose that William flips a coin, and confidently believes—
on no particular basis—that it will land tails. If by chance the coin does land tails, then William’s
belief was true; but a lucky guess such as this one is no knowledge. For William to know, his
belief must in some epistemic sense be proper or appropriate: it must be justified.[5]

Socrates articulates the need for something like a justification condition in Plato’s Theaetetus,
when he points out that “true opinion” is in general insufficient for knowledge. For example, if
a lawyer employs sophistry to induce a jury into a belief that happens to be true, this belief is
insufficiently well-grounded to constitute knowledge.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJustTrueBeli

The Tripartite Theory of Knowledge:

There is a tradition that goes back as far as Plato that holds that three conditions must be satisfied
in order for one to possess knowledge. This account, known as the tripartite theory of knowledge,
analyses knowledge as justified true belief. The tripartite theory says that if you believe
something, with justification, and it is true, then you know it; otherwise, you do not.

1. Belief: The first condition for knowledge, according to the tripartite theory, is belief. Unless one
believes a thing, one cannot know it. Even if something is true, and one has excellent reasons for
believing that it is true, one cannot know it without believing it.
2. Truth: The second condition for knowledge, according to the tripartite theory, is truth. If one
knows a thing then it must be true. No matter how well justified or sincere a belief, if it is not true
that it cannot constitute knowledge. If a long-held belief is discovered to be false, then one must
concede that what was thought to be known was in fact not known. What is false cannot be
known; knowledge must be knowledge of the truth.
3. Justification: The third condition for knowledge is justification. In order to know a thing, it is
not enough to merely correctly believe it to be true; one must also have a good reason for doing
so. Lucky guesses cannot constitute knowledge; we can only know what we have good reason to
believe. LISBDNETWORKSeptember 13, 2013 The Tripartite Theory of Knowledge
https://www.lisbdnetwork.com/the-tripartite-theory-of-knowledge/

The Analysis of Knowledge

First published Tue Feb 6, 2001; substantive revision Tue Mar 7, 2017
For any person, there are some things they know, and some things they don’t. What exactly is
the difference? What does it take to know something? It’s not enough just to believe it—we
don’t know the things we’re wrong about. Knowledge seems to be more like a way of getting
at the truth. The analysis of knowledge concerns the attempt to articulate in what exactly this kind
of “getting at the truth” consists.

More particularly, the project of analysing knowledge is to state conditions that are individually
necessary and jointly sufficient for propositional knowledge, thoroughly answering the question,
what does it take to know something? By “propositional knowledge”, we mean knowledge of a
proposition—for example, if Susan knows that Alyssa is a musician, she has knowledge of the
proposition that Alyssa is a musician. Propositional knowledge should be distinguished from
knowledge of “acquaintance”, as obtains when Susan knows Alyssa. The relation between
propositional knowledge and the knowledge at issue in other “knowledge” locutions in English,
such as knowledge-where (“Susan knows where she is”) and especially knowledge-how
(“Susan knows how to ride a bicycle”) is subject to some debate (see Stanley 2011 and his
opponents discussed therein).

The propositional knowledge that is the analysandum of the analysis of knowledge literature is
paradigmatically expressed in English by sentences of the form “S knows that p”, where “S”
refers to the knowing subject, and “p” to the proposition that is known. A proposed analysis
consists of a statement of the following form: S knows that p if and only if j, where j indicates the
analysans: paradigmatically, a list of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly
sufficient for S to have knowledge that p.

It is not enough merely to pick out the actual extension of knowledge. Even if, in actual fact, all
cases of S knowing that p are cases of j, and all cases of the latter are cases of the former, j might
fail as an analysis of knowledge. For example, it might be that there are possible cases of
knowledge without j, or vice versa. A proper analysis of knowledge should at least be a necessary
truth. Consequently, hypothetical thought experiments provide appropriate test cases for various
analyses, as we shall see below.

