The Tripartite View Flashcards
Explain the Tripartite View of Knowledge
The view that justified true belief is jointly necessary and sufficient for proposition knowledge. For example,:
•Innocence and Pete the Cheat are playing a card
•Innocence believes that the card on top of the deck is the Queen of Spades
•Pete also has the same belief
•However Pete is justified as they are playing with his marked deck of cards
•When they turn over the card, the card is the queen of spades
•This means that Pete had justified, true belief
•Therefore Pete had knowledge that the card was a queen of spades
What are the conditions needed for subject, S, to know any proposition, P
1.S must have justification for P to be the case
2.P must truly be the case
3.S must believe P to be the case
If this is correct this means that if someone knows a proposition, 3 conditions must be satisfied:
•The person must believe the proposition
•The proposition must be true
•The proposition must be justified
•These 3 conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for claiming that ‘S knows P’
•This means that you need each one to have knowledge
•If you have all 3 you definitely have knowledge
What is this definition of a concept called
A logical analysis of the concept
Explain necessary and sufficient conditions
- If an element is necessary, you could not have the particular thing in question without the element
- For example, being a man is a necessary condition of being a father
- The definition of a necessary condition can be summed up as ‘X is a necessary condition of Y if you cannot have Y without X’
- Having a necessary condition is not always enough to have the thing in question
- Being a man is a necessity for being a father but it is not sufficient alone
- If having certain necessary elements always guarantees the having the thing in question
- Then these elements are called sufficient
- For example being unmarried and being a man are sufficient conditions
- The two elements provided are sufficient
- They are also necessary- you cannot be a bachelor without being an unmarried man
- The definition of sufficient conditions can be summed up as ‘X and Y are sufficient conditions of Z if the occurrence of X and Y guarantees the occurrence of Z’
Justification is not a necessary condition of knowledge (criticism 1)
- If S claims to know p, the s must be able to justify it by appeal to evidence
- Otherwise s would be making an unsubstantiated assertion
- For example a racist judge believes the defendant guilty due to the colour of his skin
- If the defendant is guilty, the judge still lacks knowledge whilst having true belief
- This is because his belief is based on prejudice instead of evidence presented in court
- Justification is needed to distinguish knowledge from lucky guesses
- Many people would claim to know God exists or to know that they will go to heaven with only strong belief
- However many do not count this as knowledge
Example of how justification is not necessary
- Imagine a case wherea man called John has a rare gift
- He can tell you the day of any week in the future if you give him a date
- He is unable to say how he does this though he is incredibly accurate
- This is a case of true belief with no rational justification
- This can be described as more practical than propositional knowledge
- However a reliable process which produces true beliefs can be a source of knowledge
- For example Reliabilism suggests that we do not need justification
Truth is a necessary condition of knowledge(argument 1)
- Knowledge is impossible without truth
- For example a cave-woman believes that the earth is flat
- However the earth is in fact round
- Since her belief does not correspond with matters of fact, it is not true
- If it is not true it cannot count as knowledge
- The truth condition is ‘external’
- Unlike belief and evidence conditions, it is not within her mind
- People may state as if the cave-woman has knowledge
- Some may claim that thousands of years ago people knew the earth was flat and now we know it is round
- However when they use the word ‘know’ in this way they are using it in the sense of being ‘convinced’
- You cannot know something if it is false, no matter how good the justification for your belief may be
- Her belief must correspond with reality(an external criteria) and be established by her mind and belief which (an internal criteria)
- Therefore this is well justified, false belief
- Therefore she does not have knowledge
- Therefore truth is a necessary condition of knowledge
Belief is not a necessary condition of knowledge
1.Will’s friend Jay offers to take them both on a holiday
2.Jay’s GPS breaks and he doesn’t know the route
3.Meanwhile Will has been many times with his mother but never paid attention to the route
4.Will says he does not know the route and begins to doubt his knowledge
5.However as they go on he begins to recognize the roads and that he does now the route after all
6.Will gives correct directions to Jay and they arrive at the destination
•Will had individual propositional beliefs of where each road led to
•However Will did not have a belief in the fact that he knew the route
•This implies that belief is not a necessary condition for knowledge
Belief is a necessary condition (reply)
- The belief condition states that a necessary condition for knowing P is that you believe P
- Therefore you cannot know something unless you believe it
- It is absurd to state ‘I know that Paris is the capital of France, but I don’t believe it’
- If you claim to have knowledge, you are already asserting a belief
- Therefore if a person does not believe in a fact, they cannot know it
- Therefore belief is necessary for knowledge
Gettier’s examples of lucky true beliefs (criticism)
Gettier presents examples of beliefs which are both true and justified. However they do not account as knowledge:
•While accepting all three conditions are individually necessary
•He questioned whether they are jointly sufficient
For example:
1.Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job
2.Suppose Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition
3.Jones is the man who will get the job and Jones has ten coins in his pocket
4.This is justified as the employer reassured him that Jones would be selected
5.Smith also counted the ten coins in Jones’ pocket
6.He makes the proposition: “the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket”
•We know that Smith has good evidence for believing that Jones will get the job
•He also has good evidence that Jones has ten coins in his pocket
•Therefore his proposition “the man who will get the job will have ten coins in his pocket” is a justified belief
•By coincidence, Smith has ten coins in his pocket which he did not know about
•Smith ends up receiving the job
•Therefore his proposition s true
•Smith has a justified true belief, however this is not knowledge
•Therefore the three conditions are not sufficient enough for knowledge
Reforming knowledge as justified true belief
- Most people claim that Smith getting the job was down to luck
- Smith also did not have knowledge
- We have a strong intuition that knowledge should not involve luck
- Therefore Gettier’s examples convinced many that the account of knowledge as justified true belief needs modification to be true
