THE PROBLEM WITH KNOWLEDGE AS JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF
BY BERNARD JAMES MAUSER, PH.D.
Most people think that knowledge is pretty important. They spend
their time scouring the web for news stories, reading books or journals, and
paying money to go to school to learn. The underlying assumption in this
pursuit is that people think that what they are assimilating is true. Notwithstanding
those addicted to fiction, few would spend money or time memorizing what is
entirely false.
When asking professionals, most philosophers in the
university today, what knowledge is, they’ll explain that knowledge is
justified true belief. This is allegedly
given them by Plato from his book Theaetetus.
Keep in mind that in this explanation there are three parts to knowledge.
- The first is the justification. Justification is the reason or account given for the belief.
- The second is truth. Truth here is correspondence to reality.
- The third is belief. Belief is simply the view or judgment that is held.
Overlooked in this explanation of knowledge is Socrates’
critique of this ‘definition’ in Theaetetus.
The relevant parts from the text are
found at the end of Socrates dialogue with Theaetetus (209e-210a):
Socrates: Well, if ‘adding an
account’ means that we are required to get to know the differentness, not
merely judge it, this most splendid of our accounts of knowledge turns out to
be a very amusing affair. For getting to know of course is acquiring knowledge,
isn’t it?
Theaetetus:
Yes.
Socrates: So, it seems, the answer
to the question ‘What is knowledge?’ will be ‘Correct judgment accompanied by
knowledge of the differentness’- for this is what we are asked to understand by
the addition of an account.’
Theaetetus: Apparently so.
Socrates: And it is surely just
silly to tell us, when we are trying to discover what knowledge is, that it is
correct judgment accompanied by knowledge, whether of differentness or of
anything else? And so, Theaetetus, knowledge is neither perception, nor true
judgment, nor an account added to true judgment. [emphasis mine]
Theaetetus: It seems not.
The problem that Socrates points out is that justified true
belief as knowledge sneaks in justification as a kind of knowledge to shore up
knowledge. This is surely circular.
Another problem, which is not mentioned, is that if
justification is knowledge, then that justification also needs a justification,
which needs a justification, all the way to an infinite number of
justifications for the justifications. This infinite regress shows no hope of
hitting a foundation for knowledge. Without any foundation, the infinite
regress shows that justified true belief is not an adequate definition for knowledge.
In sum, there are two problems with using justified true
belief as the definition for knowledge. The first is that it smuggles knowledge
into the definition as justification (which is circular). The second is that it
leads to an infinite regress (which is the same as not having any explanation
at all).
Although this is where Plato left it, let me suggest the
Thomistic solution. Knowledge is the unity between the knower and the known. If
there is no unity between you and what you know, then you don’t know it, but
something else. Of course the full details of how this occurs must be left to
another time.