Even a necessary biconditional linking knowledge to some state j would probably not be sufficient
for an analysis of knowledge, although just what more is required is a matter of some controversy.
According to some theorists, to analyze knowledge is literally to identify the components that
make up knowledge—compare a chemist who analyzes a sample to learn its chemical
composition. On this interpretation of the project of analyzing knowledge, the defender of a
successful analysis of knowledge will be committed to something like the metaphysical claim that
what it is for S to know p is for some list of conditions involving S and p to obtain. Other theorists
think of the analysis of knowledge as distinctively conceptual—to analyse knowledge is to limn
the structure of the concept of knowledge. On one version of this approach, the concept
knowledge is literally composed of more basic concepts, linked together by something like
Boolean operators. Consequently, an analysis is subject not only to extensional accuracy, but to
facts about the cognitive representation of knowledge and other epistemic notions. In practice,
many epistemologists engaging in the project of analyzing knowledge leave these
metaphilosophical interpretive questions unresolved; attempted analyses, and counterexamples
thereto, are often proposed without its being made explicit whether the claims are intended as
metaphysical or conceptual ones. In many cases, this lack of specificity may be legitimate, since
all parties tend to agree that an analysis of knowledge ought at least to be extensionally correct in
all metaphysically possible worlds. As we shall see, many theories have been defended and,
especially, refuted, on those terms.

The attempt to analyze knowledge has received a considerable amount of attention from
epistemologists, particularly in the late 20th Century, but no analysis has been widely accepted.
Some contemporary epistemologists reject the assumption that knowledge is susceptible to
analysis.

1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief

1.1 The Truth Condition
1.2 The Belief Condition
1.3 The Justification Condition
2. Lightweight Knowledge
3. The Gettier Problem
4. No False Lemmas
5. Modal Conditions
5.1 Sensitivity
5.2 Safety
5.3 Relevant Alternatives
6. Doing Without Justification?
6.1 Reliabilist Theories of Knowledge
6.2 Causal Theories of Knowledge
7. Is Knowledge Analyzable?
8. Epistemic Luck
9. Methodological Options
10. Virtue-Theoretic Approaches
10.1 The “AAA” Evaluations
10.2 Fake Barn Cases
11. Knowledge First
12. Pragmatic Encroachment
13. Contextualism
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief
There are three components to the traditional (“tripartite”) analysis of knowledge. According to
this analysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge.

The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge:

S knows that p iff
p is true;
S believes that p;
S is justified in believing that p.
The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified
true belief”.

Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its
starting-point. It became something of a convenient fiction to suppose that this analysis was
widely accepted throughout much of the history of philosophy. In fact, however, the JTB analysis
was first articulated in the twentieth century by its attackers.[1] Before turning to influential
twentieth-century arguments against the JTB theory, let us briefly consider the three traditional
components of knowledge in turn.

1.1 The Truth Condition

Most epistemologists have found it overwhelmingly plausible that what is false cannot be known.
For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US Presidential election. Consequently, nobody
knows that Hillary Clinton won the election. One can only know things that are true.

Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns out to be wrong, we use the
word “knows” to describe their situation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election.
Speaking loosely, one might even say that many people “knew” that Clinton would win the
election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010) argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is not
a factive verb.[2] Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; most epistemologists will treat
sentences like “I knew that Clinton was going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as not
literally true.

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths
are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it
landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is a metaphysical, as opposed to
epistemological, notion: truth is a matter of how things are, not how they can be shown to be. So
when we say that only true things can be known, we’re not (yet) saying anything about how
anyone can access the truth. As we’ll see, the other conditions have important roles to play here.
Knowledge is a kind of relationship with the truth—to know something is to have a certain kind of
access to a fact.[3]

1.2 The Belief Condition

The belief condition is only slightly more controversial than the truth condition. The general idea
behind the belief condition is that you can only know what you believe. Failing to believe
something precludes knowing it. “Belief” in the context of the JTB theory means full belief, or
outright belief. In a weak sense, one might “believe” something by virtue of being pretty
confident that it’s probably true—in this weak sense, someone who considered Clinton the
favourite to win the election, even while recognizing a nontrivial possibility of her losing, might
be said to have “believed” that Clinton would win. Outright belief is stronger (see, e.g., Fantl &
McGrath 2009: 141; Nagel 2010: 413–4; Williamson 2005: 108; or Gibbons 2013: 201.). To
believe outright that p, it isn’t enough to have a pretty high confidence in p; it is something
closer to a commitment or a being sure.[4]

Although initially it might seem obvious that knowing that p requires believing that p, a few
philosophers have argued that knowledge without belief is indeed possible. Suppose Walter comes
home after work to find out that his house has burned down. He says: “I don’t believe it”.
Critics of the belief condition might argue that Walter knows that his house has burned down (he
sees that it has), but, as his words indicate, he does not believe it. The standard response is that
Walter’s avowal of disbelief is not literally true; what Walter wishes to convey by saying “I
don’t believe it” is not that he really does not believe that his house has burned down, but
rather that he finds it hard to come to terms with what he sees. If he genuinely didn ’t believe it,
some of his subsequent actions, such as phoning his insurance company, would be rather
mysterious.

A more serious counterexample has been suggested by Colin Radford (1966). Suppose Albert is
quizzed on English history. One of the questions is: “When did Queen Elizabeth die?” Albert
doesn’t think he knows, but answers the question correctly. Moreover, he gives correct answers
to many other questions to which he didn’t think he knew the answer. Let us focus on Albert’s
answer to the question about Elizabeth:

(E) Elizabeth died in 1603.

Radford makes the following two claims about this example:

Albert does not believe (E).

Albert knows (E).
Radford’s intuitions about cases like these do not seem to be idiosyncratic; Myers-Schutz &
Schwitzgebel (2013) find evidence suggesting that many ordinary speakers tend to react in the
way Radford suggests. In support of (a), Radford emphasizes that Albert thinks he doesn’t know
the answer to the question. He doesn’t trust his answer because he takes it to be a mere guess. In
support of (b), Radford argues that Albert’s answer is not at all just a lucky guess. The fact that
he answers most of the questions correctly indicates that he has actually learned, and never
forgotten, such historical facts.

Since he takes (a) and (b) to be true, Radford holds that belief is not necessary for knowledge. But
either of (a) and (b) might be resisted. One might deny (a), arguing that Albert does have a tacit
belief that (E), even though it’s not one that he thinks amounts to knowledge. David Rose and
Jonathan Schaffer (2013) take this route. Alternatively, one might deny (b), arguing that Albert’s
correct answer is not an expression of knowledge, perhaps because, given his subjective position,
he does not have justification for believing (E). The justification condition is the topic of the next
section.

1.3 The Justification Condition

Why is condition (iii) necessary? Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer
is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief might be true
even though it is formed improperly. Suppose that William flips a coin, and confidently believes—
on no particular basis—that it will land tails. If by chance the coin does land tails, then William’s
belief was true; but a lucky guess such as this one is no knowledge. For William to know, his
belief must in some epistemic sense be proper or appropriate: it must be justified.[5]

Socrates articulates the need for something like a justification condition in Plato’s Theaetetus,
when he points out that “true opinion” is in general insufficient for knowledge. For example, if
a lawyer employs sophistry to induce a jury into a belief that happens to be true, this belief is
insufficiently well-grounded to constitute knowledge.

1.3.1 Approaches to Justification

There is considerable disagreement among epistemologists concerning what the relevant sort of
justification here consists in. Internalists about justification think that whether a belief is justified
depends wholly on states in some sense internal to the subject. According to one common such
sense of “internal”, only those features of a subject’s experience which are directly or
introspectively available count as “internal”—call this “access internalism”. According to
another, only intrinsic states of the subject are “internal”—call this “state internalism”. See
Feldman & Conee 2001 for the distinction.

Conee and Feldman present an example of an internalist view. They have it that S’s belief that p
is justified if and only if believing that p is the attitude towards p that best fits S’s evidence,
where the latter is understood to depend only on S’s internal mental states. Conee and Feldman
call their view “evidentialism”, and characterize this as the thesis that justification is wholly a
matter of the subject’s evidence. Given their (not unsubstantial) assumption that what evidence a
subject has is an internal matter, evidentialism implies internalism.[6] Externalists about
justification think that factors external to the subject can be relevant for justification; for example,
process reliabilists think that justified beliefs are those which are formed by a cognitive process
which tends to produce a high proportion of true beliefs relative to false ones.[7] We shall return
to the question of how reliabilist approaches bear on the analysis of knowledge in §6.1.

1.3.2 Kinds of Justification

It is worth noting that one might distinguish between two importantly different notions of
justification, standardly referred to as “propositional justification” and “doxastic
justification”. (Sometimes “ex ante” justification and “ex post” justification, respectively.)
[8] Unlike that between internalist and externalist approaches to justification, the distinction
between propositional and doxastic justification does not represent a conflict to be resolved; it is a
distinction between two distinct properties that are called “justification”. Propositional
justification concerns whether a subject has sufficient reason to believe a given proposition;[9]
doxastic justification concerns whether a given belief is held appropriately.[10] One common way
of relating the two is to suggest that propositional justification is the more fundamental, and that
doxastic justification is a matter of a subject’s having a belief that is appropriately responsive to
or based on their propositional justification.

The precise relation between propositional and doxastic justification is subject to controversy, but
it is uncontroversial that the two notions can come apart. Suppose that Ingrid ignores a great deal
of excellent evidence indicating that a given neighborhood is dangerous, but superstitiously comes
to believe that the neighborhood is dangerous when she sees a black cat crossing the street. Since
forming beliefs on the basis of superstition is not an epistemically appropriate way of forming
beliefs, Ingrid’s belief is not doxastically justified; nevertheless, she does have good reason to
believe as she does, so she does have propositional justification for the proposition that the
neighborhood is dangerous.

Since knowledge is a particularly successful kind of belief, doxastic justification is a stronger

candidate for being closely related to knowledge; the JTB theory is typically thought to invoke
doxastic justification (but see Lowy 1978).

2. Lightweight Knowledge
Some epistemologists have suggested that there may be multiple senses of the term
“knowledge”, and that not all of them require all three elements of the tripartite theory of
knowledge. For example, some have argued that there is, in addition to the sense of
“knowledge” gestured at above, another, weak sense of “knowledge”, that requires only true
belief (see for example Hawthorne 2002 and Goldman & Olsson 2009; the latter contains
additional relevant references). This view is sometimes motivated by the thought that, when we
consider whether someone knows that p, or wonder which of a group of people know that p, often,
we are not at all interested in whether the relevant subjects have beliefs that are justified; we just
want to know whether they have the true belief. For example, as Hawthorne (2002: 253–54)
points out, one might ask how many students know that Vienna is the capital of Austria; the
correct answer, one might think, just is the number of students who offer “Vienna” as the
answer to the corresponding question, irrespective of whether their beliefs are justified. Similarly,
if you are planning a surprise party for Eugene and ask whether he knows about it, “yes” may
be an appropriate answer merely on the grounds that Eugene believes that you are planning a
party.

One could allow that there is a lightweight sense of knowledge that requires only true belief;
another option is to decline to accept the intuitive sentences as true at face value. A theorist might,
for instance, deny that sentences like “Eugene knows that you are planning a party”, or
“eighteen students know that Vienna is the capital of Austria” are literally true in the envisaged
situations, explaining away their apparent felicity as loose talk or hyperbole.

Even among those epistemologists who think that there is a lightweight sense of “knows” that
does not require justification, most typically admit that there is also a stronger sense which does,
and that it is this stronger state that is the main target of epistemological theorizing about
knowledge. In what follows, we will set aside the lightweight sense, if indeed there be one, and
focus on the stronger one.

3. The Gettier Problem

Few contemporary epistemologists accept the adequacy of the JTB analysis. Although most agree
that each element of the tripartite theory is necessary for knowledge, they do not seem collectively
to be sufficient. There seem to be cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowledge.
Here is one kind of example:

Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water, or so we think. In fact, we
are not seeing water but a mirage, but when we reach the spot, we are lucky and find water right
there under a rock. Can we say that we had genuine knowledge of water? The answer seems to be
negative, for we were just lucky. (quoted from Dreyfus 1997: 292)

This example comes from the Indian philosopher Dharmottara, c. 770 CE. The 14th-century
Italian philosopher Peter of Mantua presented a similar case:

Let it be assumed that Plato is next to you and you know him to be running, but you mistakenly
believe that he is Socrates, so that you firmly believe that Socrates is running. However, let it be
so that Socrates is in fact running in Rome; however, you do not know this. (from Peter of
Mantua’s De scire et dubitare, given in Boh 1985: 95)

Cases like these, in which justified true belief seems in some important sense disconnected from
the fact, were made famous in Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper, “Is Justified True Belief
Knowledge?”. Gettier presented two cases in which a true belief is inferred from a justified false
belief. He observed that, intuitively, such beliefs cannot be knowledge; it is merely lucky that they
are true.

In honour of his contribution to the literature, cases like these have come to be known as “Gettier
cases”. Since they appear to refute the JTB analysis, many epistemologists have undertaken to
repair it: how must the analysis of knowledge be modified to accommodate Gettier cases? This is
what is commonly referred to as the “Gettier problem”.

Above, we noted that one role of the justification is to rule out lucky guesses as cases of
knowledge. A lesson of the Gettier problem is that it appears that even true beliefs that are justified
can nevertheless be epistemically lucky in a way inconsistent with knowledge.

Epistemologists who think that the JTB approach is basically on the right track must choose
between two different strategies for solving the Gettier problem. The first is to strengthen the
justification condition to rule out Gettier cases as cases of justified belief. This was attempted by
Roderick Chisholm;[11] we will refer to this strategy again in §7 below. The other is to amend the
JTB analysis with a suitable fourth condition, a condition that succeeds in preventing justified true
belief from being “gettiered”.
Dreyfus, George B.J., 1997, Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti’s Philosophy and its Tibetan
Interpretations, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.